The Harbor Towers’ Towering Contradictions

Engaging in bouts of rebound coitus—or doing anything even remotely vigorous—near or against those windows required more courage and fortitude than one might expect, even in Puritan Boston: The lower-grade models the developers insisted be used, coupled with the leaky vents below them and the untreated concrete around them, soon revealed themselves to be highly problematic. Terry Lyman, who has lived in Tower I since 1973 and whose grandfather Theodore Lyman was one of the original Brahmins, says he used to have “rain and snowstorms inside on windy days…. It used to blow so hard that spray would blow 10 or 15 feet across my room. This is with the windows closed!”

In 1985, four years after the rental buildings were first converted to condos, Hurricane Gloria roared in and blew out 70 of the towers’ windows. The trustees representing Tower I—which, by virtue of being closer to the water, has more moneyed residents—called for all of the complex’s 1,716 windows to be replaced. The Tower II board wanted to junk merely the most dysfunctional ones. With the two sides at an impasse, the trustees moved to try to at least stop the indoor rainstorms by sealing up the vents. This meant the units no longer had proper exhaust systems—which turned out to not matter much, since the spaces between the windows and the deteriorating concrete walls were still wide enough to allow air (and some inclement weather) to flow in from outside.

With the broader question of what to do about the windows still unresolved as the recession of the early 1990s took hold, things started getting ugly. In 1992, the results of a special board election for both buildings’ trustees had to be thrown out because of voting irregularities. By the following year, the sides were hurling invective and anonymous missives at each other, circulating fliers late at night, and enduring agonizingly awkward rides with their foes on the towers’ notoriously slow elevators. For the next election, the trustees had to enlist the services of an independent vote-counter to make sure ballot boxes weren’t being stuffed. Finally, George Macomber of Macomber Construction, a Tower I resident, brought the factions together, brokering a deal to replace all the windows—and also finally seal the crumbling concrete around them—at a cost of $9 million, or roughly $15,000 per unit.

There was just one problem, though: Because the vents had been sealed earlier, the new, leakproof windows created negative air pressure in the units. Vents in the kitchen and bathroom could push stale air out, but there was no mechanism in the individual units to bring fresh air in. Ever since, the towers’ interiors have been low-pressure zones where odors and secondhand smoke migrate easily. Dare to open a window, and it creates a jetlike roar.

Frank Pompei loves his Tower I penthouse. But because of his role in the feud, people in the towers don’t love Pompei. (One likens him to a war criminal.) / Photograph by Mary Kocol

It so happens that the protracted fracas over the windows was also key to the formation of Frank Pompei as the “change agent,” as he calls himself. He says the board’s proposed wholesale replacement of the current 1960s HVAC systems will not address this long-standing ventilation problem (the V in HVAC). He also says that even if his tests prove repairs are necessary, they don’t have to happen all at once; they can instead be done over the course of 20 years, lessening the financial blow to the owners and allowing a plan to be implemented that also addresses the ventilation issue. “I’d just as soon back away from all this stuff,” Pompei says, “because I have other things to do with my time. But the reason I’m involved at this level is that I happen to know a lot about the subject, and I can’t sit on my hands, as a neighbor.”

The question is, do his neighbors want his help? In September, Pompei submitted a petition signed by 40 percent of his fellow owners calling for three tests to diagnose the seriousness of the HVAC problem: two to gauge the soundness of the pipes and measure leakage, and one to test the capacity of the fan coils, which pump in air from the current system. But then he and his slate of insurgent board candidates got drubbed in the December 6 election, garnering less than a third of the vote, which suggested the tide was turning against him within the building.

Outside it, however, things started looking a little better when the state appeals court ruled in his favor on December 28, saying he could perform his tests as long as he didn’t interfere with the scheduling of the project, set to begin in May. The trustees, meanwhile, were pushing ahead. After the election, they circulated a booklet explaining how the coming construction would proceed, and, as insurance, included a “Project Rule 10,” which threatens fines of up to $30,000 a day for anyone who fails to provide workers with immediate access to their unit. While Pompei declares, via e-mail, that “our efforts continue,” even some who share his point of view seem too battle-weary to do anything but go along with the renovations. “I think people are so fed up with the whole mess that they just want to get it over with,” says Terry Lyman, who’s among those who’ve vowed to keep fighting. Tower II resident Maryann Hoskins, a Realtor and former secretary to Mayor Kevin White, says, “Frank Pompei is a wonderful guy and very credentialed—and, by the way, I think he’s right—but it’s too late. We just have to get on with it.”

