Nov. 24: Making It in East Cambridge

Making It in East Cambridge: Industry and Innovation History Cafe with Mike Kuchta

Monday, November 24, 2025
6-7 pm
East Cambridge History Center, 625 Cambridge Street (the former Mayflower Poultry site)

A man in overalls walking down a snoy sidewalk with his hands in is pockets. Walking beside him is a goose. Men beyond snowbanks look on. Black and white. — Courtesy Digital Commonwealth

Beginning in the early 1800s, East Cambridge grew into a regionally- and nationally-important center of manufacturing, activity which largely disappeared by the late 1960s. Prominent local industries included glassmaking, meat packing, and furniture making. A growing labor force of skilled and semi-skilled workers, many of them recent immigrants, settled in the neighborhood in the decades after the Civil War, as Cambridge’s population more than tripled.

East Cambridge offered factory owners cheap land reclaimed from the marshy edges of the Charles River; ready availability of water and rail transportation for delivery of raw materials; and good proximity to the markets and port facilities of Boston.

1879 View of East Cambridge. Courtesy Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

Join us!

Come explore the industrial history of East Cambridge with Michael Kuchta, History Cambridge board member and co-author of Born in Cambridge: 400 Years of Ideas and Innovators (MIT Press, 2022). You’ll learn about the products East Cambridge has specialized in, the people who made them, and the community they built.

Want more Cambridge innovation? Check out our friends at the Innovation Trail!

The East Cambridge History Center is made possible with the generous support of the Cambridge Community Foundation and Cambridge Savings Charitable Foundation. Thank you!