Sears building, Sears Tower

In about 1870, Sears built this building in downtown Boston; it was on the site of the old Leverett estate where what is today Congress Street comes right downtown into Washington Street. That Sears building eventually became the Sears Tower as Sears owned prime real estate right downtown and had to use it to its full advantage.

In the earliest days of Boston, Thomas and Anne and their son John lived at this estate, which went all the way out to the harbor. The harbor kept being filled in to make more land, and John, after Thomas and Anne died, would make trades or deals with the city to allow it. The land originally had a tenement house at the back of it, near the harbor, but eventually came to have a ropewalk and be a prime place for boats to land and unload. A friend of the Leveretts, John Gray, was very prominent in those days and this became Gray's Wharf. It became famous in the Boston Massacre and again when the Boston Tea Party happened right off its shores.

The road from the house to the wharf was called Leverett Lane at first, because it went right through their estate, but later Quaker Lane, when a Quaker meeting house was on that street. Today it is Congress Street. The Tea Party Museum is right where it crosses the channel.

The Leveretts lost the house and the land when Harvard bled John Leverett, its President, dry in a bitter academic fight. He died in debt so badly that his daughters had to sell of the land. Leveretts survived, but it's hard to see their legacy, unless you look carefully within the Sears buildings, and even then you'd be lucky to get a glimpse of what it was like back in the 1600s.

Read all about it in my book (below), though that takes place mostly in Cambridge.

Harvardinates (Har-VAR-di-NAH-tays): The Life and Times of John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNC4X71R