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Neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Kendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The square itself is at the intersection of Main Street and Broadway. It also refers to the broad business district east of Portland Street, northwest of the Charles River, north of MIT and south of Binney Street. Kendall Square has been called "the most innovative square mile on the planet", in reference to the high concentration of entrepreneurial start ups and quality of innovation which have emerged in the vicinity of the square since 2010. The neighborhood has approximately 50,000 people who work in the area on a daily basis and a growing residential population.

Originally a salt marsh on the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, Kendall Square has been an important transportation hub since the construction of the West Boston Bridge in 1793, which provided the first direct wagon route between the two settlements. By 1810, the Broad Canal had been dug, which would connect with a system of smaller canals in this East Cambridge seaport area. From 1880 to 1910, the eastern part of Cambridge hosted a variety of industries, including "printing and publishing, musical instruments (especially organs and pianos), furniture, clothing, carpenters work, soap and candles, and biscuit making." Heavy machinery was also produced here. Cambridge was once the third largest pork packer in the US. One of these factories was the Kendall Boiler and Tank Company. The square was named after the company, which in turn was named after one of its owners, Edward Kendall. The square itself consisted of the triangle defined by Main Street, Broadway, and the short stretch of Third Street between them, now the site of the Galaxy: Earth Sphere fountain and the surrounding plaza. When the Longfellow Bridge replaced the West Boston Bridge in 1907, it included provisions for a future rapid transit subway link to Harvard Square and Boston (now the Red Line); the original Kendall subway station was opened in 1912. In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved from its original campus in Back Bay, Boston to its new Cambridge campus, located south of Kendall Square between Main Street and Massachusetts Avenue. Since then, the proximity of MIT, whose campus eventually expanded into Kendall Square, has influenced much of the development of the area, and contributed to its development as a technology hub. World War I consumed a great deal of Cambridge's production. After the war, other products were also produced: "soap, rubber goods, books, metal products, electrical equipment, furniture, ink, pianos, candy and ice cream". The Boston Woven Hose company and Lever Brothers were major employers, and Cambridge became the second largest industrial city in Massachusetts. the American effort to land a man on the moon, President John F. Kennedy (a Massachusetts native) wanted to make Cambridge the site of NASA's newly expanded mission control center. Kennedy allowed his vice president Lyndon B. Johnson (a native Texan) to choose Houston, Texas for the complex, now the Johnson Spaceflight Center. To mark the beginning of construction, Kennedy would give his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech in Houston, not Cambridge. (A Cambridge urban legend is that the Kennedy assassination is what moved Mission Control from Cambridge to Houston, but this is untrue.) In 1964, Kendall Square got a much smaller NASA Electronic Research Center instead. President Richard M. Nixon would shut it down only five years later. Former Massachusetts Governor John A. Volpe, who served as US Secretary of Transportation (DOT) from 1969 to 1973, succeeded in getting the former NASA buildings rededicated to a new DOT research center, which was later named the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in his memory. For the next twenty years, other large parcels of Kendall Square, which had also been cleared in anticipation of a much larger NASA complex, were an unoccupied post industrial wasteland.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the area northeast of Kendall, in the direction of the then new CambridgeSide Galleria shopping mall was transformed from an industrial area and has been actively constructing space for new high tech tenants as well as rebuilding its own facilities fronting Main Street. Nearby MIT facilities include the Stata Center and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as many other buildings of the eastern end of the MIT campus. The Cambridge Center office development is closest to the junction of Main Street and Broadway and the MBTA subway station at the traditional core of Kendall Square. On December 2, 1982, the Kendall/MIT subway station was renamed "Cambridge Center/MIT", although few signs were changed to reflect this. There were many complaints that the MBTA had suddenly changed the name without public input, and that the new name would be confused with the next Red Line station at Central Square. On June 26, 1985, the name was reverted to Kendall/MIT. One building, at 314 Main Street, will have as a principal tenant, the Boeing Company, which will lease of lab and office space. In January 2017, MIT signed an agreement with the federal government to purchase the site of the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Kendall Square, for $750 million.

The Kendall Square Association is the official business and civic development organization for Kendall Square, and was formed by approximately 80 organizations in February 2009. Its motto is "We share more than a future, we share a sidewalk". It has developed and distributed a free "Kendall Square Walking Map" showing destinations and attractions within a 10 minute walking radius from Kendall/MIT station. Several hotels are located in Kendall Square, including the Boston Marriott Cambridge, the Cambridge Residence Inn, and the Kendall Hotel, and several more hotels are located within walking distance. There have also been several large condominium and rental developments, greatly expanding the residential population of the area. as of 2020, MIT is building residences for 450 graduate students, plus 290 affordable or market rate units. The MIT branch of the Harvard/MIT Cooperative Society ("The Coop") has for decades operated a modest department store and general bookstore at 325 Main Street, as Kendall Square's largest retailer. In February 2019, the store moved to smaller temporary quarters at 80 Broadway, to allow for demolition of the building housing its former location. A new, taller 16 story building will be constructed on the site, and the Coop is expected to move into a space larger than its temporary quarters, but possibly smaller than its previous space at that location. In December 2017, Roche Bros and MIT agreed to put a supermarket in the center of the Kendall business and residential district. For decades, the MIT Press Bookstore was a regional attraction in the heart of Kendall Square, offering a complete selection of Press titles for browsing and retail purchase, plus a large selection of complementary works from other academic and trade publishers, including magazines and academic journals. Starting in October 2016, the Bookstore was temporarily relocated to Central Square, just north of the previous location of the MIT Museum, because of extensive construction on its former site. In 2022, the Bookstore moved into a new building at 314 Main Street, adjacent to an existing subway entrance to Kendall/MIT station. Sharing the same building, in 2022 the MIT Museum moved to Kendall Square for the first time, including a newly expanded museum store.

Kendall/MIT station on the MBTA Red Line is located along Main Street directly beneath Kendall Square. MBTA bus routes 64, 68, 85 and CT2 also stop here, as well as the EZRide shuttle between Cambridgeport and North Station, and a free shuttle to the CambridgeSide Galleria Mall.

A popular public artwork is the Kendall Band, an interactive sound sculpture by Paul Matisse, located in the Kendall/MIT subway station underground in the heart of the Square. A bronze fountain sculpture, Galaxy: Earth Sphere by MIT professor Joe Davis, is installed at the junction of Main Street and Broadway in the Square. The fountain was designed to have flowing water and to emit low temperature steam, but has been partially or completely non operational for years at a time. Small stainless steel bicycle parking racks have been installed on sidewalks in the area, with various science themed shapes, such as a sine wave or a caffeine molecule. They were commissioned in 2012 from five local artists after a public competition run by the City of Cambridge.