Custom House Tower by Marriott Vacation Club
Greek Revival granite temple crowned by a nineteen-fifteen clock tower that broke the city's own height law.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Custom House Tower in Boston opens with a puzzle: the city capped every building at one hundred twenty-five feet, yet this tower rises nearly four hundred feet taller. It starts in 1837, when architect Ammi Young won a competition to build the young nation's customs house as a Greek temple, ringed with three dozen fluted granite columns each carved from a single block. By the early 1900s the port had outgrown that temple, and architect Robert Peabody found a way around the height law that the city government could not stop. Look up at the four clock faces added in 1916, each twenty-two feet across.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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