Kenmore vs. Kendall | Paul McMorrowMay 01, 2011|By Paul McMorrow
In Cambridge, hands-off stance keeps Kendall vibrant
LET?S GET this one thing out of the way: Main Street in Cambridge, around the Kendall Square T stop, isn?t winning any beauty awards anytime soon. But the brick corridor doesn?t have to be the Champs-Elysees. It?s the backbone of the world?s most innovative neighborhood, and it does its job just fine.
There?s no greater concentration of entrepreneurial effort. The telephone call was born in Kendall, and so was the operating system running your new Android phone. Kendall boasts more startups and more lab space per square mile than anywhere else. It?s a huge reason why the Boston area nets more venture capital investment, per capita, than Silicon Valley. It?s also a far livelier place than it gets credit for being.
None of this happened through some concentrated planning effort. Kendall Square?s unique high-tech cluster is an ecosystem feeding on education, technology, and private investment. The cluster sustains itself. It thrives, in part, because Cambridge?s city government stays out of its way.
The conventional wisdom behind neighborhood-building ? that it starts with small buildings, residential foot traffic, and loads of ground-floor retail ? doesn?t really apply here. Kendall is a business district feeding off a university that, for a while, had a hot and heavy love affair with heroic concrete buildings. Modernist superblocks and inward-focused commercial buildings don?t normally make for vibrant neighborhoods. Hence the knock on Main Street.
But MIT changes the equation. The brains working and studying there attract businesses and investors who need places to work and eat and live. In addition to MIT dorms, there are scores of new apartments, and more are on the way. There?s a farmer?s market and an indie cinema and a kayak launch in the canal. The Cambridge Innovation Center?s weekly open-door mixer bustles, and a mob crowds outside the neighborhood breakfast joint on weekends. Kendall has quietly become the best neighborhood, on either side of the Charles, to grab a beer. Those food trucks that Boston is suddenly wild about didn?t come from nowhere; they came from across the Longfellow.
Much of the action after business hours happens toward the neighborhood?s edges. The dark, aging core remains a problem, although not an intractable one. MIT plans to build a million square feet of new office space over the next decade, plus 100,000 square feet of new retail space. That construction, along with the other 4.5 million square feet in the development pipeline, will help enliven Kendall?s dead spots. As long as the neighborhood can build, it can fix its own problems.
Cambridge?s city government hasn?t been shy about issuing development permits in Kendall, nor is it squeamish about density there. It knows the Kendall area accounts for 60 percent of Cambridge?s tax base. Those dollars let the city spend more money per public-school student than Marblehead, Wellesley, Weston, Newton, or nearly any other city or town in the state. It?s pure progressive politics: Big Pharma picks up the tab.
In Boston, Tom Menino?s success in reviving Kenmore Square is a fine example of how political power can be brought to bear against pancake parlors and rock clubs, but Kenmore?s makeover tells us little about fostering job growth in today?s business environment. Maybe that?s why Boston?s latest vision for the South Boston waterfront looks so much like Cambridge.
