Proto | 88 Ames St | Kendall Square | Cambridge

Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

today around noon - demo seems almost complete

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Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

This one is on a fast track, less than 2 years ago when we first heard about it.
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

Suffolk 83 said:
This one is on a fast track, less than 2 years ago when we first heard about it.
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Suffolk -- I think that Google is a major mover behind it -- you can market the Residences to the Gnurds who don't need any sunlight and have moved beyond the grad-school thing of sleeping in your office

So you work and work and then stumble a few dozen meters to your home irrespective of the weather

I did a fairly long-term project in Stamford CT where I worked in an Office Building that shared a parking garage with a Sheraton - so even in the winter rain / snow you did not need a jacket -- very convenient
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

whighlander said:
Suffolk -- I think that Google is a major mover behind it -- you can market the Residences to the Gnurds who don't need any sunlight and have moved beyond the grad-school thing of sleeping in your office

So you work and work and then stumble a few dozen meters to your home irrespective of the weather

I did a fairly long-term project in Stamford CT where I worked in an Office Building that shared a parking garage with a Sheraton - so even in the winter rain / snow you did not need a jacket -- very convenient
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What's a more major player is that they need to build residential as part of their expansion of their office and lab buildings in the area. That's part of their deal with the City.

You always put way too much stock in the big name companies in the area.
It may well fill up with Googlites or Biogeners or any number of other big local companies. But, that is not the driving force.
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

SeamusMcFly said:
What's a more major player is that they need to build residential as part of their expansion of their office and lab buildings in the area. That's part of their deal with the City.

You always put way too much stock in the big name companies in the area.
It may well fill up with Googlites or Biogeners or any number of other big local companies. But, that is not the driving force.
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Seamus -- Tell me another compelling reason why you would want to live "here" if you don't work in the immediate vicinity

Pseudo -- Advantages of living here and working somewhere else say GE in Southey, Fidelity, John Hancock, TJX in Framingham, or Partners in Assembly
  • Rents for a residence will be high as will condo prices just because any parcel can command huge rents if its a lab or a high tech office.
  • The view -- well the back of MIT certainly is lacking in the Mem Dr curb appeal and the other way is not a whole lot better
  • General Neighborhood feel -- no supermarket yet closer than Central Square, not even a drugstore within a short walk
  • Night Life -- movies and Flat Top Johnny's
  • MIT Physics Colloquia to walk to

of the above the only compelling one is MIT being across the street -- so some of the GE folks might want to live here -- and maybe Flat top Johnny's
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

whighlander said:
Seamus -- Tell me another compelling reason why you would want to live "here" if you don't work in the immediate vicinity
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I think his whole point is that there are a lot more employers "here" than just Google, and that from an urban planning standpoint, Kendall Sq. needs a ton more housing, thus planners have made stipulations w/ developers to get more housing built. Google is just one tenant, and they're not the ones building office space - just leasing it at this point. You could make the same case for any of the key players in Kendall. Heck, Broad Institute directly across the street now employs several hundred researchers in a 14-story tower. Housing demand from dozens of employers and MIT-affiliates (not even including graduate students there) is off the charts. I had a chance to buy a shoebox condo 3 blocks from this tower's site in 2013 for $295K (kicking self) and that same condo just traded again for $450k this year (and it's a very small, piece of crap condo at the bottom end of the range here).
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

bigpicture7 said:
I think his whole point is that there are a lot more employers "here" than just Google, and that from an urban planning standpoint, Kendall Sq. needs a ton more housing, thus planners have made stipulations w/ developers to get more housing built. Google is just one tenant, and they're not the ones building office space - just leasing it at this point. You could make the same case for any of the key players in Kendall. Heck, Broad Institute directly across the street now employs several hundred researchers in a 14-story tower. Housing demand from dozens of employers and MIT-affiliates (not even including graduate students there) is off the charts. I had a chance to buy a shoebox condo 3 blocks from this tower's site in 2013 for $295K (kicking self) and that same condo just traded again for $450k this year (and it's a very small, piece of crap condo at the bottom end of the range here).
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BigPicture -- Back a way from that intersection a bit -- if you look at the first aerial from Downburst in the Future Skyline -- I identified MIT-Kendall as and up and coming Dense Core on parr with th Financial District or the Copley - Pru cluster

Obviously there needs to be more residential development and their will be as Boston Properties has initiated the discussion of building residences on top of one of the parking garages, MIT has proposed residential and so forth

My point is that while Google is not building anything themselves their presence as a Global Giant just like GE in Southey -- is and will have disproportionate impact on the surroundings -- disproportionate to the scale of the particular installation.

So far there are really only two other examples of that scale of influence in the immediate vicinity of MIT -- Novartis and Microsoft [and the later has recently moved some of their people out to Burlington]. Today -- Biogen, Pfizer, Genzyme, Schlumberger, Amazon, Facebook and even IBM lack the combination of being a Global Giant and having the local impact of Google, Novartis and MIT itself.

