...
I’m supposed to investigate the theory that Cambridge’s Kendall Square, which has languished as a wind-swept tech corridor for decades, has finally reached some kind of tipping point. Genzyme and other life sciences firms have been here for years, but now Google and Microsoft are expanding, and Amazon recently announced it was moving in, too. Before Mark Zuckerberg stopped by to recruit talent a few months ago, he suggested that if Kendall had looked the way it does now, he would not have fled to Silicon Valley to build Facebook.
7:02 A.M.
MARRIOTT LOBBY
I’m taking a shortcut. Three businessmen are huddled around a laptop, slipping between German and English.
7:10 A.M.
VOLTAGE COFFEE & ART
Nursing a locally roasted Costa Rican-grown coffee, I watch the line at the register grow longer. I see people coming from the T, by bike, and walking over from the more than 800 apartments in new buildings on this block: a young man in an open-necked dress shirt, a middle-aged woman in sneakers, a bearded guy toting a book on the USS Independence. A little girl dashes to the window in time to catch a miniature dachshund wriggling past in a pink-fleece jacket.
This morning rush is a recent development, says Voltage owner Lucy Valena. She chose Kendall for her shop because she wanted to be part of something emerging. Since opening in 2010, Voltage has become a deal-making spot for venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs. Sometimes Valena will walk through the restaurant, she says, “and hear three people pitching at once.”
....A reporter at the time [ after NASA pull-out] called the empty acreage “a blasted heath of barren ground.”
The development that finally took place in Kendall a decade later created the equivalent of suburban office parks in the city, islands that lured science and computer companies but did little to shape a livable neighborhood. “Kendall Square in Cambridge has become the ugliest collection of mismatched buildings this side of downtown Tucson,” Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell wrote in 1987, calling the area “a great opportunity that now has been lost.”
2:02 P.M.
ZA
When developer Alex Twining built the Watermark, he helped prove wrong the naysayers who said no one would live in Kendall. But renting the apartments upstairs turned out to be a lot easier than filling the Cambridge-mandated retail on the lower levels. After some false starts with larger brokers, Twining agreed to let Baerkahn take a turn....
After a year of cajoling, Baerkahn persuaded Peter McCarthy of EVOO, the Somerville farm-to-table pioneer, to relocate to Watermark in 2010 and pair it with a second outpost of Za, his locavore Arlington pizzeria. After four years with an empty ground floor, Watermark had its first restaurants. ...
neighborhood, and I said, ‘Holy moly, this is really growing,’ ’’ Liang says.
3:34 P.M.
BROADWAY
Outside Fuji, signs of that growth are everywhere. Alexandria Real Estate is erecting a $500 million, 1.7 million-square-foot complex of office, lab, retail, and residential space, and Skanska USA is building a $70 million, 120,000-square-foot lab facility. At the other end of Kendall, where we’re heading now, MIT is building hundreds of thousands of square feet for Pfizer.
Baerkahn and I watch a pack of two dozen nattily dressed people – an international delegation, we decide – head toward Akamai, a company that literally makes the Internet work. Each day, as much as 30 percent of the world’s Web traffic passes through Akamai servers.
Baerkahn’s mind, however, is on the bricks-and-mortar stuff that the group isn’t seeing on this barren stretch of Broadway. “They just walked two city blocks and they walked by nothing,” he says.
MIT and Cambridge want to change that, too, with ambitious plans to remake the area on and around Main Street, Kendall’s other still-bleak thoroughfare. For now, though, the kinds of shops and restaurants that enliven an area exist only in nodes – one around Third Street, another down by Tech Square.
3:46 P.M.
AREA FOUR
Before opening Area Four, Lumiere chef Michael Leviton and partner Michael Krupp launched the ...Achilles Project/Persephone, the eclectic shopping and dining venture in Boston’s Fort Point. It made a splash after opening in 2008, but closed the next year....
“Obviously we learned a lot about location and the idea of an emerging neighborhood [from Persephone],” says Leviton, a six-time James Beard Foundation Award nominee. He says “everyone was promising the moon” in Fort Point, then failing to deliver....
“It’s really exciting to see what people have in mind for the area,” says Leviton, even as he wishes more customers would stick around to take advantage of the restaurant’s new late-night liquor license.
4:36 P.M.
CAMBRIDGE INNOVATION CENTER
The 300,000-square-foot One Broadway tower, one of the buildings Campbell, the architecture critic, trained his fire on, is a study in 1960s Brutalism. Yet the uninviting shell conceals a sleek interior and the densest concentration of start-ups in the world, or so claims Tim Rowe, who uses half the space for his Cambridge Innovation Center, or CIC.
