I mean, what other single-bike stall can you think of that is actually clad in quartz or marble?
Beyond bizarre given the ultra low hotel vacancy rates that it's not a hotel. The prices are insane, esp in Kendall.
It has all the charm of an electrical substation
This facade reminds me of a high street jewellery shop, just needs a bullet and vanadalproof glass case instead of bike parking.
If that ground floor config/treatment is 'as-of-right,' dare I say something's wrong with the 'as-of-rite.'
It's same sort of issue we see with zoning all the time: obsolete legacy zoning having an outsized effect on what does/doesn't get built. Just like we see residential zoning limiting the types of structures that get built in legacy residential neighborhoods, here we are likely seeing archaic "commercial" zoning (that harkens back to the days when Kendall was more of an industrial backwater) making it totally OK to build something like a 3-story corrugated metal shed with highbay doors on what is now a prime pedestrian street corner. To Cambridge's credit, they've had success with the Mixed Used District not far from here in Kendall, but this is outside of that boundary. The old days of a binary mindset of distinct zones of either a) low-density residential, or b) pure commercial should be over; much huger swaths of mixed-used zones should be put in place.
Mixed-use zones used to be the norm prior to WW II. Most of the older areas in the greater Boston inner cities had a mix of residential. small corner stores, businesses, and light industrial mixed into the same neighborhoods. When I lived in North Cambridge in the 1950s and 60s there was light industry scattered around, and multiple corner stores (small markets, barber shops, drug stores, bakeries, medical offices, etc). It was an economical, eco-friendly, walkable model. After WW II, the burgeoning of suburbia cast a single-use model which made its way back into the older cities as well, in which residential areas were sacrosanct with no other uses allowed.
I thought the scattered retail embedded in residential areas was a function of large household sizes and less strictly about formal single-use zoning.
There are a lot of reasons why the small corner stores and local shopping disappeared, as well as the small light-industrial. All I know is that when I was a kid in the 1950s in North Cambridge, we would walk to 90% of activities (shopping, including large department stores, medical, church, school, etc), and the other 10% we would take transit. I wish that were the case today.
it’s a by right development
.....and which Cantibridgian Bureaucrat chose that corner to be zoned as by-right???