History

The United Shoe Machinery Corporation occupied a peculiar position in American industrial history: at the time this building was commissioned, the company controlled approximately 98 percent of the nation’s shoe machinery manufacturing—a near-total monopoly built through decades of patent accumulation and exclusive leasing arrangements that would eventually attract antitrust scrutiny. The company chose Boston for its headquarters partly because of the city’s historical connection to New England’s shoe industry, and the choice of the Financial District over a factory district announced that the corporation positioned itself as a financial and administrative entity as much as an industrial one.

Parker, Thomas and Rice, working with the Fuller construction organization, designed a tower that expressed corporate confidence through the full Art Deco vocabulary of the late 1920s. The lobby’s elaborate decorative elements—the feature most specifically protected by the 1983 Boston Landmark designation—represented an unusual commitment to interior craftsmanship that was made, notably, in the first years of the Depression.

The building was added to the National Register in 1980 and became a Boston Landmark in 1983, when the Commission extended protection to the lobby interior—a relatively uncommon step that reflected how significant the original decorative program was considered to be within Boston’s commercial heritage.