“Our Linear Park neighborhood is rare, special, a real community. Once lost, it’s gone forever,” said Charles Teague, a resident who plans to present the zoning proposal, called the Bishop petition, and show off a sophisticated 3-D model of how the neighborhood would be affected if the zoning fails.

But the effects of the current zoning are already obvious, Teague said, in the size of such projects as the ones intended to replace Fawcett Oil (104 apartments) and Cambridge Lumber (20 condominiums) and the way developments crowd the former rail path known as the Linear Park. (“Everybody loves the park. They love it so much they’re killing it,” he’s said, noting towering homes that block out light and crowd the path with plastic fencing, air conditioners, generators and apartment trash.)

Cutting the allowed density by 30 percent, formally removing commercial uses from the area and protecting the Linear Park must be in city law to counter a wave of development that could bring more than 1,400 announced housing units to the area in addition to the 333 that have been built in the area in the past five years, Teague said.

The Bishop petition was introduced in September, died without council action and was reintroduced this year. Residents see it as safety and traffic concern, because of the many small and even one-way streets they fear will be flooded with cars when new residents arrive, as well as a quality of life issue changing the cozy neighborhoods they chose to buy or rent in.

“The intensity and density is becoming overwhelming,” Brookford Street resident Merhi Sater said last month. “Our streets are becoming a nightmare.”

City Hall is at 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square.

Panera Bread baguette is good for a chain, great when it’s hot out of the oven and over-the-top terrific when it’s an example of good customer service. (Photo: Robyn Lee)

I think the Porter Square Panera Bread is here to stay for a while — and I suddenly have warm feelings to hope that’s so.

The eatery, which opened July 6 at what is technically 5 White St. in the shopping plaza, is Porter’s answer to the gourmet-ish comfort food of Au Bon Pain enjoyed by folks in Harvard, Kendall and Davis squares. But it did something for me last night no Au Bon Pain, its one-time kind-of owner, has ever done: won my cranky customer’s heart with great service.

I went in too late Tuesday night and found the basket of baguette (what the company likes to call “French baguette”) empty. I quizzed the workers with some desperation as to whether there might yet be a loaf hiding out somewhere, or even anything like a baguette. But no, the site had been slammed that day and had run out hours ago of an appealing plain bread.

Since Panera is my only local baguette option, I was out of luck. I didn’t even bother checking the nearby Shaw’s grocery store to see if it had any store-made baguette, which is not only the most expensive baguette I know of, but probably the worst I’ve ever tasted. And, if it’s not too old a joke, it usually sells out by the time I go looking.

Wednesday, though, I made it to Panera earlier; was briefly shattered to see the basket empty again; then elated to hear there were loaves just then fresh from the oven, so fresh they hadn’t been slipped into paper sleeves and stocked. I ordered one. “How many?” the manager asked. “Just one,” I repeated, asking the worker at the counter how many he thought I could eat.

But he gave me two — explaining it was to make up for my disappointment the previous night. (I don’t remember crying, just whining.)

Nice going, Panera manager.

I was stunned and delighted, a feeling that lasted through my walk home in the cold tearing off hot hunks of crusty bread, and lingered afterward.

Qdoba lasted there from January 2005 to June 2010, despite how universally its Mexican food was disdained compared with the competing Chipotle chain and certainly the Anna’s Taqueria across the street. With service and product such as this, Panera should be around for decades. And I may buy baguette there every night I can.

(Because we’re past that union problem, right?)

Including its new entertainment license that allows bands to perform until midnight Sundays through Wednesdays, until 12:30 a.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and until 1 a.m. 25 times a year, the 50-52 Church St. venue will more than fill a cavernous space left empty when the Phatt Boys restaurant closed in February 2006. Some people living nearby and at least one square business owner worry about noise, parking problems and public drunkenness, and hired Huron Village attorney Shippen L. Page to argue that the commission should reject the transfer of Phatt Boys’ liquor license and ask for a new application for the live music.

“It can and should consider the prospective overall impact on the community,” Page wrote, noting  a multiperson fight that broke out Nov. 30 at the larger Central Square restaurant and nightclub, The Middle East, as well as residents lacking a chance to look at floor plans and the failure of the businessmen behind The Sinclair to get sign-off from city zoning officials in the time laid out by commission rules.

