And while some of the tech and biotech companies in Kendall have been laying off employees this fall, all of these construction projects seem immune — so far — to recessionary rumbles.
If you haven’t been to Kendall recently, it’s turning into a real neighborhood, and has been slowly rebooting after COVID. On our walk, we passed two barber shops, a florist, a grocery store, and a Dig restaurant I hadn’t noticed. We also ducked into the subterranean MIT Press Bookstore, recently relocated and newly renovated. Here’s a list of what’s under construction at the moment:
200 Main St. Demolition crews have been taking down a 30-story tower, floor by floor; it’ll be replaced with a 13-story combination lab-office building designed by Elkus Manfredi Architects, a Boston firm. It will have underground parking, and ground-floor retail and restaurant space. Graduate students who once lived in what was called the Eastgate Apartments have moved into newly built buildings nearby.
238 Main St. Yet another CVS. That would be a dull development for many neighborhoods, but Kendall Square hasn’t had a drugstore since an independent pharmacy, Kendall Drugs, closed at this same address more than a decade ago. It’s slated to open in the winter.
Kendall Square MBTA station. The T is getting two new head houses, or entrance structures, with MIT funding one on the campus side, covered by a huge cantilevered structure, and the developer Boston Properties funding one in front of the Marriott hotel.
314 Main St. Yes, MIT owns a building with an address you could spend infinite time entering into Google Maps. It will be home to a café run by Ripple Café of Dorchester on one corner facing Main Street, just above the MIT Press Bookstore and next to the MIT Museum’s gift shop. The other corner of the building will be home to an outpost of the oyster-centric restaurant Row 34, opening in the spring.
325 Main St. Boston Properties is collaborating with CommonWealth Kitchen, a nonprofit that supports startups in the food and restaurant business, to create a new food hall called Kendall Public Market. In a presentation it delivered in June to the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority, Boston Properties targeted the second half of 2023 for opening. This won’t be a food hall on the scale of High Street Place or Boston Public Market, but there’s room for about five food stalls, a coffee bar, seating, and some small retail kiosks. It’s situated between the Kendall T stop and a new entrance lobby for Google’s Cambridge office. (Up a few flights of stairs is a newly redeveloped rooftop garden, the Urban Park at Kendall Center, ideal for outdoor eating in good weather. It opened during the summer.)
Also at this address, Google employees will begin occupying the final phase of its expanded Cambridge complex in early December. This building is 16 floors, and Google’s head of external affairs for New England, Liz Schwab, says it includes “more public-facing event spaces that will allow us to better host community, research, and client events.”
600/625 Main St. This will be a massive 300,000-square-foot building for the Ragon Institute, a research center affiliated with MassGeneral, MIT, and Harvard that studies immunology and is working to develop vaccines for HIV/AIDs and other infectious diseases. Designed by Payette, a Boston architecture firm, it is slated to be finished in 2024.
290 Binney St. Kendall’s so-called Blue Garage, with parking for more than 1,100 vehicles, will be demolished and replaced with a new underground garage. The British pharma company AstraZeneca will occupy one of two new office-and-lab buildings, relocating about 1,600 of its employees from Waltham and Boston. That 16-story building is expected to open in 2026. A 37-story apartment tower,…
Read More: Kendall Square remains a work in progress