Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Reshaping of Boston

Insuring the City examines the development of the Prudential Center in Boston as a case study of the organizational, financial, and spatial forces that large insurance companies wielded in shaping the postwar American city. The Prudential Center was one of seven Regional Home Offices (RHOs) planned by Prudential in the 1950s to decentralize its management. What began as an effort to reinvigorate the company’s bureaucratic makeup evolved into a prominent building program and urban planning phenomenon, promoting the economic prospects of each RHO city and reshaping the geography of the business district. Examples from Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago show each RHO as a calculated real estate investment. The RHOs were also expressions of the insurance company’s self-image as a benevolent force in American cities and social life. Boston—the location of Prudential’s Northeastern Home Office—was, like other American cities, preoccupied with urban obsolescence and erected a political and legal structure to facilitate redevelopment. Navigating its way through these structures, Prudential became an “urban redevelopment corporation” in its own right. The Pru’s intended site was a rail yard on the outskirts of the central business district, a site that was also pivotal to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s plans to construct an urban extension. Prudential navigated a triangular relationship with the Pike and the Boston Redevelopment Authority to gain recognition—and favored tax status—as a quasi-public actor in the legislatively sanctioned fight against urban blight. The Pru, dedicated in 1965, hastened the expansion of Boston’s central business district into a second midtown area that was a self-contained enclave organized around the car. Together, the Pike and the Pru planned a massive highway interchange in Boston’s Back Bay district. Prudential’s design choices began with the selection of a “businessman” architect, Charles Luckman, and this study examines Luckman’s bureaucratic design process. Though never been loved by architectural critics, the overall plan of the Prudential Center achieved many of its sponsor’s goals and, in several senses, insured Boston’s future. It instilled the city with new financial confidence and thousands of jobs, protected against physical obsolescence, and invested in the city’s public realm.