But the commissioners granted the license transfer and adding nightly capacity by 396 people (and 52 outdoor dining seats) to the current 304.

Alcohol sales are to end when shows stop, and the venue is to get three-month and six-month reviews, according to people who attended the meeting. On issues of parking, however, commissioners said Harvard Square parking garages aren’t used fully and can absorb more visitors.

Opposition was led by Pebble Gifford, who lives just outside Harvard Square and told commissioners Nov. 15, in a roving 20 minutes of testimony, how much she dreaded a return of the drunkenness long-time residents lived through in decades past. She also urged commissioners to look at the kinds of bands booked by The Sinclair’s proponents, The Bowery Presents, noting some that had obscene names and others dressed in Arab garb and wondering if they were “trying to be provocative.”

Despite the lawyer, Gifford’s testimony and a roomful of similarly concerned people, commissioners okayed the plans, giving Harvard Square another live music option (larger than Tommy Doyle’s and more diverse than the jazz-minded Regattabar and folk-focused Passim) and late-night dining.

Resident Charles Teague felt commissioners gave a pass on the delayed zoning official signature only by saying such rules were broken all the time, but his take after attending the meeting wasn’t all negative.

“It’s good to have another performance space,” Teague said, “but I think it’s dying to be in Kendall Square.”

The Basement Housing Overlay District — usually referred to as the Chestnut Hill Realty petition after the company that asked for it — first affects 13 buildings along Massachusetts Avenue between Porter and Harvard squares, all with at least 30 existing apartments including a basement unit and all built before 1930. If the studio and one-bedroom apartments are considered a success, the zoning could be expanded citywide and affect another dozen buildings.

After the vote a week ago, councillor Craig Kelley submitted a request for reconsideration. But the seven days he and vice mayor Henrietta Davis had to persuade other councillors to vote no were fruitless, and Sam Seidel, who was missing from the first vote, joined the majority to vote in favor.

Mayor David Maher and councillors Marjorie Decker and Ken Reeves were urged Monday not to vote on any matter involving Chestnut Hill Realty by recent council candidate Gary Mello, because company-related campaign contributions gave their votes “the appearance of impropriety.” The three officials declined Mello’s suggestion without comment.

Aside from Mello’s concerns about money appearing to sway votes, there were concerns about parking from fellow candidate Tom Stohlman (who felt allowing basement units to go in without matching parking spots “should not be passed without some corresponding benefit to everybody else in that zone”) and about the quality of basement apartments in general. “I looked at a lot of basement apartments when I was [first] looking to live in the city several years ago, and all of those were all in terrible condition. I would have been very said if I had to live there,” resident Dara Glass said. “They don’t offer a good quality of living.”

Backers of the plan, including former mayor Sheila Russell and Chestnut Hill Realty’s director of development, Mark Levin, painted a different picture of what Levin called “moderately priced housing … affordable to a wide range of renters,” mentioning large windows and high ceilings to go along with mandated separate water and sewage lines and case-by-case approval from city engineers keen on keeping renters from being flooded.

The zoning will create a few units of affordable housing; most basement apartments will be market-rate but, according to Chestnut Hill Realty’s Matthew Zuker, between 15 percent and 20 percent cheaper than above-ground apartments in the same buildings.

Heather Hoffman, a real estate attorney and co-president of the Association of Cambridge Neighborhoods, had data for Chestnut Hill Realty’s buildings in the Basement Housing Overlay District, including the John Harvard Apartments at 1-3 Langdon St., which she said the company bought for $250,000 in 1976 and is now assessed at $4.8 million; the Wendell Terrace Apartments at 19-21 Wendell St., bought for $235,000 in 1976 and now assessed at $4.9 million; and the Chauncy Court Apartments at 18-26 Chauncy St., bought for $2.6 million in 1986 and now assessed at $12.7 million. Calculating 80 percent of the value of studio and one-bedroom housing in those buildings, Hoffman found a basement apartment could get as low as $1,412 at the John Harvard Apartments and $1,124 at the other sites.

Each of the mortgages have been refinanced recently, to  $6.2 million from $4.3 million at the John Harvard Apartments, to $6.4 million from $4.5 million at Wendell Terrace and to $17.7 million from $11.3 million at Chauncy Court.

