The Globe's Scott Kirsner suggests a great idea, an
Innovation Trail as alternative to the historical Freedom Trail...
"I’m proposing a different kind of walk though Boston and Cambridge: an Innovation Trail that focuses on the past, present, and future of innovation here. We’ll always have Paul Revere’s place and Old Ironsides, but what about the incubator where Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell tinkered or the world’s only “Walk of Fame” for entrepreneurs? The Innovation Trail picks up just a few years after the Freedom Trail leaves off: The newest spot on the old trail is the Bunker Hill Monument, built in 1842. The oldest stop on this new trail is the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital, where surgical anesthesia was first demonstrated successfully in 1846."
While Scott offers
more detail in his blogpost, in my opinion he overlooks a few especially key places, including...
- Arthur D Little's Research Palace, the first of Boston's innovation consultancies (Bain, BCG, Monitor came later),
- Dick Morse's National Research, the birthplace of Minute Maid frozen OJ (named to honor the Minute Men of Boston),
- Main Street as the original telecom alley where Bell made the first long-distance phone call to Watson who was sitting in an historic landmark building first home to Davenport's railroad car manufactory, later home of Land's instant photo firm, Polaroid, and today shared biotech space, LabCentral,
- Technology Square, the first successful University-linked brownfield economic redevelopment park,
- the Barta building where Jay W Forrester's team built Whirlwind precursor to Sage and birthplace of DEC and MITRE,
- Charles Stark Draper's Instrumentation Labs where inertial navigation was perfected and Moon landing made feasible,
- And several more!
Also, it's worth looking at the
Cambridge Innovation Map.
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