Erection of a New Skyscraper for the 21st Century

We've been sitting on our hands wondering how we were going to approach Menino's call for a new downtown skyscraper last week without making all sorts of inadequacy jokes, you know, how this skyscraper might just be Menino's viagra. Damn, we blew our load already. To be just as blunt the basic story told is that Menino has called for a 1,000 foot skyscraper (that's roughly 80 stories, John Hancock is 62). And all Bostonist can do is giggle thinking about how he doesn't measure up to Dubai's planned phallus. In the speech he made announcing the plan he described a tower as a way to showcase the promise and strength of Boston's economic future. Seems reasonable enough, but we do remember hearing a little something about Fidelity shifting some jobs to North Carolina, and the potential for Gillette, following the P&G merger, to pull some of their operations out of the Prudential Center leaving a bit of real estate open for new tenants.

The other vacant or less than capacity buildings aren’t what seems to concern Menino. His list of crazy ideas seems to keep on growing, Bostonist is hoping this is the cherry on top. A new skyscraper would give Boston another visually iconic structure, towering well above the often ridiculed Hancock and it’s plywood past. Bostonist wonders how it might effect our view of the Zakim, which fits so nice into the new Boston imagery. A rail advocate wrote into the Globe recently to point out that that the thousands more people who would occupy an enormous building (not to mention the 500k sqft Harvard Stem Cell center slated for Allston) would seriously clog up any advances the Big Dig has made without expansion of our rapid and rail transit systems in the Hub.

Bostonist mentions Dubai above not off-handedly. You'll notice that the image we use here is not the image the Boston Redevelopment Authority rendered of what a wicked tall building would look like on the Boston skyline. Rather, the image is of the Dubai skyline and what a building might look like there (theirs happens to be a taller project) and as some astute architectural scouts on the internets noticed that the image threw in the Pru and 111 Huntington just to round out the background image.

Update: Our subtle "Erection" headline may have been beaten by the Herald's assertion that "Size Matters"
Image used is the DOS Architecture rendering of Dubai's proposed tower, with a little Boston in back.