“That’s nearly $10 million that was taken out of these buildings two months ago. It is reasonable  to conclude there is a lot of value in them, and I suggest strongly that they can in fact afford to put in affordable apartments,” Hoffman said of the Realty.

Her association proposed an amendment last week to the zoning to make affordable housing out of all new basement apartments or an equal number of them, but it failed 6-2.

Travis McCready, executive director of the Kendall Square Association, rest briefly at a cafe at 1 Broadway, where he works alongside entrepreneurs at the Cambridge Innovation Center business incubator. (Photo: Catherine Nakajima)

The Kendall Square Association’s executive director, Travis McCready, met with Cambridge Day in late November to talk about the future of the square, with its innovation-industry offices and lab space often called the most innovative square mile in the world. The hourlong talk in a cafe at 1 Broadway, where he works alongside entrepreneurs at the Cambridge Innovation Center business incubator, showed McCready bringing to bear experience dating back to his education at Yale University and the University of Iowa; through his time as a corporate lawyer and at the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, Boston Foundation and Harvard University; and into his ongoing work as a trustee of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, overseer at the Institute of Contemporary Art and director of the Boston Public Market Association. The below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Kendall Square is just starting to pop with shops and restaurants, but if I were a business owner I would be nervous about opening there when Massachusetts Institute of Technology redevelopment will soon mean months of heavy construction. Are there thoughts of how to make sure Kendall’s growth isn’t stunted by construction scaring away customers?

No one is nervous about it. For me the question that keeps me up at night is if you take a look at any district across the country — Cambridge, Berkeley, Calif., it really doesn’t matter where — and you say that you’re going to open up 16 restaurants in two years, that is really, really aggressive. Because as you know, the first six to 18 months is when these new restaurants are at their most vulnerable. So I look across the landscape and I see Voltage and Abigail’s and all these other really solid restaurants and I wonder if we’ll be able to sustain the businesses to enable these entrepreneurs to grow roots so that nothing fails. If it fails because they’re producing a crappy product, shame on them, but I don’t think any of them are. So it behooves us as a district to do what we can to support the ecosystem so they have a constant flow of business.

Now, construction, I don’t really worry about that. That’s a good thing, that’s a really good thing. More people in the neighborhood, more jobs, more people on the street, more opportunity for people to be going out to dinner afterward, hitting breakfast beforehand, you name it, construction is actually a good thing. The next stage of evolution is how you create Kendall Square as more of a destination so we’re continuing to satisfy these restaurants, not just with the homegrown people but people who are coming to the area from Boston or from Somerville or what have you. That’s the new trick. If we can do that it’s smooth sailing.

Is there a continued pipeline of new restaurants?

Beyond the 16, I know of two other restaurants,  but I don’t know if it’ll be in six months, nine months or 12. That’s a new Italian restaurant in 1 Kendall I believe is going to be called Buca. And then there’s a quick-serve restaurant, a Qdoba, that Boston Properties will open at the Kendall T station. Then there’s a third player I can’t name who’s looking to open a restaurant — and if we can get him that would be great.

Has MIT promised to make sure there is good passage and way-finding for people getting off the T?

I’ve been doing this for 11 years or probably longer, and I think of that as being kind of rudimentary. They’re going to do it, they have to do it. I’ve dealt with Harvard and MIT and they do it. So that’s not even on my mind. That’s going to happen. MIT is motivated.

Do you have any sense how long that construction is going to last?

No. Naturally the phasing will depend in part on what else is in the pipeline when they get approval. If they get approval at the same time Alexandria real estate has something approved and they’re going after the same tenant base, they’re going to look at that and shift their phasing. You want to reduce the amount of time that you have a built product without any occupancy.  And everyone has their pound of flesh to extract from MIT, so who knows whether they’ll be able to file again tomorrow or in six months. It’s my hope that they get a chance to file as soon as possible, because it really could be an extraordinary project.

Is there anything so essential to a project coming to Kendall that not seeing it in a proposal would be a deal-breaker for you?

