CambridgeSide was still one of Greater Boston's stronger malls when its owners began remaking it. It had around 100 shops, and about 7 million people a year still visited.
It opened in East Cambridge in 1990 as an indoor mall by the water near the Museum of Science, at a time when malls in this area usually meant going out to the suburbs.
Then Kendall Square grew. The nearby blocks filled with life-science companies, and the third floor could be recast as lab or office space in a neighborhood built around biotech.
A full mall of shops stopped making sense. One by one, the old anchors closed or changed hands, and parts of the building started filling with lab and office uses instead.
What remains is a place that a shopper from 1990 would only partly recognize. Some of the old mall is still there, but the anchors, the food court, and the upper floor tell a different story now.
CambridgeSide Galleria: the urban mall that faced the canal
When CambridgeSide Galleria opened in East Cambridge on September 13, 1990, its tables looked out toward the Lechmere Canal and the tree-lined circle of Canal Park, where a fountain sat at the end of the open space.
A long gabled skylight ran the length of the interior and lit three retail levels at once.
The first floor was built to feel like a street, with pavement-style flooring and pushcarts. The idea was an interior that worked like the city sidewalk it sat beside.
The center held about 80 stores, a food court, and three restaurants, plus a set of practical stops: an express driver's license renewal counter, the New England Sports Museum, a car wash, and ATMs.
The skylit atrium was the building's covered central walk, running between Canal Park at one end and the Charles River side of the development at the other.
Parks at both ends softened the edges of what was, underneath, a very large enclosed box.
Before CambridgeSide: an industrial canal in East Cambridge
Before the mall, the blocks near the Lechmere Canal held industrial buildings, warehouses, a liquor store, and a casket company.
The canal sat at the back of a district shaped by industry, and by the decades after World War II much of that property had gone underused.
The site also carried a tie to Lechmere Sales, the local appliance and department-store retailer whose old Cambridge store stood in the area before the redevelopment.
Cambridge began rethinking the riverfront in the 1970s. The 1978 East Cambridge Riverfront Plan treated the Lechmere Canal as a public asset rather than the rear of a factory district.
Among its core moves were a connected open-space system and a Lechmere Canal public space surrounded by retail and housing, with offices and other development nearby.
Canal Park, Charles Park, and the future mall atrium became a linked sequence of public and semi-public spaces.
The Cambridge Planning Board approved the original planned development in 1987. New England Development developed it, with Arrowstreet preparing the master plan.
From the start, the approval covered more than a mall: an office building to the south, and an eastern piece first planned as housing and later changed to the hotel that became the Hotel Marlowe.
CambridgeSide's 1990 opening and its middle-market bet
The anchors were Filene's, Lechmere, and Sears. The bet behind the building was a gap in Greater Boston shopping.
Copley Place ran expensive. Downtown Crossing had its own frictions, and Faneuil Hall could be impractical for a regular errand.
Suburban malls felt interchangeable. CambridgeSide aimed at the shopper in between, putting department stores, everyday retail, food, services, transit, and parking on a waterfront in one place.
It opened during a weak Boston real estate economy, which made it a public test of whether a large enclosed mall could work in a dense city without copying the downtown department-store model or the suburban one.
The format was unusual for a region where the classic enclosed mall still mostly meant the suburbs.
The first Bath & Body Works store opened in Cambridge in September 1990, part of that chain's founding history. By 1992, the project was a finalist for an Urban Land Institute award.
East Cambridge pushed back on the mall it got
Not everyone in East Cambridge was comfortable with a regional mall next door.
From the early years, some residents worried about outside visitors and crime, and traffic became central when New England Development proposed a cinema.
In the mid-1990s, police and mall management said there was no unusual crime problem and no sign that the mall had raised crime in East Cambridge.
However, a few incidents kept the subject alive, including an attempted armed robbery at the Sears cash office in 1995.
The clearest fight was over a proposed cinema at Two Canal Park. Residents objected to the expected traffic, late-night activity, and outside crowds.
New England Development dropped the cinema and moved toward an office building instead.
Even in the mall's strongest years, the line between regional draw and neighborhood quiet stayed a live political question.
The anchor stores left one by one, from Lechmere to Best Buy
Lechmere closed first, in 1997, ending the run of a chain with deep roots in the immediate area.
Its space was split and reused, with Best Buy and Borders among the tenants that moved in. Filene's became Macy's in 2006, when the Filene's name disappeared across the Boston market.
