At 520 feet above downtown Boston, the upper reaches of the Millennium Tower are open to the sky, a few fingers of steel girders and temporary fencing framing workers spreading concrete for each new floor — a third of an acre every other day.
Four hundred feet below that on the seventh floor, a sunny two-bedroom is all but ready to move in.
The construction of the Millennium Tower in Downtown Crossing, the tallest new building to hit the Boston skyline in 40 years, is like no other this city has seen. On this “vertical assembly line,” as project superintendent Rich Michaels calls it, lower floors are finished before the upper ones are enclosed. The process is so fast that some new residents will be cooking in their multimillion-dollar condos while painters touch up the top floors.
Boston hasn’t built many towers crammed into tight downtown spaces, but the assembly-line process is used in cities such as New York where clusters of skyscrapers are more common. At 60 stories and 685 feet at its peak, the Millennium Tower is the first of several new towers to hit the skyline in the coming months, all to be built faster than the generation of skyscrapers before them.
