Kendall Square’s transformation from urban wasteland to futuristic high-rent district was hardly a straight line, requiring stops, starts, and nearly a half-century to complete. It included botched plans, neighborhood outrage, and some plain, old-fashioned luck.
Tulimieri chuckled when asked what advice he has for Harvard.
“My words of wisdom are this: You won’t do it overnight,’’ Tulimieri said. “It is a sequential process. And it’s going to take longer than you thought.’’
Harvard has no timeline or cost estimate for its plan, which has yet to be approved by the university’s president. A team of deans, faculty, and alumni has recommended construction of a massive 36-acre life sciences park in Allston, buttressed by a new academic research facility. The shift is a dramatic one for Harvard, which has long shunned commercial development of its academic research, as it tries to take a page out of a book that MIT began writing decades ago in Kendall Square.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, has long been at the center of innovation and research; the sewing machine, microwave oven, and the first computerized spreadsheet are just a few of its innovations with Kendall Square roots.
Yet for a good part of the past five decades, the Kendall Square area was a wasteland of parking lots and abandoned factories. In the mid-’60s, with the promise of a new NASA space center locating there, Cambridge acquired and razed more than 40 acres around Kendall Square as part of an ur ban renewal effort.
Nearly 100 businesses were relocated at government expense, yet the project never lifted off. After the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who backed NASA’s move to Cambridge, congressional support for the project dwindled. Although NASA had constructed several buildings on the site, the project was eventually lost to Houston, in the home state of Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.
