As we prepare to commemorate 400 years of the place we know as Cambridge, History Cambridge is highlighting projects and proposals that did not come to fruition in the city’s past. On Thursday, we host a fundraising event, “Un/built Harvard Square,” that examines the forces that built the square we know today and explore the forgotten, unbuilt proposals that could have transformed it. Information and registration is here.
Cambridge’s City Council committed 29 acres within Kendall Square on July 27, 1964, to build a $60 million electronics research center for NASA. After five years of extensive demolition, resident and business displacements, design development and partial construction, the project was halted, as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration pulled out of the plan completely in December of 1969.
Although the ERC was never built, the clearances and land acquisitions required for the development set in motion a chain of events that paved the way for Kendall Square’s transformation from an industrial district into the biotech incubator it is today. Teeming with green-fueled restaurants and vaccine juggernauts, Kendall serves elite working professionals of Cambridge. Few traces remain of Kendall’s industrial workers who fueled wealth-building in Cambridge’s early years – and their determination to save the Square.
During the peak of the space race, the John F. Kennedy presidential administration proposed a plan for a new aeronautics center. Under the auspices of defense and progress, the center was imagined as a hub of research incubation, with scientists developing technology to advance space efforts. The public announcement of the proposal and its $60 million budget catalyzed fierce responses from members of Congress, ranging from intense interstate bidding to others staunchly opposing the plan and its estimated costs.
After months of power struggles among members of Congress, Greater Boston was announced as the center’s host in 1963. After further congressional debate and a site-selection process, NASA ultimately accepted Cambridge’s offer of 29 acres in Kendall Square in August 1964. Proximity to universities and a dense regional network of electronics research made Cambridge particularly persuasive as a site proposal.
The center promised to be an enormous economic and cultural institution. Planned as a research institution and graduate training center, it was expected to employ approximately 1,600 professional and technical workers and 500 in administrative and support staff. Overall, the ERC was intended to centralize research toward the space race.
Kendall Square was not a vacant space, though. It bustled with activity as one of Cambridge’s principal industrial districts. Its rail sidings, Broad Canal and proximity to the Charles supported factories producing machinery, metal goods, pumps, rubber products, printing, ink, confectionery and electronics. By the early 20th century, companies such as the Blake & Knowles Works, Carter’s Ink, Raytheon and General Radio elevated the area into a major center of manufacturing employment. Much of Cambridge’s manufacturing growth was concentrated around Kendall Square by 1930.
To begin development of the 29-acre site, Cambridge authorities turned to demolition procedures. Under the designation of blight, authorities could take private property by eminent domain and proceed with demolition. At this point, the area was framed as an economically obsolete landscape, dwindling in the midst of deindustrialization in Cambridge.
Quite explicitly, the city framed Kendall Square as a nuisance, an area ripe for development, with mayor Edward Crane describing the area as a “run-down, seedy, third-rate industrial area,” further calling the canal an “eyesore.” Such language constructed a narrative in which clearing the existing district could be presented as a major success for Cambridge’s economy and built landscape. NASA had provisionally accepted Cambridge’s offer of a site in Kendall Square by Aug. 19, 1964, contingent upon the city’s ability to possess and prepare the area for development. That would require relocating occupants and clearing much of the existing industrial district.
Fighting blight
From the start, Kendall Square businesses opposed to the proposed site development vehemently and organized , quickly against it. On Sept. 23, representatives of the 94 industrial firms threatened with displacement formed the Committee for the Preservation of Cambridge Industry and announced their intention to fight the project through the courts.
The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority declared Sept. 30 that the area was appropriate for an urban renewal project and authorized an application for federal funds to conduct surveys and prepare plans. The City Council and city manager approved a corresponding resolution on Oct. 8. That same day, 27 of the 94 businesses joined as plaintiffs in a civil suit, Electronics Corporation of America et al. v. City Council of Cambridge et al., seeking to halt the proposed renewal project. The businesses challenged the legal basis of blight used to qualify the area for takings and argued that the threatened taking of their property raised constitutional due-process concerns. The suit moved from the Massachusetts Superior Court to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
In February 1965, the court upheld its dismissal as premature, finding that their challenge had been brought before an urban renewal plan had been adopted formally and the relevant public agencies had not completed the administrative or survey processes. The court therefore did not rule on the merits of whether Kendall Square qualified legally as blighted or whether the takings were constitutional.