Fortunately, everyone is on the same page about what the deal-breaker is, and that is the ground floor. Some people call it community space, some call it shared space, some call it retail space, people use all sorts of terminology, but in their minds they all mean the same thing, which is that ground floor uses should be such that you have the ability to congregate, mix, mingle, meet in a nonproprietary fashion. You should have the ability to come and go, there should be something extraordinary about the space in terms of either technology or a landmark, some kind of use that’s iconic and reflective of Kendall Square. If MIT would come forward to propose, which they haven’t, that the ground floor look like 53 State St. or one of those office buildings in Boston’s Financial District which is just a massive lobby — dead project. That’s the fastest way to kill that project. We’re all smarter now and know that what this area really needs is a level of ground floor vitality and the ability to mix, mingle, bump and connect, whether it’s over a coffee or a good espresso or a Holyoke Center type of pass-through atmosphere.

The culture of Kendall

In every discussion about what makes a neighborhood, people want a grocery store. For Kendall, there’s so much talk about bringing in residential space, but beyond city councillor Leland Cheung, no official enthusiasm for a full-fledged grocery store to serve residents. What are your thoughts on its importance?

Since I’m a former lawyer I’m going to split a hair here and first say what I mean by grocery store: I don’t mean that thing they have in Harvard Square. That’s more of a quick-serve type of a specialty market. When I think grocery store I think of something like Trader Joe’s or Evergood Market on Mass. Ave. or Fresh Pond Market on Huron Avenue, a business model that has made its reputation and its connection with the community not on an extraordinary offering in variety but on an extraordinary ability to provide what the community wants in a smaller format, at the right price point based on the amount of available space. You’re not going to be able to go there and buy six kinds of olive tapenade, but you’ll get one great, local variety tapenade. And a great selection of six local beers, not 36. I think the property owners would agree that that kind of market is something that would be very helpful to have in Kendall. I don’t think anyone is interested in a Shaw’s, a Star Market, a big box. There’s no use for one.

Is focusing on more of a Trader Joe’s than, say, a Market Basket part of a branding for Kendall?

One of the great things about Kendall Square that’s emerging right now is that all of these restaurants that have opened, except one, are local entrepreneurs. There’s only one chain, and that is Champions. It’s a cultural phenomenon we should be proud of, and that is kind of thing that I would like to see extended to a market, a pharmacy, or anything else that opens up here in Kendall and part of the reason why I feel like there’s no need for a Shaw’s or Star Market. One, the residential demand doesn’t exist. Secondly, culturally, it’s completely opposite to what we have going on down here.

That seems to implicitly cap the amount of residential space that will be available.

People should be very careful with their expectations for the amount of residential space that you’re going to be able to have down here in Kendall Square, because I think there will be a natural cap. There’s an equilibrium to how it evolves, and you don’t want to cut the legs out from underneath the district by favoring too much residential in place of business and commercial use. People talk about there being a thousand units of housing in Kendall Square, built it now, build it now, but it’s unreasonable to build thousands of units right now. Not everyone would agree with my numbers, but everyone would agree in principle that Kendall Square is not a residential district, it’s a mixed-use district. The two philosophies would yield drastically different results, and what I’m very cautious of is no matter how much housing you build, there’ll never be enough. But no one disagrees that it would be great to have more housing where you’re down the elevator at your home, you’re walking past the farmers market and you have an a-ha moment and you’re at your office 30 seconds later.

Some might worry Kendall will be reserved for well-paid people in innovation industries while, for instance, all the affordable  housing goes in East Cambridge. Are all parts of the city for everyone?

I think there is an implicit understanding that there are five squares in Cambridge and each one is distinct. There’s an implicit understanding that we do death to a square by trying to transform it into one’s interpretation of another square. You kill Kendall by trying to transform it into Harvard Square. You kill Harvard by trying to transform it into Porter. There’s an understanding that each square has to have its own character. And you have to have a different formula for this live-work-play dynamic. Which is really what we’re after.

Visioneering

You talked about Kendall Square being a destination. Starting several years ago, Glenn KnicKrehm’s Constellation Center was supposed to be part of that.