“This building is ground zero for the Kendall Square innovation scene,” Baerkahn tells me before checking in on his own office, CityRetail, one of the 450 start-ups here. Part of the team behind Android – the Google operating system that today powers more than 250 million smartphones – worked on the early days of the project here.
....Paying by the person, CIC tenants get all-inclusive, hassle-free access to amenities: high-end chairs and high-rise views; phones, Wi-Fi, and color printing; conference rooms with flat-panel displays; unlimited coffee and snacks. In other words, all the stuff that beats building a tech company the old-fashioned way – in your parents’ garage.
5:37 P.M.
VENTURE CAFE
..I’m here for CIC’s Venture Cafe, a 3-to-8 p.m. get-together that draws entrepreneurs, techies, venture capitalists, and aspirants from across the area each Thursday....
I’m surprised by the size of the crowd: easily 100 people, maybe 200, pressed close and chatting in twos and threes. One investor is holding “office hours,” just sign up at the bar. A menswear stylist has set up shop in an advice booth, a la Lucy in “Peanuts,” counseling engineer types accustomed to oversize oxfords and pleated khakis. Above the bar, someone has scrawled: “Great things happen when smart people bump into each other."....
AT A TABLE
To my left is Leo von Wendorff, a native of Germany who was lured to Kendall a few weeks ago. His company, Virtual Knowledge Workers Inc., provides outsourced help in tech support, basic research, and clerical tasks. Before I know it, a woman in the Philippines is staring back at me from the screen of his phone. She waves.
To my right is Caitria O’Neill. She was just about to move to Russia when a tornado leveled her hometown of Monson, Massachusetts. Trying to help manage the town’s response, she discovered that disaster relief is about a decade behind in technology. So she stayed here, starting a company called Recovers.org to bring it up to speed.
Across from me, Lindsey Witmer is developing a health app that pairs people with health coaches. This is only her second time at the Venture Cafe. “Randomly meeting people throughout your life is great,” she says, “but you kind of reduce the need for serendipity when you come to a place like this.”
As if on cue, CIC’s Tim Rowe sits down at the table.
“So, we’re supposed to have a drink, but here’s my proposal,” he says to the group of us. “A billion-dollar venture fund is on the 15th floor and they’re having their opening party up there. Will you guys walk with me up there, and then we’ll have a drink?”
6:15 P.M.
IN THE ELEVATOR
Our mini-delegation has been joined by Greg Bialecki, the state’s secretary of housing and economic development....
6:36 P.M.
CHARLES RIVER VENTURES
In the past decade, CIC tenants alone have raised more than $1 billion in venture capital. So it only makes sense that the firms handing over all that money would like to be close to the people spending it. In October, Highland Capital Partners – with $3 billion invested and a satellite office in Silicon Valley – relocated its headquarters from Lexington to One Broadway’s penthouse.
Six weeks later, Charles River Ventures – another Route 128 multibillion-dollar VC firm with a branch in Silicon Valley – moved in one floor down. This is their invitation-only housewarming, a chicer version of the Venture Cafe going on below us.
Rowe introduces the entrepreneurs from downstairs to Jon Auerbach, a CRV general partner (and former Globe staffer). “The process is people with the money and insight like Jon meet people like Caitria and Lindsey and they have a conversation,” Rowe explains, “and sometimes – rarely – that clicks and that turns into a business and that creates jobs.”
“And I just stand here and watch it happen,” deadpans Bialecki, the economic development secretary.
....I had planned to be at the Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center, attending a pep talk for software developers on how to unplug in an always-on business world. Instead, I’m speeding with Rowe to a dinner where delegations from seven countries will discuss, between forkfuls of Chilean sea bass, how to create their own Kendalls back home.
7:15 P.M.
ROBOTS AND BEYOND GALLERY [MIT Museum]
As we make our way upstairs, I ask Rowe, Kendall’s most tireless booster, how the area compares with Silicon Valley. He doesn’t even stop to turn around. “Silicon Valley is kind of confident that it’s the leader, and Cambridge doesn’t really realize it’s the leader,” he says. “But we actually have higher density and a lot more venture capital.” He’s right if you’re talking on a per capita basis, but not yet when measuring by total dollars. (As I said, he’s a booster.)
That may explain why this international crowd is here tonight, not on the West Coast. I meet Ian Ritchie, a Scotsman who has started 35 companies and whose business card has a self-portrait and the letters CBE, meaning Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Then Selcuk Kiper of Istanbul, vice chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum in Turkey.
“Turkey opened a consulate in Boston. It’s brand-new and the [consul general’s] only job is to make links between Kendall and Turkey,” Rowe says to Kiper. So why in the world is he renting in Back Bay, not Kendall?
