Harbor Towers

In the early 1960s the city proposed four shorter towers on India Wharf, a pier that a building by Charles Bulfinch had occupied for 155 years. The scheme became three forty-storey towers, then two, with a swimming pool where the third was to stand. Henry Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners, the architect chosen, regretted the change: two towers, he said, lacked the compositional interest of his pinwheel plan. It did leave more open space.

To clear the site, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which oversaw the scheme, had let the historic India Wharf Building be pulled down; Cobb later wrote that this was arguably a mistake. The complex belonged to the renewal of Boston's waterfront, which also took in Christopher Columbus Park, the New England Aquarium and the revival of Quincy Market. Developed by the Berenson Corporation and built in 1970-71 with Federal Housing Authority and private money, it was meant to provide rental housing. It was the first major residential development on the waterfront, but delays in connecting streets and sidewalks, and a site wedged between a then-polluted harbor and an elevated highway, forced rents down.

Starting in 1981, over two years, both towers were converted into more than 600 condominiums. In 2008 Cobb wrote that he did not regard Harbor Towers as his best work in Boston.

The apartments are arranged in a pinwheel around a central core, in a cast-in-place reinforced-concrete structure. The concrete balconies look like a giant zipper against the flat facade. Harbor Towers I, the taller, stands at 121.9 m (400 ft) and Harbor Towers II at 120.7 m (396 ft).

The towers are seen from outside, from the waterfront between the New England Aquarium and Rowes Wharf.