This is the third conversation about the Constellation Center that I’ve had today. I’m so hopeful for Glenn and the center, and I wish him all the best and I’ll give him all the support possible. But I think that right now the community and everyone is waiting for some sign that the project is real. He’s done incredible amounts of work and stuck to his guns about designing the building from the inside out. I give him credit for being sort of an iconoclast about how that building gets built, but I also would be lying if I didn’t say that virtually every community or representative from every walk of life that I encounter is waiting for some sign that that project will get built. We meet every quarter or every few months, and I hear “This will be the perfect venue. I can’t tell you if it will be six stories high or four stories high, but I’m going to take the time to design the perfect venue.” That’s a much different conversation than people are used to dealing with. Even MIT came forward and said, “Okay, we’re going to build this at this size” and all that stuff. Glenn has stuck to his guns and has been having a conversation for nine years about the ethereal experience you will have when you’re in this venue and in this building.

So your understanding is that this is a perfectionist obsessing over design for nine years, not that there’s a funding issue?

I think the two are connected. I think Glenn is obsessing over design, and I think he wouldn’t disagree with that. Based on having done projects like this before in nonprofit settings, I can tell you that he’s probably having some difficulty raising the large-scale capital contributions that he needs to complete the project. But I think that once Glenn decides that the project is designed and meets his specs, once he gets going on having a different conversation with the funding community, this project could really be a home run.

What’s going on here that warrants more attention?

Two things: One is the former Edward J. Sullivan  courthouse building at 40 Thorndike St. — 22 stories, 600,000 square feet of space, right at the center of East Cambridge, North Point and the heart of Kendall Square. It’s a complicated project, a complicated asset, but that’s a great location, a great potential project, and it’s really an opportunity for the state and the city to do something incredibly interesting. It’s two blocks from Cambridgeside Galleria, two or three blocks from Alexandria Real Estate’s 1.7 million square feet along Binney Street, a seven-minute walk to the North Point green line stop, nine minutes to the heart of Kendall, you couldn’t script it any better. The only thing is the asbestos.

What’s your vision for it?

Mixed use. A layered mixed use. Just like a good flaky crust. The first couple floors would be some sort of community use, whether it’s a farmers market or it’s a meeting space for community groups or something like that. The next couple of layers would be incubator space like the Cambridge Innovation Center. The top few layers would be, I guess the term is, innovation housing. More housing for the graduate student who’s making only $40,000 a year or $50,000. It’s living here with a family and two young kids. That kind of thing, and do it in an interesting format between a condo and a dorm.

What’s the second thing?

The second is more philosophy than anything else and goes back to the question of equilibrium. What I love about working down here in Kendall is that everyone seems to be philosophically aligned on the ingredients of success. One of the thing we talked about was the retail element. The other thing people always talk about are the brand names — Pfizer, Google, Microsoft, Nokia — those brand names and how attractive it is to have those names down here. I think the messy middle that drives the brand names is entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and maintaining enough space for them to want to be here, because you want them here. So that balance between Pfizer taking 180,000 square feet of space versus 18,000 entrepreneurs taking 10,000 apiece is the balance this community has to continue to be able to broker. That’s really critical.

Do you think the balance is right?

I think right now it’s good. We have, besides the CIC, four other incubators, so incubator space continues to be a successful model. At the same time I’ve talked to a couple clean-tech companies who have decided not to stay here because some of what they need — large industrial spaces, for example — are quickly disappearing.

Foreign relations

Where are we with the regionalization efforts Chung led a while back? There were already regionalization skeptics on the council and of course immediately after we opened ourselves up Boston seemed to act behind our backs to steal away biotech companies.

Leland’s effort was a good first attempt at regionalization just to establish that we can perhaps have relationships. The discussions that are under way are a little more nuanced: “Let’s collaborate on these items which are important to all of us and are about all our survival.” Transportation and transportation finance reform. Doesn’t matter if you’re Longwood, the Waterfront or Kendall Square, if our public transportation system is underfunded, run-down, broken, what have you, all three of those districts will fail.