The bigger losses came later. Store-closing signs went up at Sears in October 2018, and the store closed by that December, leaving a large empty box on the First Street side.
Macy's shut its home and children's store in mid-2019 and closed for good on December 27, 2020.
That left Best Buy as the only large-format anchor for a short stretch, until it closed in June 2022. After that, T.J.Maxx was the last conventional big-box anchor standing.
The names that defined the mall at its opening were gone. The retail side that remained was now marketed around Apple, Sephora, Zara, Mango, lululemon, Victoria's Secret, and a row of restaurants.
The 2017 refresh dropped "Galleria" from the name
The 2017 renovation cost $30 million and replaced flooring, escalators, lighting, signage, and colors, along with the logo and the name.
"Galleria" came off the public identity, and the property became simply CambridgeSide. The work answered real wear: escalator parts had become hard to find, and the beige-and-brass finishes from 1990 looked dated.
The numbers at the time were strong. CambridgeSide drew more than 7 million visitors a year, kept occupancy in the mid-to-high 90 percent range, and posted sales of $485 per square foot.
The strength was uneven. The lower floors performed while the upper level struggled for foot traffic, and the department-store and big-box model weakened across the country.
The refresh fixed the surfaces. It did not fix the math on the third floor.
When CambridgeSide turned its top floor into lab space
In 2019, Cambridge approved converting the mall's third floor from retail to office, and a later change allowed lab use.
The reason was supply and demand: upper-floor retail was struggling while Kendall Square and East Cambridge had become one of the strongest life-science markets in the country.
The same location that once mattered because it was near downtown Boston and the riverfront now mattered because it sat beside Kendall Square's life-science ecosystem, with labs, universities, medical centers, and startups close by.
The full plan, called CambridgeSide 2.0, kept the core mall and rebuilt almost everything around it.
The approved program added 575,000 square feet of net new space, split between housing and commercial use, and pushed the complex toward 2 million square feet across six connected buildings.
Zoning approval in December 2019 required at least 30 percent of the new floor area to be residential, with much of the housing set aside for affordable and middle-income households.
The full buildout carried a preliminary construction estimate of more than $800 million. The package also carried community commitments, including $6.9 million for transportation and support for the local East End House.
The former Sears area at 60 First Street reopened as lab and retail space by 2023. The former Macy's building became lab, office, and retail space and reached occupancy review by 2025.
Fixing the dead street edge along First Street
The original building had a problem on First Street. That side mostly faced inward, with garage and service uses helping turn a long stretch of sidewalk into dead frontage.
The 2020 redevelopment plan aimed straight at that weakness, breaking up the blank edge with new entrances, ground-floor shops, wider sidewalks in key spots, plantings, and small pocket parks.
It also proposed a mid-block Mall Connector from First Street back toward the food court and canal-side path system, keeping the property's old job as a pedestrian link while correcting the part of the 1990 plan that had turned away from the street.
What's open at CambridgeSide now, and what's still coming
The food court that once faced the canal is gone, replaced in October 2024 by CanalSide Food + Drink, a hall of 13 mostly local vendors built around a central bar.
The fast-food counters gave way to a Neapolitan pizza stand, a ramen shop, a pasta-to-go window, and an ice cream counter, among others.
The canal-facing dining idea from 1990 stayed; the tenants changed.
Some of the empty retail space now works as a rotating stage for exhibitions.
CambridgeSide has hosted 'Harry Potter: The Exhibition', a life-size reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and a walk-through show with more than 50 animatronic dinosaurs.
The retail that remains leans on Apple, Sephora, T.J.Maxx, Zara, and The Cheesecake Factory.
The rest of the plan is running behind.
Interior demolition was under way by the first quarter of 2026 at 80 First Street and 150 CambridgeSide Place, and leasing and financing constraints pushed later construction back, with the city extending the timeline into 2028.
The residential building has not gone up, though it stays required: 150 CambridgeSide Place is still slated for about 160 to 170 apartments above 10,000 square feet of retail.
The old anchor-store mall is gone: Filene's, Lechmere, Sears, Macy's, Best Buy, and the food court they shared a building with.
The skylit center stayed. So did two floors of shops and the canal the building was designed to face.
People still come, now for a lab job, a slice of pizza, or a room of animatronic dinosaurs, to a place that kept its center and rebuilt almost everything around it.