Despite continued opposition on the ground, with workers organizing and continued public outcry, the Kendall Square Urban Renewal Plan received local approval in August 1965 and state and federal approvals that autumn. The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority subsequently acquired property, relocated businesses, demolished buildings and partially filled the Broad Canal to prepare the site. Much of the industrial landscape that businesses and workers had fought to preserve was leveled.
The center and other developments planned for the Square were never built. Only a fraction of the intended campus went up before NASA announced the closing of the center in December 1969. The federal government transferred the site in 1970 to the Department of Transportation, with plans for a major transportation hub on the plot. Cambridge was left with a partially constructed federal complex among an expanse of otherwise vacant land. Redevelopment continued, albeit slowly, in the years that followed, as declining federal interest in the property, layers of government approval and the lack of urban renewal funds created further delays.
Several efforts were made by 1973 to secure blue-collar and nonprofessional white-collar jobs for the CRA’s ongoing development of the square, from mayor Barbara Ackermann appointing of a Kendall Square Task Force, public hearings at City Council subcommittees and grassroots organizations pushing for change, including Hard Times and the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee. The government cosigning of working-class land development and policy marked a striking reversal: Less than a decade after Cambridge cleared scores of businesses for the ERC, its authorities were seeking ways to restore the kinds of employment it had displaced.
The community that bore the loss were the residents and workers in Cambridge. Between 1960 and 1980, the neighborhood lost 20 percent of its population and roughly 27 percent of its families, while the number of residents employed in manufacturing fell by more than half, to 567 from 1,214. Despite the efforts of the city to learn from its mistakes and to center residents more diligently, the struggle of Kendall’s workers to maintain the site during those years should be named and held in our minds.
The afterlife of the unbuilt
The history of the ERC in Cambridge shows that blight was a political designation used to justify displacement by burying working-class networks, histories and livelihoods in the district. By framing the need for Kendall’s redevelopment as economically urgent and dire, officials absolved themselves of a larger responsibility to tenants’ welfare, paving the way for an out-of-sight, out-of-mind displacement scheme. This displacement took place despite the mechanisms that were intended to protect resident well-being, including advisory bodies that asserted this decision-making was fraught, erasing jobs and decentering residents. Ultimately, officials demonstrated that the lucrative potential for tech development was a priority above the interests of the area’s residents.
Kendall Square provides us with a tale of displacement by tech land developments, cosigned by local authorities, to craft a vision of a deindustrializing Cambridge. We may be able to imagine that the Kendall Square of today could have looked like an area more reflective of the interests of the working class and blue-collar Cantabrigians. Instead, the removal of resident interests from the area opened the floodgates for unbridled corporate and tech developments to gobble up land, removed from responsibility to local interests and local investments and further public use of land.
Recovering a history of Kendall Square extends a call to restore human agency within the changing urban fabric by naming and remembering the efforts of residents to fight and advocate for themselves and their neighbors as central stakeholders and essential workers in the city. It is essential for us to heed the Kendall Square concerns, to remember the residents and workers in the area with long, established legacies of pouring into Cambridge’s economy, built environment and culture. It is overdue to restore dignity to industrial and manual workers, remembering their role in the key wealth-building industries of Cambridge. Unearthing the history of Kendall Square can help us navigate the major challenges that lie ahead, urging us to critically reexamine our definitions of progress, blight and growth.
History Cambridge started in 1905 as the Cambridge Historical Society. Today we have a new name and a new mission. We engage with our city to explore how the past influences the present to shape a better future. We recognize that every person in our city knows something about Cambridge’s history, and their knowledge matters. We listen to our community and we live by the ideal that history belongs to everyone. Throughout 2026, we are focusing on the history of West Cambridge. Make history with us at historycambridge.org.
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