For me, part of understanding the regionalization question is getting comfortable with who we are. The great thing is there are more people who want to be here than there is supply. Demand is far exceeding supply. Go back 30 years to when Cambridge Center was under development and Boston Properties will tell you that was not the case. Thirty years ago we were in the position that South Boston’s Waterfront is in now, which is that you have much more space than demand. They have to be really aggressive in terms of their marketing and price point to be able to get folks to occupy that real estate. They’re kicking our ass, there’s no way around it. They’ve got staff, money and they have money and they have money and they’re being really aggressive about wining and dining and flying all over the country and taking a look at different models in California or Research Triangle Park or Austin or what have you. “Gee whiz, I think on the South Boston Waterfront we should have a really edgy ice cream shop.” “I heard of one in Berkeley, let’s go fly out and take a look at it.” That’s the type of thing they do. Can you imagine the city manger authorizing that? That’s what they’re doing, and again I give them credit. But at the end of the day the business fundamentals are if you can get into Kendall, that’s where you want to be. If you can get into Harvard or Yale, why settle for Siena? Nothing against Siena, but if you can get into Harvard or Yale that’s where you want to be.

Speaking of public transportation, the state must have known it was ludicrous to pitch a Grand Junction commuter rail line to run through Cambridge without actually stopping in the city.

I think that the planners always knew they would have to stop in Cambridge somewhere, whether on Mass. Ave., closer to MIT or down here on Main Street, closer to Galileo Way. There were a gazillion ideas that hadn’t been fleshed out.

After a 6-2 vote on Monday by city councillors on the Chestnut Hill Realty petition, which would create dozens of basement apartments in an elevated area considered by city planners as relatively unlikely to flood — but with the apartments still requiring separate water and sewage plumbing in case it does — councillor Craig Kelley filed a motion to reconsider the vote. It only takes one councillor to get a reconsideration, and with the filing in place it doesn’t matter that the petition formally expired Tuesday.

Kelley is unlikely to get enough councillors to reconsider their votes Monday to nullify a four-vote margin.

“All I can do is hope my powers of persuasion are enough to get some councillors to change their minds,” Kelley said Tuesday, explaining that he will talk with fellow councillors as he sees them to make it clear why he opposes the apartments. He was joined in voting against them Monday by vice mayor Henrietta Davis, who found her worries about flooding mostly addressed but remained worried about parking and “the potential to create a second class of apartments in a building, ‘where the basement people live.’”

While the zoning petition restricts the test apartments to areas near bus and T stops (mainly along Massachusetts Avenue in areas such as Agassiz and lower Avon Hill) and handles resident parking case by case, “I share councillor Davis’ concerns about the parking and I for one don’t place enough faith that the Planning Board will come to the same conclusion about availability or impact on on-street parking,” Kelley said. The Planning Board rejected two versions of the basement apartment petition — originally filed as “workforce housing” — but didn’t get a chance to vote on the most recent.

The city engineers also have great discretion when it comes to allowing or refusing specific basement apartments, said Brian Murphy, assistant city manager for community development, and they already can go only into buildings that already have at least one such unit.

An amendment forcing property owners to create affordable-housing units equal to the number of new basement apartments, whether or not they were all in basements, also failed by 6-2, although in that vote Kelley was joined by councillor Denise Simmons.

“Zoning should not be for the benefit of private individuals, particularly companies. If this does go forward, let it go forward with a provision for an equal number of affordable units, which would in fact do some some good for the city, making it actually affordable for our work force,” said Mark Jaquith, a member of the Association of Cambridge Neighborhoods, the group that suggested the amendment.

But Matthew Zuker, a principal of Chestnut Hill Realty, said had the amendment passed it would have eliminated any interest he had in building the apartments, which will already be priced some 20 percent below the market-rate units in the building above. “The units are expensive to build, making them a real long-term commitment,” Zuker said.

“Is it perfect? No. Is it good? Yes,” he said of the petition and its revised wording. “No proposal is completely beneficial to anyone.”

He had no projected date for when apartments might begin renting. Although the winter weather has been good, he didn’t expect construction to begin anytime soon, Zuker said. In fact, although the controversial petition has been kicking around since January, design work hasn’t even begun.

A worker prepares 196 Elm St., in Davis Square, to become the bricks-and-mortar location of Knucklebones, a provider and seller of athletic services and goods. The grand opening is Monday.

Knucklebones, a provider and seller of athletic services and goods, has its “epicenter” grand opening Monday in Davis Square (at 196 Elm St. North, the very edge of Cambridge’s border with Somerville), taking over half the space emptied by the Caning Shoppe when it moved to Somerville’s Wilson Square over the summer.

To celebrate, the site is open for free play from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. for children age six month to 6 years, according to an announcement from Mitch Zeisler, who founded Knucklebones in 2004, and the rest of the 11-person team.

