In his 1986 book A Concrete Atlantis, the late architectural writer Reyner Banham described the United Shoe Machinery Corporation (USM) structure in Beverly, Massachusetts as a concrete-framed factory in its canonical form "a work of crushing self-assurance. Its absence from the general literature on the history of modern architecture is a reproach to scholarship," he added.

Banham also described Beverly as "that ultimate masterpiece of [engineer Ernest L.] Ransome's declining years." Ransome, known worldwide for his then revolutionary technology, himself authored a book, Reinforced Concrete Buildings, with co-author Alexis Saurbrey in 1912, published in New York City by McGraw-Hill.

Cummings Center, the former USM site, is today a massive complex of Ransome's renovated commercial buildings and landscape features on a 74-acre site near Beverly's downtown business district. Construction of the original plant began in 1904 and continued in phases over a span of 96 years, through the present renovation. It is one of the most outstanding pieces of Massachusetts commercial real estate.

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The typical exterior facade of the main building, now 100 Cummings Center, is four stories tall. The facade's structural elements are organized following classical tri-partite organization (a primarily horizontal base, a vertically organized shaft section, and a horizontal capital). "The pleasing proportions, based on its structural system, foreshadow the later modular designs of Mies van der Rohe and one of the basic aesthetic principles of modernism -- the direct relationship of structure to style," Banham added.

Approximately 8' wide bronze aluminum framed windows, installed during 1997, fill all the facade areas between the sub-columns. The windows replace earlier steel replacement windows. A few of the original wood framed windows remain. Front elevation windows installed in 1997 feature one horizontal and two vertical mullions to match the previous, very deteriorated major window components.

Recessed concrete spandrel panels, which replaced glazing below the present windowsill level about 1920, feature raised perimeter molding. Above the fourth floor windows are a projecting bullnose molding and a coved cornice with no vertical divisions. This cornice extends above the roof and creates a parapet at roof level.

In 1997 two steel-framed four-story additions were completed on the south elevation within two formerly open courts between the three primary wings of the main plant. In terms of scale, the total combined length of the four main elevations of this building is 3,340 lineal feet, of which the combined length of the newly added exterior elevations of the two additions totals only two percent.

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The first documented commercial development on this site occurred in 1643 with the construction of Friend's Mill. This tidal grist mill survived till the very end of the 19th Century, and qualifies Cummings Center as the oldest continuously used commercial property site in America.

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Huxitable...Most significant concrete landmark in America
On October 2, 1997 Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "The Shoe was, and is, the single most important, and generally unrecognized, concrete landmark in this country, predating the Detroit auto factories by the engineer Albert Kahn that have been widely credited with the structural and engineering innovations that actually appeared here first." Before 1997 Huxtable wrote about the USM complex in Progressive Architecture in 1977, and addressed it even in 1957 in a New York Times feature story.

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Modernist architects developing their treatise in the 1920s and 1930s often used the "building as machine" analogy to describe (their view of) the proper approach to building design. Fine art painting and photography of the era was strongly influenced by the aesthetic, evidenced in machines such as ocean liners. USM's later disregard for the overall appearance of its structures, evidenced by the plethora of ducts, pipes, boards, plastic covers, sheds, transformers, silos, tanks, loading areas, and other appurtenances attached to the building, is an ironic counterpoint to the modernist's assertions that functionally derived form is a result beautiful.

During the 1997-99 restoration, virtually all attachments and numerous concrete block and sheet metal additions to all of the contributing structures were removed. All buildings are now mostly very much more in keeping with their early appearance than they were in 1996. The notable exceptions are the graceful, but unsound 225' tall chimney, which was removed in 1997, and the several prominent aluminum and glass curtainwall structures added in 1997.

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Oldest commercial real estate site in USA
When Beverly, Massachusetts was part of Salem, Massachusetts, the Salem Town Council authorized construction of a tidal grist mill. The new dam would utilize the twice daily flow from an inlet of Bass River, where Upper and Lower Shoe Ponds are today.

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The actual dam was just north of what is now the corner of Elliott and McKay Streets. For more than 200 years, both horse drawn wagons and coastal schooners brought dried corn to the flourishing Friends Mill from as far away as Long Island, New York, while colonial Beverly emerged around the mill.

After the mill burned to the ground in spectacular fire in 1893, its wharf continued to be used for shipping and other commercial purposes until the area was acquired for United Shoe Machinery Company in 1902 by the future U.S. Supreme Court justice, Attorney Louis Dembitz Brandeis. United Shoe then immediately built what, for several decades, was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world. Dating back to 1648, this radically new style of manufacturing plant, which is now Cummings Center, was constructed on the oldest continuously used commercial real estate in the United States.

Attorney Brandeis not only served as an organizer and as a director of United Shoe in its earliest days, but at about the same time, he also founded Massachusetts' Savings Bank Life Insurance Company in 1908. The fact that more than 70 percent of employees at "The Shoe" held SBLI polices at one point, suggests more than a casual relationship between the highly paternalistic United Shoe management and SBLI, presumably through Brandeis.

In time, the brilliant Brandeis turned away from United Shoe, however, and later he was prominent in the decades-long court battle against the Company and its highly monopolistic practices. Indeed, during Brandeis' 1917 Supreme Court confirmation hearings he was roundly criticized by some for having represented both sides in various USMC anti-trust hearings.

Some lawyers representing both the Government and USMC reportedly spend their entire professional careers working on nothing but a succession of United Shoe anti-trust cases. In one form or another, the cases persisted from 1908 until the Company was finally broken up in 1978.

During almost all of that period, however, United Shoe was always considered among the bluest of blue chip American manufacturing firms. United Shoe Machinery Company was America's first truly multi-national company. To many, it was the Microsoft of its day, and in many ways, just as successful.

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Cummings Properties LLC, 200 West Cummings Park, Woburn, MA 781-935-8000

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