Kendall Square, MA

Kendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the "square" itself at the intersection of Main Street, Broadway, Wadsworth Street, and Third Street (immediately to the east of the secondary entrance of the Kendall/MIT subway station). It may also refer to the broad business district that is east of Portland Street, northwest of the Charles River, north of MIT and south of Binney Street. The One Kendall Square complex is actually located half a mile to the west of the traditional location of Kendall Square, between Broadway and Binney Street (on the other side of which is the Kendall Square Theatre).
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 from Boston to Cambridge. By 1810, the Broad Canal had been dug, which would connect with a system of smaller canals in this East Cambridge seaport area.
The area became a major industrial center in the nineteenth century, and by the beginning of the twentieth century was home to distilleries, electric power plants, soap and hosiery factories, and 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. 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 1911. MIT moved to its new Cambridge campus, then located south of Kendall Square between Main Street and Massachusetts Avenue, in 1915.