Cambridge Crossing (NorthPoint) | East Cambridge/Charlestown | Cambridge/Boston

shmessy said:
I agree, it IS as vey lovely park…..but not much “city” around it to “block out”. THAT is the tragedy of Cambridge Crossing. It is so close to both North Station and Kendall Square, yet they built it as if it were Burlington, MA. There is very little urban activation here, low pedestrian, low ground floor retail/restaurant, etc. Human-wise, it is a dead zone. Given its advantaged location, that is a sin.

I’ve been there over a dozen times the past three years and it’s always the same. Your excellent picture above is illustrative of that fact.
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I agree ground floor activation could be better but comparing CX to a suburban office park is a bit silly. I'm over there about once a week, oftentimes running or biking through at various times of day. The park is bustling anytime the weather is good (e.g. people exercising, picnicking, walking dogs, or just hanging out), and the presence of Beatrice, Tatte, Lamplighter, etc., plus the Community Path extension, keep things fairly active on the weekends on the north end of the park especially. On top of that, there is fairly regular cultural programming (e.g. outdoor movie nights, concerts) and occasional street festivals in the area. Plus, several of the residential buildings have ground-level units that open directly to the street. CX may never match the foot traffic of Central Square or DTX, or even the Seaport, but given that the area is rather impermeable with its location between the railroad tracks, CR maintenance facility, a busy highway/arterial street, and the Charles River, quite frankly I'm surprised it gets as busy as it does!
 
The reason the ground floor activation sucks is the geniuses at the CRA decided that retail should go in separate 1-2 story pavilions, not ground floors. Put the restos and shops in the ground floors, put a couple more towers where the pavilions are, and you'd have something much better.

Interestingly, the City of Cambridge planners realize that this CRA retail pavilion fetish is dumb, but don't have control to stop it.
 
Images taken from a completely empty office on Wednesday. Unfortunately my internship ends this month, I enjoyed being in this neighborhood.
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22marc said:
Images taken from a completely empty office on Wednesday. Unfortunately my internship ends this month, I enjoyed being in this neighborhood.View attachment 69042View attachment 69043View attachment 69044View attachment 69045
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Great pics, 22marc. Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Anyone need any more proof that Cambridge Crossing is a ghost town????? Granted, it WAS the day before Thanksgiving, but I’ve been there on normal weekdays several times - early morn ing, mid-morning, late afternooon and while there are several nannies walking strollers in the beautiful park (truly excellent park) amid there were a FEW workers having coffees, this is 10% of the humanoid life dynamic something so close to downtowns Boston and Cambridge should be. Whoever design Cambridge Crossing has no love for dynamic urban design. They just plopped land scrapers around a gem of a park.
 
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Probably a question for a different thread: why don’t the finances work out for subdivided lots and commercial or non-lab mixed use?

We have reached the point where engineering and materials science have eliminated the obstacles to buildings of most any shape. Now we have run headlong into fill-the-envelope buildings.
 
shmessy said:
Whoever design Cambridge Crossing has no love for dynamic urban design. They just plopped land scrapers around a gem of a park.
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To me the issue seems obvious. There isn't a single building to draw somebody in who doesn't already have to be there. The forms and proportions are worse than we get in the Seaport, which has extreme height limits but also attracts people because it's right by the water. North Point doesn't have the water so needed something else, and being in a Max FAA zone it had a golden opportunity to make an architectural statement. Well, a statement was made, but it's legitimately the worst statement in the entire urban area other than the diagonally abutting West End neighborhood. I have yet to set foot in North Point and if even I'm not interested, what hope is there to bring in the general public?

There is still time to rectify this situation. There are still parcels available if they weren't so stubborn to stick to a master plan that is now woefully out of date. The city is finally open to more height and these developers should take the hint and build a couple tall residentials here.
 
I also resent the idea that we should be wanting to go to breweries or tatte. There are a lot of people in Camberville who spend a lot of money on the local economy who enjoy neither!
 
  • Benefit of the doubt: It's new. The Seaport received similar criticism until recently.
  • Inexplicable: The ground floor retail options are thin.
  • External factor: There's not much around "outside" of this in the first place, except perhaps the Museum of Science, but 1) that has a really specific audience that is typically only there for Mos, and 2) related to my note below, 28 does a great job dividing everything apart. If you were to populate this park and the retail locations with visitors, and not just immediate local residents, there either has to be notable options worth traveling to either there or directly nearby.
  • Challenge that wasn't addressed strongly: I still view it as cut off. Visually, from 28, as a pedestrian, you don't really see where you should go to find the "happening" things. That's the only side to really have the chance for a pedestrian to change their route to go through the neighborhood - to the north you have a rail yard, to the east you have an elevated road connecting Sullivan to Kendall, and to the west (if you want to call it west) it ends with more train tracks.
  • Anecdotal additional benefit of the doubt: as I've noted here before, my millennial friends appreciate the neighborhood more than the Seaport, mostly due to the success of the park. If they can capitalize on this with something unique that would drive frequent returning visitors, you might have something. Personal opinion is that you need a few more full time residents and a few unique restaurants or experiences, not just a Tatte, a Tatte twin, and a brewery.
 
