Walking Up State Street and Looking at 60 State
I first noticed the building because I was late for a meeting at the nearby Federal Reserve and kept looking at my phone instead of the street. That's when I tripped over the fact that this building doesn't announce itself. No grand plaza, no signage that screams landmark status. It's a forty-story office tower sitting between the Old State House and the waterfront, and if you don't know what you're looking at, you'll keep walking. 60 State Street sits at the corner of State and Franklin Streets in Boston's Financial District. Completed in 1970, it was designed by the firm Shepley Bulfinch and is built in the International Style that dominated corporate architecture from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. The tower rises about 463 feet with a rectangular footprint, a steel frame, and a facade covered mostly in dark glass and concrete panels. It was one of the taller buildings in the city when it went up, and it still commands attention because of its position at the top of State Street hill where the Boston Common ends and the water begins. The address itself is attached to what used to be the Old South Block redevelopment project. In the 1960s the city tore through a neighborhood that had been largely Italian-American for over a century. The whole area around here got redeveloped as part of that push, and 60 State Street was the crown jewel of what came out of it. You can see the result today in how the building faces the Federal Reserve Bank next door and the Customs House Tower across the street, forming a strange architectural conversation between mid-century modernism and 1915 Beaux-Arts ornamentation.
Inside the building, the floor plates are deep. Each floor runs roughly 45,000 square feet with a central core housing elevators, restrooms, and mechanical rooms. The original tenants were mostly insurance companies and financial institutions, which is still the mix today. State Street Corporation moved into part of the building in the 2000s, and they've been a anchor tenant ever since. That's significant because State Street is one of the oldest trust companies in the United States, founded in 1792, so you have a financial institution that predates the Constitution occupying a building that was considered cutting edge fifty-four years ago.
How the Building Actually Works
Getting access to the building isn't complicated but it's not exactly open either. You show up at the main entrance on State Street, go through metal detectors, and your ID gets scanned. I learned this the hard way on a visit when I forgot my badge and had to wait twenty minutes for someone to verify me over the phone. The security setup reflects the building's proximity to the Federal Reserve Bank, which shares the block. After the events of 9/11, every building within a half-mile radius of that Fed facility got upgraded significantly, and 60 State Street absorbed a lot of that spending. The HVAC system in the original tower was a constant complaint for tenants. I spent three weeks in 2019 dealing with a floor that wouldn't hold temperature above sixty-eight degrees in October. The building uses a variable air volume system from the original installation, and while it was updated over the years, the control valves on the older zones were worn out and the building management was slow to replace them. The fix ended up being a temporary setup where I got a portable heater and complained to facilities management until they flushed the air handlers. It cost me about two hundred dollars in electric heating I wouldn't have needed otherwise, but at least I wasn't writing check requests by hand in a freezing office. The elevators are another thing worth noting. There are two banks, express and local, and the express runs to the upper floors from the lobby. During my time there, the express system was frequently delayed because of maintenance on the outrunner columns in the shaft. I'm not claiming to be an engineer but the building manager once told me that the outriggers connecting the exterior columns to the interior core needed periodic inspection, and they couldn't do that work while elevators were running. So you'd wait, sometimes ten minutes, for a bank that should have been a two-minute ride. It's a structural quirk of the design that most people never notice unless they're late for something.
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What Makes It Historically Notable
The building sits on ground that has a complicated history beyond just the urban renewal era. Before the 1960s demolition, the site was part of the West End adjacent neighborhood, and the street grid itself was shifted slightly when they reconfigured the area. If you walk down State Street and look at the angle of the building compared to the street pattern to the north, you can see where the old and new alignments meet. That offset is subtle but real, and it's something most people miss. Architecturally, the building is straightforward International Style. No ornament, no classical references, just a rectilinear tower on a raised podium. The facade uses precast concrete panels with a dark aggregate finish and large expanses of tinted glass. The concrete has held up reasonably well considering Boston's freeze-thaw cycles, though some spalling has appeared on the lower levels where deicing salt splash reaches. I've seen maintenance crews working on the south face almost every spring, which is standard for buildings of this age in this climate. The building received a Historic American Buildings Survey documentation in 2014, which is a federal program that records structures of historical significance. That doesn't mean it's a landmark, just that it was recorded as part of the national inventory. The nomination cited the building's role in the postwar redevelopment of Boston's waterfront and its association with the Shepley Bulfinch firm, which has been operating since the 1800s and designed many of the buildings you see downtown. The firm took over from Henry Hobson Richardson's old office, so the architectural lineage here goes back further than the building itself.
