Excerpted from "Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub" by Robert Buderi. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2022.
The story of NASA in Kendall Square would be told and retold countless times by locals—even more than fifty years later. People shake their heads and point to the eye-sore compound with a gigantic tower building opposite the Marriott Hotel between Broadway and Binney Street. The most common version of the myth runs something like this: The space agency needed a headquarters, and with Massachusetts's own John F. Kennedy serving as president of the United States, he arranged for it to be in Kendall Square. The site was built, NASA moved in, but then, after Kennedy's assassination, new president Lyndon Johnson moved it to his native Texas, where it remains today.
