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City, feds quietly cook up plans for dense development on large, underused space in Kendall Square

By adamg on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 9:49am

Cambridge Day reports what it knows about possible reuse of the 14-acre Volpe Transportation Center parcel in Kendall Square, which could include zoning for buildings up to 300 feet high. But both the federal government, which owns the land, and city planners, have turned very shy.

Neighborhoods: 
Cambridge
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Kendall Square
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Comments

By prof_booty on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 10:22am.

On Dec. 19, the agency denied a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of the RFI responses, saying “release of such information would cause competitive harm to the businesses that submitted this information … and [releasing costs and fees] would provide an unfair competitive advantage to competitors.”

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By greenlinetobrooklyn on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 12:44pm.

IANAL or really even all that informed on FoIA, but a request being denied because of potential business advantages for competitors does not seem right.

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By Verbal on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 10:43am.

This all seems quite reasonable to me. That space is largely a wasteland now.

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By geep9 on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 11:26am.

really?

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By anon on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 12:17pm.

I used to work in that area in till about six years ago. The Volpe complex was fairly active. What happened?

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By anon on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 1:05pm.

I used to work there. AFAIK it's still active and in use, but there is a lot of land there that's nothing but grass.

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By anon on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 4:58pm.

And surface parking.

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By notmyaccount on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 2:04pm.

Volpe is as active as ever, this is just about using ALL the land and a building upgrade for Volpe itself since the 60s-era buildings are nearing end-of-life.

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By kernelPanic on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 5:46pm.

That "federal transportation" site has always made me super interested mainly due to the insane standoff and anti-vehicle security they had in place for such a long time. I can't easily recall any other public-ish site that had so much exterior security stuff well before 9/11 (it's more common now ...)

You can see this as you walk around the place:

  • A massive perimeter designed to keep vehicles far far away
  • There are subtle but visible steel reinforcement cables threaded/hidden within the shrubbery all along the streetside - another huge anti-vehicle measure that you rarely see in a downtown area. The disguised cables go into massive ground anchors every 10 feet or so
  • Huge greenspace; makes me think of underground facilities or datacenter
  • power and cooling structures that look like they could support a datacenter

What makes my tin foil hat really send off sparks is the physical location - it's practically right on top of a huge swath of fiber optic cables hauling tons of local and non-local internet traffic. The entire campus is yards away from all of those anonymous looking beige buildings that hold Level3 / ATT / etc. etc. datacenter facilities over on Bent Street.

Anyway my paranoid thought for the day is that this site would be super convenient if you wanted to optically tap the fiber running nearby but also needed some infrastructure and security to handle analysis and some small amount of local storage

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By SwirlyGrrl on Tue, 12/30/2014 - 6:53pm.

I can't easily recall any other public-ish site that had so much exterior security stuff well before 9/11 (it's more common now ...)

Check out the Federal Reserve. The area pictured used to be a drive up right next to that entrance, and the road used to be closer to that side of the building.

A lot of that security around government buildings went in after the Murrah Building was bombed.

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By kvn on Wed, 12/31/2014 - 3:37pm.

And that ain't the only most interesting and security worthy facility in the area either.

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