The cult classic “Repo Man” satirized the vapidity of America in 1984 by making every product onscreen into a generic – “beer”; “drink”; food” – in the style of real blue-striped but otherwise unbranded items that began to appear on grocery store shelves as life increasingly sucked. It took me a while to realize that this is one of my problems with the CanalSide food hall, which opened Oct. 25, 2024, in the CambridgeSide mall.
Over each of the 14 eateries is an identifier of its cuisine: Chilacates is “Mexican.” Over Lala’s Neapolitan-ish Pizza is “Pizza.” Over DalMoros Fresh Pasta To Go is, for some reason, “Fresh Pasta.” Over a sign for Sapporo Ramen & Sushi is, for some reason, just “Ramen.” And so on.
It’s not solely the redundancy (or inconsistency) that makes CanalSide feel so uncomfortable. There’s a problem with scale that reflects an affliction of malls overall and CambridgeSide specifically – the reason it went before the City Council in 2019 to win approval to rebuild within its footprint, minimizing its original retail mission in favor of adding homes, office and labs. When Amazon and the Internet stole away shoppers, stores lost their reason to be in malls. Malls lost their reason to exist. As a collection of brick-and-mortar sellers of consumer goods, CambridgeSide has been shrinking for a long time.
Defined by a 1978 East Cambridge Riverfront Plan and opened Sept. 13, 1990, it was shaped by the same cultural forces as “Repo Man,” with one providing the mainstream setting and the other reacting with a punk soundtrack. The mall is midreinvention again – more substantively so than those 1980s generics that have been rebranded to look less blatantly corporate.
There’s a possibility that when CambridgeSide finishes its 1.7 million square feet, 575,000 of it added from the original, and its offices and labs fill with workers and its 200 new homes fill with residents, the square footage of CanalSide will fill also. There will be a happy din and the pleasant boisterousness of people enjoying food, drink and company side by side.
The space can hold 600 people; during my weekend visits there have been two or three dozen.
You enter CanalSide by passing through cavernous halls of silent, cool concrete. Inside, you can stand in one place and scan your range of choices of generic descriptors in what feels like a schematic in computer-assisted rendering software meant to be replaced by actual restaurants – “insert bubble tea shop here” – but that got built with the generic instead, like cakes at grocery stores frosted by distracted deli workers to say things like “Happy Birthday Comma Laura.”
Less than a mile away, the Eastern Edge Food Hall opened Feb. 12 on Main Street in an MIT building in Kendall Square – nine eateries in a space that can hold 284 people, or less than half of what CanalSide was built to host.
The modesty works. This is a cozy space, and a little eccentric. Pipes run everywhere in a narrow space that denies the ability to stand and survey where you’re headed; you’re forced to amble the length to see a kind of design-jumbled assortment of eateries, generally with fewer options than the restaurants at CanalSide in a way that feels helpful rather than restricting: a patties place has four options; Juicy Jay’s has five burger options, three sandwiches and fries. CanalSide makes its C-Side sports bar vibe explicit by making giant TVs prominent; Eastern Edge hides its screens from all but those looking for them. Eastern Edge is warm. CanalSide is cold. Eastern Edge feels like it’s waiting for you. CanalSide can feel, I say with no joy, abandoned.
This also isn’t an indictment of the food sellers in CanalSide, from the savory Sapporo to the terrific smashed NuBurgers.
It is, though, a criticism of a trend toward so-so architecture that creates skepticism around development. This might apply to the first draft of the affordable-housing addition to a historic home at Massachusetts Avenue and Mellon Street in Cambridge in 2023 that was greeted universally as not even trying to blend in with its surroundings. (“I hope, frankly, that this reflects very little design development to this point,” said Catherine Preston Connolly, then-chair of the Planning Board. “The very plain design we’re getting in the first hearings is off-putting to neighbors throughout the city in ways that are unnecessary.”) It might be the head of Copper Mill showing renderings for its proposed building in Davis Square, Somerville, while agreeing with the crowd that “they are sterile. They are soulless.”
In the case of CanalSide, owner New England Properties accepted the so-so design and built it. CanalSide looks toward that boisterous future of 600 people warming a giant space, forgetting the lessons from ghosted Bath & Body Works, Clare’s and Macy’s storefronts and too optimistically ignoring the risks of a faltering economy. For this moment, the intimacy and quirk of Eastern Edge feels like the more thoughtful approach. We’re just not in a big moment, and we don’t seem to love being handed something generic.
CanalSide food hall, in CambridgeSide, 100 CambridgeSide Place, East Cambridge
Eastern Edge Food Hall, 290 Main St., Kendall Square, Cambridge
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