A lab project in East Cambridge was embraced Tuesday by the City Council in an Ordnance Committee meeting, and with it the future of the neighborhood organization called East End House.
An old two-story building at 320 Charles St. in East Cambridge – built as an Anheuser-Busch Co. bottling plant in the 1950s, more recently leased to the Broad Institute for its work fighting diseases – is proposed by owner BioMed Realty to be redeveloped into up to four stories for a future life-sciences tenant. With the East Cambridge Community Enhancement Overlay District zoning permitting would come community improvements around the Ahern sports field across the street, to “the pedestrian experience” and to community services.
The building would be allowed to rise to 65 feet on the 2.5-acre site, not including mechanicals, on the side away from Ahern Field – 20 more feet than is now allowed in zoning but still 10 feet short of what would be allowed for residential – and get more density. It would add greenery with a series of courtyards, landscaping, “significant tree canopy” and a series of terraces and green roofs that allows for the possibility of solar arrays, according to a BioMed presentation.
The zoning got a 9-0 vote from the committee of a whole, making it something of a lock for when the same members vote on it as a council.
“This is a good example of something other developers should look at,” vice mayor and committee chair Marc McGovern said. “When you work well with the community and you compromise and you’re open and transparent and fair and deliver on your promises, as BioMed has always done, things go smoothly. Play games and goof around, it gets more complicated.”
BioMed vice president Sal Zinno acknowledged to councillors that “the building that we proposed initially was too large,” but a series of meetings reminded the company “that this building is not in Kendall Square, that it is proximate to open space, to the Kennedy-Longfellow School, to a number of residences.”
The project represented “community engagement at its finest,” councillor Ayesha Wilson said, and there was a series of speakers from East End House, the East Cambridge Planning Team and the surrounding community who endorsed the project.
Help for East End House
Some of that support reflected BioMed’s proposed and negotiated community benefits package, which would include around $10 million for the city’s Affordable Housing Trust, millions in annual new tax revenue, contributions to open space improvements and scholarships and $20 million to the East End House, “which is really the most exciting part for me,” Zinno said.
The money is intended to help the 150-year-old community center, which is a few blocks away at 105 Spring St., navigate a crisis: At the moment it needs more room and resources, “the building is crumbling,” said former city councillor Tim Toomey, speaking to the committee as a neighbor, emeritus member of the board and longtime user of the facilities. (“There are pictures in there of my mother in 1945 at a USO dance,” Toomey said. “There are membership cards of my family’s dating back to the 1930s.”)
“East End House is at a breaking point,” Toomey said. “With just three to five years of life remaining, demand for our programs is rising and our capacity is maxed out.”
Susan Lapierre, chair of the East End House’s board, said the organization has been doing the best it can to keep serving the community and clients – 96 percent of whom are lower- to moderate-income residents – within the building’s classrooms, gym, senior spaces, food pantry and through programs such as after-schools and workforce training.
“It is a lifeline for children, families and individuals who rely on our daily services,” Lapierre said. “For far too long, East End house has been plugging the dike, stretching every dollar … The demand for services continues to grow, but our ability to deliver at the scale and quantity and quality that our community deserves is limited by the physical constraints of our current space.”
A way to ensure East End House stays
There is a risk East End House could stay open only by leaving Cambridge – for instance, using a land sale to a developer to pay for relocation and expenses, but with no guarantee it could afford new property at the scale it needs.
Matt Connolly, president of the Linden Park Neighborhood Association, said development fatigue made his group only a reluctant participant in talks with BioMed. “This is the fourth major lab development project within a quarter-mile of our house. We are in about year 10 of 15, with five more years to go, with Eversource, which is using the site right next to our house at 135 Fulkerson as a construction and staging area,” Connolly said.
Yet Linden Park would support the BioMed project, Connolly said, if it guaranteed a home to East End House – at 135 Fulkerson, next to BioMed, land that was saved from becoming an Eversource power substation and given to the city. McGovern said the land has not been committed.
“The time is now to come up with a solution, both for BioMed’s site and ours,” Connolly said.
Changed community benefits
BioMed, which has been a contributor to East End House for 20 years, has resisted a separate call to provide space for the nonprofit on its own parcel at 320 Charles St., another idea heard Tuesday. Another speaker said the company should be giving around $40 million, the conjectured cost of a new East End House; but the loudest opposition to the BioMed zoning came from Ilan Levy, a resident who presented a petition of names concerned about traffic, noise, light pollution and the 1,500 workers expected daily at the building. There was zoning in place “protecting our neighborhood from Kendall Square infiltration,” Levy said.
Councillors saw the project’s benefits, though, especially at a time of growing budget austerity for the city as other developers cut back plans.
Late changes to the community benefits package by a few councillors were agreed to readily by Zinno – in part resulting from the city budget putting money into rehabbing Ahern Field, which would let BioMed funds go elsewhere. In the councillors’ version, East End house gets $20 million rather than a proposed $21.2 million, and the reduction is combined with $1 million from Ahern money and a neighborhood planning study to be divided among other nonprofits, McGovern said.
The found money would go in chunks of just over $400,000 to the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, community arts, The Dance Complex and the Cambridge Community Center in Riverside.
A stronger
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