“Come by and meet the KB team, register for upcoming classes, find out more about our retail and, of course, play with the coolest and most unique athletically inclined products around,” the announcement says.

The team has mostly traveled to clients to host custom events such as birthdays, but its “Knucklebones Epicenter of Athletic Services” allows it to bring in — as part of what Zeisler describes as the site’s first stage — play groups, programs, private events and field trips, as well as roll out a retail catalog with athletic equipment and backyard games.

Stage 2, projected to come by Jan. 1, will be the filling of the Elm Street space with a full retail store, and the final stage is to bring in athletes, writers, chefs, educators and health professionals to talk about healthy living. (The grand opening was originally announced for October.)

Also coming to the area is Michaels, the Irving, Texas-based art supply chain with 1,054 sites throughout Northern America. Founded in 1984, the chain expanded quickly and went public but was taken private again in 2006 with a purchase by Bain Capital Partners LLC and The Blackstone Group. Michaels also owns the Aaron Brothers and Artistree chains.

It fills the massive underground space left empty when Burlington Coat Factory left the Gravestar Inc.-owned Porter Square Shopping Center in June 2008 and could steal some of the lower-end shoppers from the Paper Source at 1810 Massachusetts Ave., only 0.2 miles and some five minutes’ walk away.

So far there is only a temporary sign over the Michaels site indicating the store is on the way — but the sign also says the store is hiring and leads potential employees to the store website.

Thanks to Ron Newman for reminders on these developments.

The Residences at Fresh Pond are planned to replace the structure at 70 Fawcett St. in the lower left, putting 429 apartments just off Route 16, at right, and a block from the Alewife T stop, top right. (Photo: Bing)

For those who thought The Residences at Alewife were big at 227 apartments, here come The Residences at Fresh Pond — 429 apartments to be built about a half-mile away.

The math shows the modest area expanding rapidly, adding 656 units and a thousand likely new residents and proving what city officials said Monday in discussing a possible high-rise (and another 259 units) on the other side of the city: While other cities languish in economic doldrums, Cambridge remains all but irresistible to developers.

A sprawling, two-story, 141,000-square-foot office building will be torn down for The Residences at Fresh Pond, which will go up just off Route 16, the Alewife Brook Parkway, and a block from the Alewife T station on the red line, New Boston Fund Inc. announced Wednesday.

While The Residences at Alewife were approved in March to replace the long defunct Faces nightclub on Route 2, the new complex will remove empty warehouse-style buildings at 70 Fawcett St. that once belonged to BBN Technologies, the acoustics and computing company bought by Raytheon Corp. in 2009. Raytheon remains a neighbor on Moulton Street.

Teardown and site work is to begin this year, said Brian Fallon, a partner at O’Connor Capital Partners, which bought the 4.9-acre site from New Boston Fund for an undisclosed amount.

A quitclaim deed recorded at the Middlesex Registry of Deeds showed $13.6 million paid from a Cabot, Cabot & Forbes address for 70 Fawcett St. on Sept. 27.

Eventually, O’Connor plans for a complex with “many amenities,” including a pool, fitness center, lounge and event space, Fallon said.

A study submitted in January described The Residences at Fresh Pond as consisting of two five-story buildings, one 105 feet high and the other 74 feet high. There would be 402 parking spaces, according to the study, and a traffic study found “no congestion or hazard will be created … the complex is designed to be pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly” as well as built in an environmentally conscious way that will win LEED certification.

The study’s description of the project:

Residential units with stoops, landscaping and terraces along Fawcett Street and the proposed future cross street. The parking garage entries are located off the side street to minimize the impact to Fawcett Street. The Project will also provide bicycle parking spaces within the garage and on the first floor to foster alternative transportation.

The Residences at Alewife on Route 2, also known as the Concord Turnpike, look to be oriented toward cars and luxury, including residents renting two-room apartments at up to $3,000 a month with use of yards, a heated pool, gym, community room, billiards room and screening room with a flat-screen television and cushy individual seats. There will even be a concierge, said builder Rich McKinnon and other employees of his McKinnon Co. The apartments should be ready for sale in the summer of 2013.