Charlie_mta said:
At least it has some streets traversing the development, unlike Charles River Park which has none. But I do agree Cambridge Crossing could have been laid out in a much more urban way.
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It’s slightly better — and slightly more justified given it’s not built on displaced people’s homes and not smack in the middle of a city — but it uses all the same principles, namely, a slice of the city where you don’t have to deal with the city. But yeah, much better overall. But they could have done better design, more of a reason for people to flow through there, etc.

The biggest mistake was not making the bike lane a proper full width actual bike trail. I know Charlie fucked us on the bike alongside GLX but eventually with the McGrath coming down there still was gonna be the option of having a major bicycle thoroughfare passing thru north point. That could have put it on the map a lot more as the southern terminus of a major bikeway from concord and minuteman to the city and beyond. I have followed this development from the beginning, it was one of the things that was in very early planning stages when I first got into urban planning. The original plans all called for a major bicycle infrastructure, and that is not what we got.
 
The residential tower has a bunch of retail spaces around its base that havent been leased yet and the building next door has more ground floor retail and one space has a tatte in it. This is on both sides of what would be the “main strip” into cambridge crossing and also facing the common. Its definitely a fairly soulless area right now, but making it seem like none of the buildings have any leasable ground floor retail spaces is not true.
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This building has a lot of retail spaces fronting the park which could be a draw in the future.
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Also along n first st
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Right now theres a huge empty city block where the old station was and 7 lanes of traffic total to cross when someone comes out from around cambridgeside on first street. When that block is filled in it will make crossing this area much less daunting to get to cambridge crossing. Also when you get to lechmere and pass under the elevated structure theres another empty lot on your right where a future residential building is going to go. Its not inviting at all right now for pedestrians to continue down first street unless going to lechmere.

Its similar to when the seaport only had the hotels around the wtc/bcec. There wasnt any reason to go down there unless you had to and only a couple retail spots could be open. Once more of seaport blvd filled in people naturally continued down it and more and more retail places opened up and could survive. Right now the old station and the new residential are the 2 most important parcels that once developed will start to connect this place to the rest of cambridge. Once its more connected and a few more spots fill in then more and more of these empty retail spaces will be able to open. Its never going to be the seaport, but its definitely going to get better than it is now.

(Its crazy that we can now use the seaport as an example to aspire to)
 
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Am I crazy or are there are about 5 more residential buildings planned to come here?
 
Unfortunately the triangle where the station was will be an uninteresting park surrounded by traffic fumes + noise. It will not invite people into Cambridge Crossing. Another CRA special: not letting people develop interesting lots and instead putting in parkland that will not get used.
 
curcuas said:
Unfortunately the triangle where the station was will be an uninteresting park surrounded by traffic fumes + noise. It will not invite people into Cambridge Crossing. Another CRA special: not letting people develop interesting lots and instead putting in parkland that will not get used.
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I thought the small triangle is a park but the large lot hasnt had any plan for what its going to be yet?
 
stick n move said:
I thought the small triangle is a park but the large lot hasnt had any plan for what its going to be yet?
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You're correct. The small triangle is a lousy park, but the much larger Lechmere station parcel is supposed to get a TBD building on it.
 
These massive planned developments face the challenge of the entire world changing multiple times over between when they're planned and when they're eventually built out (decades later). So the initial plans are pretty useless, almost never financed as intended, almost never phased as intended, and require many, many dozens of planning board change requests/waivers.

If a developer says "I'm going to build X commercial and Y residential, phased as such" (as is the case here), they can literally say "never mind, can't get the money, not going to do it that way...or things are deferred until _[developer quits/retires/goes bankrupt/is replaced with a new developer who proposes a different plan]_." There's almost no accountability.

When a developer wants to pursue a massive plan, the city should focus instead on approving waves of two buildings at a time that balance each other. This gives the inevitably needed flexibility of accepting that the world will change, while nonetheless ensuring things don't swing too far unidirectionally toward the hot trend du jour (e.g., labs, labs, labs!)
 
I agree with a lot of the criticisms here. There was huge room for improvement to make this a better urban space.

But FWIW, my own anecdotal observations are that the area is busier with pedestrians than those recent pictures depict. It seemed like a ghost town when it opened, but keeps getting livelier. People use the park, there are often little events going on, big bike groups go through and hang out on weekends, the beer garden is nice. I go over there only occasionally, but this year especially it has exceeded my (admittedly kind of low) expectations. It'll never be as lively as even, say, Assembly Row. But I don't doubt it will keep getting better as retail and empty lots get filled in.
 
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