That’s when Murat Lutem, the Turkish consul general himself, steps in, looking at once dapper and sheepish.
“I was just giving Selcuk [grief] about your location,” Rowe says.
“Well,” shrugs Lutem, “it’s done.”
8:30 P.M.
KEYNOTE SPEECH
While the international set washes down dinner with wine, Joi Ito moves forward to give his talk, drawing a hush followed by an ovation. Ito is a superstar in this world: Raised in Silicon Valley and Tokyo, he dropped out of Tufts, worked for a time as an international DJ, and became a jet-setting venture capitalist with an eye for the next big thing (he got in early on Twitter and Flickr). Last year, he was picked to run the Media Lab, a place he calls “a massive serendipity engine.”
I follow only some of Ito’s message, but this much is clear: Silicon Valley grabbed the low-hanging fruit of software development and consumer Internet sites. But hardware is the next frontier, he continues, and Kendall’s strong footing in math, science, and research will make it “the new hub.”
Talking about how “plans are overrated” and you need to be ready to “throw away your map,” Ito notes that YouTube was conceived as a dating site before it found a brilliant way to reinvent itself.
That makes me think of Campbell’s rebuke of Kendall being a lost cause, aesthetically at least, and I wonder whether there is hope for continued reinvention here, too. “It’s not a sure thing,” Ito says when I catch him at the coat check, “but we have an opportunity to capture.”
9:08 P.M.
THE CORNER OF MAIN AND OSBORNE STREETS
Having left Rowe holding court with a group of Spaniards, I’m now standing before a pair of industrial buildings.
One has a historic marker: On October 9, 1876, this is where Thomas A. Watson telephoned Alexander Graham Bell 2 miles away in Boston, thereby placing the first long-distance call in history. The ancient building has been refurbished by MIT and adjoined to a vast new biotech center.
But its neighboring building is in disrepair: upper windows covered in boards, lower ones that reveal emptiness and peeling paint. It is the first sign of halted progress I have seen all day.
There is no marker on this site, but it is another kind of monument, a cautionary tale. This was where Edwin Land invented instant photography, transforming a humble optics company named Polaroid into one of the most successful businesses in Massachusetts and a household name around the world. But then technology shifted, and Polaroid, caught flat-footed, tumbled into bankruptcy.
9:26 P.M.
THINK TANK
...At the closest thing Kendall has to a nightclub, there’s a long line of women shivering in tiny skirts and guys stoically sucking cigarettes.
9:36 P.M
MEADHALL
There are 100 tap handles, 50 on each side, enough for everyone at the oval bar to have one, with a few more to spare. Another couple dozen people are sitting at tables.
...“You want to wake up?” he asks, producing a big box of packages printed with “AeroShot.” They’re leftovers from a launch party upstairs by Breathable Foods, a company that grew out of Harvard and created Le Whif, an inhalable chocolate. AeroShots are breathable caffeine.
11:53 P.M.
OUTSIDE THINK TANK
A sandwich board advertising $5 APPS and $3 PBR ALL NITE has blown over...
FEBRUARY 3, 2012, 12:03 A.M.
OUTSIDE AREA FOUR
...Back at Area Four, I hear the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” coming from outdoor speakers. The lights are on in the bar.
Suddenly the music is off, mid-song. The lights cut out next.
12:09 A.M.
7-ELEVEN
Under the glare of fluorescent lights, the rotating hot dogs gleam.
...I bend down to tie my shoe, and a day’s worth of business cards spills from my shirt pocket.
Scooping them up, I see an unexpected display: cold medicine!
I take a picture. I should send it to the Broad Institute’s Alan Fein, who so badly needed a pharmacy, so he’ll know where to go the next time a board member is feeling under the weather.
12:29 A.M.
OUTSIDE MICROSOFT NERD
....I spend another half-hour walking, but find next to nothing. A lonely-looking guy lugging an overstuffed backpack. A few party stragglers weaving their way to the T.
I think it’s time to go home.
12:57 A.M.
KENDALL T STOP
It is that odd hour when the T may or may not still be running, stations and trains shutting down for the night, no employees in sight.
Slipping through a partially closed entrance, I step around a puddle of vomit.
A marked-up plywood board bears the kind of graffiti you get only in Cambridge. “Stupid Vandals” someone has scribbled. Below it, from someone else: “Sacking Rome and everything.”
.....And then I remember the app. I try to wake up my phone, but it’s battery is dead. I find an outlet, charge it for a few minutes, and discover I cannot get cell service. Being lost in Kendall without technology makes for a particular kind of loneliness.
....In the distance, I hear a rumble.
It turns out the train is coming to Kendall after all, hurtling through 100-year-old tunnels, speeding into the future."
