the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

SWEAT THE DETAILS 155
Public hearings and environmental-impact reports generally cover
development issues such as traffi c flow, noise, and congestion. Nowhere in
nearly a decade of planning and public debate had anyone raised the pos-
sibility that razor-edged shards or unguided five- hundred- pound wings
of glass could, from time to time, hurtle down on Boston’s pedestrians and
motorists. Concerned city officials roped off the streets and sidewalks surrounding
the John Hancock Tower, and shattered and suspect windows
were quickly replaced by inelegant sheets of plywood that eventually covered
about one- third of the building’s surface, earning the building the
inglorious nickname “the Plywood Palace.” The effect was about the same
as adding orthodontia to the Mona Lisa, and the falling-windows fi asco
quickly took its place among some of Boston’s other bizarre disasters, including
the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, when a sticky, thirty-foot-high
wave of molasses from a North End distillery explosion killed 21 people
and injured 150.
Replacing the defective double-pane windows with single-pane
safety glass—a retrofi t that cost the window maker more than $7 million
and was completed in 1975—did not completely solve the problem. Nor
did the installation of an electronic sensing system wired to each and every
window that signaled any problems to a centralized alarm. Wooden canopies
were built to cover the adjacent sidewalks, and city officials still had
to barricade the sidewalks and surrounding streets any time winds aloft
reached 45 miles per hour. In October 1977, Newsweek magazine reported
that, for the previous three months, “two men with binoculars” had been
posted in Copley Square between 6 a.m. and midnight each day to scan
the tower constantly for windows that changed color, a telltale sign that
the glass was cracking. At that point, the tower was losing about one replacement
window each month. In 2003, Jack Connors, chairman of an
advertising agency located on the tower’s 39th floor, recalled to Boston
Globe reporter Mark Feeney how one of those falling panes sliced through
the rear window of his parked car.
As architects and engineers scrambled to figure out the window