The Harbor Towers' Towering Contradictions

There's nothing welcoming about the Harbor Towers. The swath of land they sit on is crudely severed from downtown—initially by the Southeast Expressway, now by the Kennedy Greenway—and bookended by the stately Boston Harbor Hotel and the aquarium. Depending on where you're standing, the buildings loom over either the harbor to the east, or a curved stretch of Atlantic Avenue to the west; in fact, it could safely be said that the towers, each a grim 40 stories of concrete and glass, loom over everything nearby.

For all that looming, however, they are surprisingly difficult to find. From the street, you don't see the driveway that leads to them until you're nearly past it. If you do manage to make the turn, it opens into a short, shabby, and, at night, badly lit strip of asphalt, flanked by the unsightly backside of the enormous aquarium parking garage, and ending in a windy cul-de-sac strewn with construction equipment and watched over by a guard in an equally dim and shabby booth. Even when you're standing right in their shadow, it's not immediately clear how to get into the buildings. The entrance to Tower I, which is the closer to the water, faces the Harbor Hotel to the right. Tower II faces the water, keeping its back to visitors, too. Huddled together the way they are, the buildings appear to be carrying on a conversation in which you're not particularly welcome to participate. It's all very Yankee, in its way. Very Boston.

It's often been said, in fact, that the best thing about living in the Harbor Towers is that you don't have to look at the Harbor Towers. In the '90s, the city rezoned the waterfront so nothing like them could ever be built there again; the changes now limit building heights and require projects to include more open space and access to the waterfront. While it'd be easy to attribute the hostility to the familiar chasm between architectural taste and popular appeal, even Henry Cobb, the buildings' I. M. Pei–affiliated architect—who went on to build his masterwork, the John Hancock Tower, in Boston—is inclined to agree with the mob. "I do not regard Harbor Towers as my best effort in Boston," Cobb says via e-mail. "I am sympathetic to those who believe that in the perspective of history this could be seen as the wrong project in the wrong place at the wrong time."

And yet the scorn felt toward the towers' exteriors doesn't compare to the enmity now coursing through their own halls. The man fueling the tensions is Frank Pompei, founder and president of Exergen, an engineering firm that, among other things, manages the heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) systems at Harvard University. Pompei is a short guy, a little rotund. His manner of speaking (fast, precise) and his dress (leather suspenders, big gold cuff links, power tie) call to mind an old-time big-city mayor. Pompei and his wife, Marybeth, who's the chief clinical scientist at Exergen, had rented two adjoining sixth-floor units in Tower I from 1990 to 2003, but they "fell madly in love" with the penthouse, which they'd had occasion to visit while living in the building. (The space offers a staggering panorama of the city; an acquaintance of the Pompeis, Tower II resident Edward Gleichauf, says there's a "certain godlike remoteness" to it.) When the Pompeis, who'd resettled in a condo in Cambridge, heard it was on the market, they snatched it up last May for $1.3 million.

Then came the fighting. The towers have two separate boards, one for each building, but they make decisions collectively, and in August, after more than a year of pitched debate, they levied an unprecedented $75.6 million special assessment for a host of what were deemed critical repairs, the bulk of which related to the aging buildings' HVAC systems. According to the trustees and their backers, the heating and cooling water pipes were so badly corroded they needed immediate replacement; to delay would be to risk increasing the cost of the work, if not court disaster. Pompei believed the trustees were being too rash, that their plan to spend millions to swap out the relics from the late '60s, rather than upgrade them, was folly. In an attempt to debunk the trustees' proposal, he brought in his own engineers, as well as William Coad, past president of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, then pressed to gain access to some of the towers' engineering reports, which he says the board was withholding from owners.

Last October, he also launched a campaign to get himself elected to the board, and filed a lawsuit calling into question the scientific grounds for the repairs, along with a request for an injunction to stop the work, at least until tests could be done to make sure the levy—which amounts to about 20 percent of each unit's value (in his case, roughly $360,000)—was warranted.