From a technology perspective, the building has gone through several communications infrastructure upgrades. The original telephone system was copper-based and wired through the core. By the late 1990s they pulled fiber through the ceiling plenum, and in the 2010s they added Cat6a cabling to most floors for the data requirements of financial firms. The wiring closets are on every other floor, and the horizontal runs max out around two hundred feet before you hit the distance limit on Gigabit Ethernet without intermediate switches. I've run tests hitting 850 Mbps consistently on the original cabling, which is fine for most work but would choke if you tried to do anything bandwidth-heavy like running a local video render farm.
Common Problems People Don't Expect
The biggest practical issue with 60 State Street is the wind tunnel effect on the ground level. When the wind comes off the harbor at twenty-five miles per hour or more, the space between the building and the Federal Reserve creates a jet stream that makes the sidewalk nearly unusable. I've watched people lean into the wind at a forty-five degree angle just trying to walk past the entrance. It's not advertised anywhere and visitors always seem surprised. The workaround is to use the Franklin Street entrance during high wind days, which shields you a bit more because of the building mass on that side. It adds about thirty seconds to your walk but saves you from getting your portfolio knocked out of your hand. Another thing that catches people off guard is the parking situation. There is a garage at the rear of the property accessed from Franklin Street, but it's small and the rates are steep. I paid eighteen dollars a day there in 2021, which was typical for the area. The alternative is theState Street Parking Garage on Congress, which is a four-block walk and costs about twelve dollars. Neither is great but you've got worse options in this part of downtown if you drive. The bathroom situation on the upper floors is another minor grievance. The restrooms are clustered near the elevator core and there's only one stall per gender on most levels. During lunch hours from twelve to one, you'll wait. I stopped going to the fifteenth floor restroom entirely and started using the twelfth floor facilities which have three stalls and get far less traffic. That's a tip nobody tells you until you've already missed a deadline because you were waiting in line.
Why the Location Matters
60 State Street occupies a piece of Boston that has been the center of American finance since the colonial period. The Old State House is two blocks away. The Boston Stock Exchange, which moved to this building in the 1990s before eventually merging into the NYSE, operated from the lower floors for a while. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is adjacent. All of this means the building is surrounded by institutions that have been operating for decades, sometimes centuries, and it's unusual for a single structure from 1970 to sit at the center of that kind of continuity. The innovation angle is more recent. State Street Corporation has been investing heavily in blockchain infrastructure and digital asset custody over the last five years, and a lot of that work happens out of this building. They opened a digital asset team here in 2018 and have since expanded it significantly. It's an interesting juxtaposition to have a building that looks like any other 1970s office tower housing some of the more forward-looking financial technology work in the city. The servers are in the basement, the developers are on the eighteenth floor, and the marble lobby hasn't changed much since 1971. If you're visiting and want to see the building from the best angle, stand on the bridge at the end of India Street and look north. You'll get the full elevation against the sky, and on clear days you can see the Prudential Tower behind it and the Custom House Tower to the left. The composition shows why the site was chosen, even if the architecture itself is utilitarian. The building does what it was designed to do, which is provide Class A office space in a location that has been economically important for three hundred years. That's not a bad track record.
For anyone researching the building for a paper or presentation, the city of Boston's inspectional services department has public records on the permits and renovations. The Massachusetts Historical Commission has the HABS documentation. And the State Street archives, which are accessible to researchers by appointment, have files on the original construction and the various tenant improvements over the decades. I used those archives once to verify a claim about the original floor loading capacity, and the documents showed the design was spec'd at one hundred pounds per square foot, which was standard for offices at the time but seems light by today's server room standards. That's why the newer tech installations needed reinforcement, which they did in 2016 at an estimated cost of four hundred thousand dollars. The building is well connected transit-wise. The Blue Line station at State Street is directly underneath, and the Silver Line stops nearby. I commuted from Cambridge for six years and the train ride was twenty minutes door to door, which is about as good as it gets in this city. Parking a car is a different story but that's true for almost anywhere in downtown Boston. There's not a lot of drama to report about this building. It's an office tower that works, has worked for fifty-four years, and continues to house financial institutions that are some of the oldest in the country. The architecture is competent if unremarkable, the location is excellent, and the maintenance is adequate. Most people who work there will tell you the same thing: it's a good building for getting work done, and you shouldn't expect anything more than that from a structure that was built before most of them were born.
