The Harbor Towers' Towering Contradictions

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."