Elizabeth Cook served as spokeswoman for Boston Public Schools right after the busing riots, and went on to head up the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs under Mayor Kevin White before getting into a career in the then male-dominated advertising industry. She moved into Tower I as a renter in 1976, after her kids had gone off to school and her Beacon Hill home was burglarized four times. She took to the place right away, and has been there ever since. “I love being on the water,” she says. “In the city, but out. Get up in the morning and look over to Europe. Don’t fence me in—that kind of thing.” Having paid her $90,000 assessment shortly after the trustees handed it down (this was roughly $6,000 more than she’d paid for the unit when she bought it in 1982), she is a Pompei opponent and, like the others, questions his motivation. But in fact, Pompei is pursuing his insurrection at least partly out of the same affinity his foes have for the unsightly old structures. “The building itself is an excellent building,” he says, adding that he simply wants to bring it into the 21st century. “That’s why I moved back. I knew it was an excellent building. It could easily handle a good upgrade.”

Yet the same thing that impels him to act also lessens his chances of success. It’s clear that wherever they are on the HVAC dispute, people who live in the towers, particularly those who have been there for a long time, feel a profound, idiosyncratic connection to them. They point to the appealing rarity of the modernist residential buildings, the likes of which can never be built again; the erstwhile barren location; the close-knit, if often querulous, community; the astounding views; and the absence of traditional yuppifying condo perks like valet parking, in-house chefs, a health club, or even washers and dryers in the units (by design, these are limited to the basement). All of this lends to the experience of residing in the towers a glint of austerity that is nothing if not quintessentially old Boston, even if their design itself is decidedly New Boston—or at least the New Boston of the ’60s and ’70s, which is what the new New Boston wants to eradicate. “The people who live here really are pioneers,” says Maryann Hoskins. “They suffered through the Big Dig, and all of that digging and noise, and they stayed here because they loved it.” Beth Dickerson, a Realtor with Gibson Sotheby’s who deals in the luxury market, says flatly, “What it comes down to is: This is what it is to live in these buildings.”

Along with the assessments for the windows and the HVAC system, the towers’ residents have been hit with big repair bills covering everything from roof work to lobby renovations to patching a 10-foot-wide sinkhole that once opened up in front of Tower I. “The people who didn’t want to deal with that probably moved the first time,” Dickerson says. “Everyone else is willing to put up with it.”

Even as Pompei laments how many residents will be crushed by the $75.6 million assessment, he’s able to name only one person who may be forced out because of it, a testament to the Harbor Towers’ draw. Helen Rees, a legendary local literary agent who’s lived in Tower I for 15 years, says, “We all have an awareness of the significance of these buildings. We all love the neighborhood. There’s a spirit here that only gets stronger. We’re more committed to our community than ever.” Peter Forbes, who lived in Tower II from 1994 to 1998 and achieved fame in his building for using a crane to lift a huge molded glass wall into his 19th-story apartment (which the current resident now can’t get out), recalls, “There was a wonderful sense of camaraderie. It was kind of like being on a cruise ship. People who wouldn’t ordinarily be friends were friends because you were all there in Harbor Towers.” When he and his wife had a baby, the couple next door raised a stink about all the noise. “They got nowhere,” Forbes says. “Everybody stomped all over them and said, ‘That’s what babies do—they make noise. Why are you making a fuss over it?'”

As they were when they first opened, the towers remain a place where people go to start over, says Hoskins, who moved in after she divorced. “Most everybody I know [here] came from someplace else. It may have been a different life or a different circumstance, but it’s kind of a new chapter in the book. A lot of that energy pervades down there.” Todd Lee, the architect on the 32nd floor, has lived in the building three separate times: once after his first wife took ill, once after she died and he wanted to “live like a monk,” and again after he married Karen C.C. Dalton, a charming art historian from Texas now teaching at Harvard. “I don’t know of any building in the city that has affection like this,” he says. “People who live here understand what an anomaly it is, and how extraordinarily lucky they are.”

Last November, International Place developer Don Chiofaro bought the aquarium garage, with plans to turn it into a hotel, condominiums, and office space. Add that to Rowes Wharf and the now more-or-less-clean harbor, and the Harbor Towers will soon be fully enveloped, for the first time, by respectable society. The surrounding area will see the increase in activity and density that planners had always hoped the towers’ construction would spur.

With that new money moving in and the neighborhood becoming more hospitable, the towers, historically cheap compared with other downtown high-rise condos, will cease to be outposts for the forward-thinking and instead become a destination for more-conventional wealthy types. The old shabbiness and provinciality that characterized the inner and outer lives of the buildings for decades will be lost, for good or ill, just as the shabbiness and provinciality that has defined Boston for half a century has given way to a glitzy pseudo-cosmopolitanism. The only question is whether the intermittent warfare will continue.

Considering the poor construction, that at least seems one vestige the residents won’t have to worry about losing. “In a sense, Harbor Towers is kind of an island,” says Peter Forbes. “They fight everybody on the outside, and when there isn’t anybody on the outside, they fight each other on the inside. There have been coups left and right when one group gains ascendancy over another. But their victories seem to be short-lived, and then somebody else comes in and dethrones them.”

Of his own time there, Forbes adds, laughing, “It was bliss, interrupted by two things: political explosions and structural failure.”