Custom House Tower

The Custom House Tower is a Neoclassic skyscraper designed by Peabody and Stearns, and built between 1913 and 1915 in Boston, MA.

Custom House Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Marriott's Custom House.

Its precise street address is 3 McKinley Square, Boston, MA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Custom House Tower is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Boston and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Neoclassical style. Because of that, the Custom House Tower was officially declared as a national landmark on June 26^th 1986.

The tower was built on the original foundation of the customs building from 1830.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1997 and 1999.

Peabody and Stearns was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Custom House Tower a reality:

• Norcross Brothers as the Main Contractor
• Jung Brannen Associates as the Main Developer

The Custom House Tower can be categorized as a Neoclassic building.

The Custom House Tower uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features light-toned granite cladding that resembles that of ancient Greek and Roman temples.

The clocks were added in 1916.