@LARGE
A hipper square

By Scott Kirsner

Boston high-tech types complain a lot about unfavorable comparisons to Silicon Valley.

Now comes an opportunity to actually do something about it.

The Valley is a completely place-less place. The area's technology companies are ensconced in their own sterile office parks, scattered across cities like Santa Clara, Mountain View, Cupertino, and San Jose. There's no center of gravity, and aside from a few restaurants, like Buck's and Il Fornaio, and the chain of Fry's Electronics superstores, there are no places where techies, entrepreneurs, and investors congregate.

Boston has the same problem with Routes Route 128 and Interstate 495. The odds of serendipitous encounters between employees of Terra Lycos and EMC and FairMarket and Sycamore are infinitesimal, unless they get into a fender-bender at a toll booth.

Cambridge's Kendall Square is different. The neighborhood is jammed with smart young people, innovative companies, cutting-edge research groups. In a very contained area, you've got Akamai Technologies, the MIT Lab for Computer Science, Curl Corp., MIT's Draper Laboratory, Amgen, Biogen, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge Technology Partners, @stake, Art Technology Group, the Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, and more. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, works there, too, at the World Wide Web Consortium.

Why, then, is the place such a complete void? There's no fabric that knits all of these companies together, even though they're all within a CD-ROM's throw of the Kendall Square T station. The architecture is terrible; the streets are cold and uninviting. Most of the area's shops and restaurants are shuttered by six. By dark, the place is a wasteland.

Here's where the opportunity for Silicon Valley one-upsmanship comes in.

Kendall Square is already a hive of innovation. Now, we need to make it a hive of interaction.

``There's definitely an underserved market here for late-night gathering places, and dining, and places to go out and play soccer or Frisbee in the summer,'' says Alex Kleiner, president of Frictionless Commerce. ``There's not really a sense of community. It would be great to see organized events, or organized parties.''

Kleiner isn't some superannuated frat boy; he's married, with two kids. But like most entrepreneurs, he knows that many of the ingredients required for building a successful firm - ideas, employees, investors, advice - come from spontaneous, unplanned encounters. Chance connections. Kendall Square needs more of them.

The square has come a long way since the late '60s, when large swaths of dilapidated industrial buildings were razed to make way for a planned NASA space center. After President Kennedy's death, however, the NASA site wound up being built in Houston, Lyndon Johnson's home turf. Kendall Square got the Volpe Transportation Center instead.

The square managed a very slow recovery throughout the '70s and '80s, when federal urban renewal funding helped to build Cambridge Center, the complex that includes the Marriott Hotel and several neighboring brick buildings. Today, even amid the general economic uncertainty, Kendall Square is an incredible wellspring of innovation. It would be hard to point to a similar patch of land anywhere in the world - less than one square mile - that generates quite as much top-notch intellectual property. If good ideas are the currency of the new economy, this place is a major mint.

And yet the people who work there often feel ``like a collection of rats in a collection of holes,'' as Joseph Reagle of the World Wide Web Consortium colorfully puts it. There just isn't enough social interaction. (And it's not because all techies are recluses.)

You just can't solve the problem in Silicon Valley. Everything is too dispersed. You can solve it, however, in Kendall Square. The area needs a grass-roots effort to bring in more restaurants, shops, bars, and entertainment spaces that stay open late. (With all of these computer scientists, the square doesn't have a single video arcade?) It needs block parties, barbecues, and outdoor concerts in the summer, and a rotating series of well-publicized open houses - come see the latest robotics work at Draper Labs or the newest software from Art Technology Group - in the winter.

The Cambridge Chamber of Commerce has an E-Business Committee that has put on some good networking events, and is planning a one-day conference in May. But it's not explicitly focused on the Kendall Square area, and it's not inclusive enough of the neighborhood's biotech companies and others.

Will the wave of new construction in the square improve the situation, or make it worse? Reagle and others worry that more office buildings, where employees arrive via car, park in an underground garage, and leave at the end of the workday won't have much of an impact.

``All of the construction in the Kendall Square area just creates more space that closes down at the end of the day,'' says one software company employee who works there.

Plus, it won't be as easy for developers to fill the new space, with rising vacancy rates and falling prices all over Cambridge. That could intensify the ``ghost town'' effect, both during the day and after dark.

There are a number of hopeful signs. Many of the buildings going up now, including the Beal Cos. building on Binney Street, will add more street-level retail to the area. Technology Square, home to Frictionless Commerce, Akamai, and the Web Consortium, will get a new ``white tablecloth'' restaurant that presumably will stay open into the evening.

An old firehouse on Main Street is being preserved and converted into a funky 70-room inn. Emma's Pizza has moved in to a storefront on Broadway, and soon the edge of the MIT campus on Main Street will be the site of a new building by renowned architect Frank Gehry.

Lyme Properties, the developers responsible for One Kendall Square, the neighborhood's primary after-work meeting place (it's home to the Cambridge Brewing Company and the Kendall Square Cinema), has broken ground on a new project on Third Street. The clumsily named ``Kendall Square'' (the project used to be known as Cambridge Research Park) will include condos, a hotel, office space, a large single-screen movie theater, a concert hall, retail, restaurants, and a ``skating pond.'' East Cambridge residents are lobbying for a full-size rink that could accommodate hockey games, but Lyme has in mind something smaller, so they avoid it avoids the word ``rink'' and call calls it a ``pond'' or ``skating area'' instead.

I think Kendall Square is in such dire need of human extra-cubicular activity that Lyme shouldn't shut out youth hockey teams from East Cambridge. Who knows? At some point, the rink might also accommodate scrimmages between Genzyme and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which will both have offices in the new complex, or Akamai and the MIT Lab for Computer Science, whose rivalry has been known to spark massive snowball fights. (After this month's blizzard, LCS staffers wrote an incendiary equation in the snow outside Akamai's headquarters: ``LCS > AKAM.'' AKAM is Akamai's ticker symbol, and the company has its roots in research done at the Lab.)

``The transformation of an entire area doesn't happen overnight,'' says Roger Boothe, the director of urban design for the City of Cambridge.

``Kendall Square used to be full of casket makers, glass makers, furniture makers, and sausage makers. Then it was barren. In terms of where we've gotten to, it's amazing. But now we need to do some enlivening, and we need more of a user population here, more residents, to support new activities.''

That will happen over time. But right now, the opportunity exists for the people who work in the square to make some serious, sustained efforts to knit together an inclusive community and increase the area's connection coefficient. Corporate community-building gets less attention - and resources - in tough times, but it's even more important. So this will have to begin as a grass-roots crusade.

Are you ready to do something here that Silicon Valley doesn't have a prayer of emulating? I'm curious to hear your ideas.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.