No builder is yet designated for The Residences at Fresh Pond. The sale was negotiated between New Boston Fund and Cabot, Cabot & Forbes on behalf of O’Connor Capital Partners, according to a New Boston press release.

It was New Boston Fund, a private equity real estate investment, development and management firm, that got approval from the city in 2008 to develop 260 units on part of the site. Before buying, O’Connor Capital Partners got approval for the remaining residential units, the New Boston Fund press release said.

A perfect match? A candy shop and exercise outpost are coming to Massachusetts Avenue between Porter and Harvard squares. (Photos: Marc Levy)

The same conflicted twist of fate that put an ice cream shop by a gym in Porter Square has a new mismatch coming to the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue closer to Harvard Square:

At 1702 Massachusetts Ave., lawyer Yalonda Howze is opening Evelyn & Angel’s Candy Shop, where she will make and sell chocolates, candy and roasted nuts and run a soda fountain. The space held the Topaz gift store before it moved to Harvard Square.

(Unless there’s been an astonishing coincidence, Howze, a Linnaean Street resident, is also an associate at Boston law firm Mintz Levin — two years ago named as one of only 25 “Rising Stars” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and this year elected by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce as one of the “Boston’s Future Leaders.” Despite her professional success in commercial and product liability disputes and liability prevention strategies and personal successes in civil rights and immigration issues and aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina, she told the Weekly: “I’d always hoped to be a singer.” A message has been left with Howze at Mintz Levin.)

At 1764 Massachusetts Ave., the Needham-based Get In Shape for Women is opening its latest weight-loss and exercise location. The chain has more than 75 sites in 18 states. The Cambridge space was once City Housewares and the Greenward ecological gift store, which moved down the avenue toward Porter.

It’ll take a candy shopper 0.1 miles, or a three-minute walk, to suffer guilt on the way to Get In Shape for Women, or the same for someone to buy candy after a workout. The situation is a little more extreme in Porter Square, where Emack & Bolio’s Ice Cream is literally next door to a Healthworks women’s gym.

The entrance to the former Phatt Boys inside 50 Church St., Harvard Square, is now blank and utilitarian — but could someday lead to The Sinclair music and comedy club and restaurant. (Photo: Marc Levy)

A 525-person live music and comedy club could join Club Passim on Church Street in Harvard Square, and an indoor-outdoor restaurant space could be revived, with the appearance of a request for a License Commission hearing Tuesday.

The three-member commission would have to allow the transfer of a restaurant and alcohol license to a venue called The Sinclair from Phatt Boys, the firehouse-themed barbecue restaurant with the hip-hop name that went bankrupt and closed in February 2006, and an entertainment license to include live music and dancing, five televisions and a comedy show.

The Sinclair is a venture of Bowery Cambridge, the local extension of a New York-based concert promotion company that took over Boston’s Royale nightclub last year. Parent company The Bowery Presents also owns venues in New Jersey and New York City and Albany, N.Y.

The manager for the music component, at least, would be the same as for Royale: Boston-born Joshua Bhatti. But it’s less clear who will run the all-day restaurant, now set up to hold 175 diners inside and another 52 on a seasonal private outdoor patio. The former Phatt Boys location is behind Dado Tea at street level and above a Fire + Ice restaurant in a building leased out by Trinity Property Management. Trinity, also owner of the Harvard Square parking garage and leaser of shops in The Garage Mall and around the square, is run by John P. DiGiovanni, also chairman of Harvard Square Business Association’s board of directors.

Bhatti’s proposed hours for The Sinclair are long — from 8 to 1 a.m. Sunday through Wednesday and 8 to 2 a.m. Thursday through Saturday and the night before legal holidays.

Although the commission’s Chris O’Neil notes that The Sinclair is only moving into existing space, there are neighbors wary of the 10,000-square-foot, multilevel size (as well as the hours) of The Sinclair, which could make the License Commission meeting Tuesday a lively one. The meeting starts at 6 p.m. in the basement conference room of the Michael J. Lombardi Building, 831 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square, where The Sinclair project will be represented by the ubiquitous attorney James Rafferty.

O’Neil and contractors in the cavernous former Phatt Boys space — now stripped of its furniture and tchotchkes and reduced to bare concrete and plywood — referred questions to Rafferty. A message was left with Rafferty on Monday morning.