Skip to Content
MIT News feature

Mapping the Changes in Kendall Square

The eastern edge of campus has come a long way
since the 1960s.
August 18, 2015

In 1963, on the site of the old Lever Brothers soap factory, MIT opened the first building in a modern office complex known as Technology Square. The utilitarian structure would house MIT’s computing pioneers for more than four decades. Its construction also represented a first step in turning Kendall Square into a hotbed of innovation.

The transformation came in fits and starts. Not long after Tech Square debuted, NASA opened its Electronics Research Center at 55 Broadway, only to move out three years later because of federal budget cuts. Cambridge paved over much of the large parcel of land cleared for the space agency and began the slow process of courting developers. Although Draper Laboratory, which had spun out of MIT, moved into Tech Square in 1976, many companies left the city, lured by suburban office parks. So it was big news in 1980 that Boston Properties would break ground on the first office building in the new Cambridge Center development.

In the 1980s, the Kendall Square biotech revolution began. Biogen moved into a warehouse on Binney Street in 1983. The Whitehead Institute, which would help lead the Human Genome Project, arrived in 1984, followed by Genzyme in 1990. Today, the corner of Vassar and Main is a nexus of the life sciences, with the Broad Institute, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the Whitehead, and Novartis all within shouting distance.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, Kendall Square became the home of high-tech startups like Akamai and lured tech stalwarts like Microsoft and Google. Today many of the nearly 600 startups at the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway are tech companies.Meanwhile, more than 50 Kendall restaurants have opened since 1990. And if MIT’s plan to add housing, retail, office, and R&D space gets approved by the Cambridge Planning Board, can a grocery store be far behind?

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.