The shiny steaming kettle hanging over Court Street near Government Center, a Boston landmark since 1873, is up for sale.
Owner Peter Schwartz is offering the oversize, gilded icon as well as the building it is attached to, 63-65 Court St., for $3.7 million.
Schwartz bought the building in 1990 for about $1 million. The broker is NAI Hunneman Commercial.
According to the marketing materials, the small - 4,000 square feet on four floors - steaming kettle building is being offered as a pair with another historic structure, the Puffers Building, at 214-218 Cambridge St., at the foot of Beacon Hill.
The price on the Puffers Building, with a name symbolic of the cigar manufacturers that once occupied it, is $3.8 million. That's slightly more than what's being asked for the steaming kettle - even though the Puffers Building is more than twice as large, at about 10,900 square feet.
In fact, the steaming kettle building is the incentive in this commercial offering, according to Carl L. Christie, executive vice president of NAI Hunneman.
The empty Puffers Building has been on the market for a couple of months and hasn't generated much interest. So the price has been reduced from $4.2 million, and Schwartz decided to sweeten the pot even further.
"As an inducement for someone to buy the Puffers Building, he thought if he put this landmark teakettle in the mix, he would get a bite on it," said Christie.
"I think it's a fabulous opportunity for a residential condo conversion," Christie said of the five-story Puffers Building.
The steaming kettle building will be sold only as a package with the Puffers Building.
Fully occupied, the steaming kettle building is producing good commercial income now and has the potential to earn more when current leases end, Christie said.
The kettle, with rising clouds of steam from its spout said to be the first animated sign in the country's history, now looms over a ubiquitous modern icon - a Starbucks coffee shop on the ground floor. Dentists' offices are on the upper floors of the building, built in about 1965.
The kettle was designed in 1873, when the owner of the Oriental Tea Co.'s tea and coffeehouse commissioned Hicks and Badger, the city's largest coppersmiths, to build a sign.
According to a 1995 account in the Globe, the giant kettle even eclipsed the visit of King Kalakaua, Hawaii's "Merrie Monarch," in January 1875, as a news story when a contest to guess how much liquid it would hold captivated the city.
There were eight winners among the 12,571 entries, and the exact amount is engraved on the kettle: 227 gallons, 2 quarts, 1 pint, and 3 gills. (A gill is a quarter of a pint.)
The kettle was originally on a building at 85-89 Court St. and has been moved twice.
It survived the destruction of old Scollay Square in the 1960s, when Government Center and City Hall Plaza were created.
The Oriental Tea Co. lasted into the 1940s, when it was bought by Boston restaurateur Nathan Sharaf, who along with general manager Robert Abrams ran several downtown coffee shops.
Schwartz bought the building and its famous decoration after Sharaf died in 1988. It has since served as the home of Croissant du Jour and Coffee Connection, a subsidiary of Starbucks.
Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com.
