page_title: Prudential Tower
section_title: Prudential Center
hierarchical_section_title: Prudential Tower / Features and design / Prudential Center
caption_attribution_description: English: Publicly-accessible outdoors Prudential Center courtyard at base of tower, Boston, MA Photograph taken by me with a Sony Cybershot Digital camera, July 2006.
context_page_description: The Prudential Tower, also known as the Prudential Building or, colloquially, The Pru, is an International Style skyscraper in Boston, Massachusetts. The building, a part of the Prudential Center complex, currently stands as the 2nd-tallest building in Boston, behind 200 Clarendon Street, formerly the John Hancock Tower. The Prudential Tower was designed by Charles Luckman and Associates for Prudential Insurance. Completed in 1964, the building is 749 feet tall, with 52 floors, and is tied with others as the 96th-tallest in the United States. It contains 1.2 million sq ft of commercial and retail space. Including its radio mast, the tower stands as the tallest building in Boston, rising to 907 feet in height.
  A 50th-floor observation deck has been the highest such location in New England open to the public, as the higher observation deck of the John Hancock Tower has been closed since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Scheduled to close permanently on April 18, 2020, the Prudential's "Skywalk" was closed until further notice in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
context_section_description: The Prudential Center, situated on 23 acres (93,000 m²), is in the Back Bay neighborhood at 800 Boylston Street and houses a 620,000-square-foot (58,000 m²) shopping mall, the Shops at Prudential Center, in the base.  Known to locals as "the Pru," it is bordered by Belvidere, Dalton, Boylston, and Exeter streets overlooking Huntington Avenue. Before the Prudential development, the site was a switch yard for the Boston and Albany Railroad. By 1965, a part of the negotiations for the Massachusetts Turnpike extension included the construction of the roadway below parts of the Prudential complex. The Prudential still has its own (eastbound only) exit from the turnpike for this reason.
  The new skyscraper at 111 Huntington Avenue was completed in 2002, directly across the street from The Colonnade Hotel, at 120 Huntington Avenue. The third tower of the Prudential Center, 101 Huntington Avenue, is, at a mere 25 stories, overshadowed by the other two.
  The Hynes Convention Center is connected to the complex, as well as the existing Sheraton Hotel Boston at Copley Place, which combined was considered the first mixed-use development in New England and awarded the Urban Land Institute's Best Mixed Use Development Award in 2006. By the fall of 2007, another major development was completed along Boylston Street at the Prudential Center complex: the Mandarin Oriental, Boston hotel. In 2016, 888 Boylston Street, a 17-story LEED Platinum-certified office building, completed the last site of the Prudential Center complex.
  The complex has direct indoor connections to two MBTA stops, Prudential and Back Bay. Prudential is on the Huntington Avenue side of the building directly outside the Colonnade Hotel and is the first station on the Green Line E branch after its split from the main line at Copley Square. Back Bay is a stop on the Orange Line and is accessible to the complex via the Copley Place mall, to which it is attached by a walkway over Huntington Avenue. Back Bay is also served by Amtrak, including the Acela high-speed train.
  The Prudential Center serves as one of three starting locales for the Boston Duck Tours, a popular tourist attraction in the city.
  In November 2016, a 45,000-square-foot (4,200 m²) Eataly location was opened, replacing the existing food court.
  The "Top of the Hub" restaurant, which had occupied the 52nd floor since December 1965, was scheduled to permanently close on April 18, 2020, but was closed a month earlier due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
caption: Prudential Center courtyard, July 2006
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