The Harbor Towers' Towering Contradictions

That request was thrown out by a judge; the state accords condo boards nearly unlimited power to handle their buildings' affairs. So Pompei pushed forward, appealing the ruling, and continued working on his board election bid, along with three supporters, to try to bring the project to heel from the inside. He now believes the trustees have spent so much time and money convincing people of their plan that they've become prisoners of their own momentum. "They've boxed themselves in," he says. "They've been Chicken Little about the whole thing for so long, in public, that now all of a sudden they're stuck." Pompei's opponents—worried about falling property values caused by the uncertainty of the assessments, skyrocketing construction costs, and the risk of system failures—say he is a "megalomaniac," a rabble-rousing "snake-oil salesman" intent on wasting everyone's money to satisfy some inscrutable grudge. Several mention Pompei caused a similar stir at his old condo complex in Cambridge, running for the board there twice, and losing both times. "He could be dangerous if he lived in Bosnia," muses one longtime resident who supports the trustees. "He doesn't live by any rules."

Such strife is nothing new to the Harbor Towers. Over the years, they have been the battleground for a number of bitterly fought, highly publicized disputes among residents, who've been hit with a series of outsize assessments that were floated either to beautify the buildings or, more importantly, to keep them from falling apart. But their longtime inhabitants, many of whom could certainly afford to move, could not imagine living anywhere else. Built on hallowed historical ground at a time when the city was on the skids, and having since presided over periods of rot and tumult, prosperity and rebirth, the Harbor Towers, for these loyalists, typify Boston the way no other structures can. And the buildings' very isolation and ugliness, the rancor they inspire—these are, as it turns out, just another part of their appeal.

In its heyday, the waterfront was a bustling block of piers and warehouses, a center of global commerce. As Jane Holtz Kay writes in her book Lost Boston, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries "Yankee traders were swapping chisels for furs, furs for tea, and tea for money" there, and the wealth raked in from the seven seas helped fund an unprecedented building boom in Boston. The focal point of all this activity was India Wharf, built in 1805 by the dean of Boston architects, Charles Bulfinch. "An address on…India Wharf was currency around the world," writes Kay. It also played host to the India Wharf Rats Club, a renowned gentlemen's club where, it was said, women could enter, so long as they didn't ask about the long, shiny cylindrical object—a whale's penis—hanging from the ceiling.

By the 1960s, however, the waterfront had become desolate, a dreary lagoon of dirt parking lots and little else. As went the waterfront, so went Boston. "These were not good times for either the nation or the city," writes Thomas O'Connor in his book The Hub. What had been a steady stream of federal aid began to dry up, siphoned off by the Vietnam War. Boston had to curtail its urban renewal and housing programs, and its colleges and universities, O'Connor notes, were forced to discontinue "many of the bureaus, institutes, and planning centers that had been providing valuable assistance" to City Hall. Moreover, Boston had become a focal point for the antiwar movement, and the black community was increasingly militant in the wake of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.

White flight was in full swing and social unrest was spreading, creating a powder keg that would go off not long afterward, in the form of the busing riots.
The city, then run by Mayor John Collins, was eager to get behind any developer—in this case, the Berenson family and Carlyle Construction out of New York City—with the temerity to build something new, particularly something densely residential, amid all this decay. Funded in part by the last of the Federal Housing Authority money, and overseen by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), the original plan for the Harbor Towers called for three stacks of rental units, plus a parking garage, done in the Brutalist style of the day: all raw concrete and hard angles. (Peter Forbes, an architect who lived in the towers in the mid-'90s before moving to Florence, Italy, points out that such a design was considered a "heroic gesture" in the late 1960s, an effort to "get away from the steel and glass skyscraper of the '50s, which people were beginning to feel was cold and impersonal.") In order to free up the space for the project, the BRA also allowed the historic India Wharf Building to be demolished. "In retrospect," writes Cobb, the towers' architect, "[that move] was arguably a mistake."

Of course, there were limits to how big a chance the developers would take. Because they couldn't be certain anyone would want to live out in the grubby hinterland that was the waterfront, three towers eventually became two, with a pool installed where the third was to have stood. Cheaper materials were also subbed in. The kinds of windows that got installed, according to Cobb, were inferior to the ones he had specified, and the unsealed concrete that made up the exterior of the buildings—and held the windows in place—was subpar, too, prone to crumbling and staining.

The towers were completed in 1971, and soon were drawing younger, adventurous, urbanist souls from many walks of life, among them Bruins great Derek Sanderson. In keeping with the times, a certain moral casualness reigned. "It became a great den of prostitutes and loose living for a number of years," says Todd Lee, an architect who lives on the 32nd floor of Tower I. "I may exaggerate, but it had a really bad reputation." Edward Gleichauf, who had friends in the buildings in the '70s—and decided to move in himself 10 years ago—says, "It was a hell of a party place." Elizabeth Cook, a resident since the mid-'70s, notes that early on the towers attracted a lot of recently divorced men. "There were men I knew who were coupled when I met them," she says, "and when they showed up here, I knew something had changed." Adds Lee, "A lot of guys had bachelor pads there, and would do all their fucking looking out the window."