Of course this could change -- go back a decade and neither Novartis nor Google had the impact in Kendall that they do today
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

whighlander said:
BigPicture -- Back a way from that intersection a bit -- if you look at the first aerial from Downburst in the Future Skyline -- I identified MIT-Kendall as and up and coming Dense Core on parr with th Financial District or the Copley - Pru cluster

Obviously there needs to be more residential development and their will be as Boston Properties has initiated the discussion of building residences on top of one of the parking garages, MIT has proposed residential and so forth

My point is that while Google is not building anything themselves their presence as a Global Giant just like GE in Southey -- is and will have disproportionate impact on the surroundings -- disproportionate to the scale of the particular installation.

So far there are really only two other examples of that scale of influence in the immediate vicinity of MIT -- Novartis and Microsoft [and the later has recently moved some of their people out to Burlington]. Today -- Biogen, Pfizer, Genzyme, Schlumberger, Amazon, Facebook and even IBM lack the combination of being a Global Giant and having the local impact of Google, Novartis and MIT itself.

Of course this could change -- go back a decade and neither Novartis nor Google had the impact in Kendall that they do today
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The point you're missing is that neither BP nor MIT are building residences because they wants to. They would both prefer to lease office and lab space at $50-70/sf. They are being required to build residential components.

I agree with this concession being required to build more and bigger office/lab spaces.

I will disagree wholeheartedly with Google having a major impact on the area, or at least a greater one than many of the local biotech's in the area. Their moving here didn't seem to cause a bunch of other tech companies to move here. Amazon has it's toehold and Microsoft is about to start pulling some toes out. Pfizer's expansion, Novartis expansion, BMS coming to town, BlueBird's local expansion, Sarepta and Abbvie coming to town, etc. All of these arguably have as big or bigger an impact on the growing popularity of Kendall as a destination neighborhood. Both as a business/company and as a place to live.
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

A fun little game of reverse pile driving going on at the site today. They need to remove some lingering piles from the old garage that are smack in the middle of the future building.
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

SeamusMcFly said:
The point you're missing is that neither BP nor MIT are building residences because they wants to. They would both prefer to lease office and lab space at $50-70/sf. They are being required to build residential components.

I agree with this concession being required to build more and bigger office/lab spaces.

I will disagree wholeheartedly with Google having a major impact on the area, or at least a greater one than many of the local biotech's in the area. Their moving here didn't seem to cause a bunch of other tech companies to move here. Amazon has it's toehold and Microsoft is about to start pulling some toes out. Pfizer's expansion, Novartis expansion, BMS coming to town, BlueBird's local expansion, Sarepta and Abbvie coming to town, etc. All of these arguably have as big or bigger an impact on the growing popularity of Kendall as a destination neighborhood. Both as a business/company and as a place to live.
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Seamus -- we can argue this point endlessly -- obviously Kendall has a number of small to medium sized home grown Biotechs -- but the biggest impact to the market for top $ space in that sector, has been from Novartis and the other transplants

Their [Google] moving here didn't seem to cause a bunch of other tech companies to move here. Amazon has it's toehold and Microsoft is about to start pulling some toes out.
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On the Technology side -- Kendall has home grown Akamai as a "name" but Google and the smaller beachheads by the other Technology transplants' outposts [Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc.] are driving the "price insensitive" part of the market.

Besides, Amazon't toehold [including Amazon Robotics aka Kiva Systems in North Reading near Terradyne] is actually quite large [although mostly not in Kendall]. Similarly, IBM has a lot of people working out on I-495 in addition to the Rogers Street location for Watson Health. Microsoft is moving the backer-office types out of the high priced space to the facility in Burlington originally developed for Nokia [in an earlier era].

However, there are two major technology beachheads in Kendall: Schlumberger who relocated in toto from old-GE country in CT to the other end of Drapers's Gerbil Tube over Broadway; and Philips Research (HealthTech and Lighting) which left leafy Hudson River Valley Briarcliff, for slightly less leafy banks of the Charles over by IBM Watson near the MOS. I suspect that there will be others of that genre in Kendall in the next few years.

And there's this:
We founded Shell TechWorks in the USA in 2013 as a commercial start-up company inside Shell. Its office is located in the world’s most innovative square mile, in Cambridge, Massachusetts – a hub for leading technology organisations including Google, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Microsoft, Draper, Apple and Novartis.
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with an HQ on Main St but in true MIT tech start-up fashion most of the folks work in an old building on Albany St.
 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge

 
Re: Ames Street Residence | 88 Ames Str. - Kendall Sq. | Cambridge



Almost done with drilling the foundation piles. Starting to place steel on top of some of the piles.
 
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