Massachusetts, home to more than 500 biopharmaceutical companies that employ 50,000 people and provide more than $6.5 billion in payroll, is one of a handful of premier biotech locations in the world.

The Massachusetts biotech industry was built in the late 20th Century with true New England grit and determination, and carved out of hardscrabble settings. Looking back, it seemed as unlikely an industry to blossom here as crops were to grow in the rocky Massachusetts soil the Pilgrims farmed in 1620.

The industry began in ill-fitting spaces in converted warehouses and office buildings and advanced to the custom-built laboratory and manufacturing facilities that are the hallmark of the industry today.

East Cambridge Emerges

In the post-World War II decades, East Cambridge beyond Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in serious economic decline. In the 1960s, however, MIT became an important partner with the city of Cambridge – agreeing to assist the city with its urban renewal projects in redeveloping the area to the north.

The first project was the abandoned Lux Flakes property, a soap factory located between Broadway and Main Street. With MIT financing, the commercial developer Cabot, Cabot & Forbes built 200 Technology Square.

Tech Square attracted Polaroid, IBM and computer science assets, including MIT’s Artificial Intelligence labs. Tech Square would not initially be a destination for the small biotech companies that emerged in the early 1980s. But two sites within a stone’s throw would be.

NASA Pulls The Plug

NASA’s announcement in the early 1960s that it would develop its Electronic Research Center on 29 acres of the 42-Acre Kendall Square Urban Renewal Area sparked hopes of a rejuvenation of the downtrodden area. But in 1969, NASA pulled the plug on the electronics center. “Someone at the time said that we had been seduced and abandoned by NASA,” said Joe Tulimieri, executive director of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority (CRA). “That is just how it felt. It was devastating. This was an urban renewal project a decade in the making and our anchor investment was gone.”

The CRA had to re-tool the urban renewal plan and gain control from the federal government of the land vacated by NASA. It was not until 1976 that the CRA had a new redevelopment plan. In 1979, it also had a developer for the plan – Boston Properties.

Ed Linde and Mortimer Zuckerman had been colleagues at Cabot, Cabot & Forbes before they founded Boston Properties. The CRA required Boston Properties to build a major building on the property within seven months, guaranteed by a $250,000 performance bond. Boston Properties didn’t flinch and built the 240,000-square-foot Five Cambridge Center on time.

Enter Biogen

Soon after, Boston Properties was approached by a small start-up company called Biogen, which was doing recombinant DNA research.

Biogen had been formed by a group of scientists meeting in Switzerland in 1978 to start a new kind of pharmaceutical company. Biogen would not start out, however, in a new building. Instead, its first location was 223 Binney St. in Cambridge, in 78-year-old, former machine shop. “Wally Gilbert and I searched the Kendall Square area for sites,” recalled Phillip Sharp, the MIT biologist and geneticist who co-founded Biogen with Gilbert, a Harvard Ph.D. “The area between Binney and MIT was vacant. When we saw the Binney space, it was a mess. However, it was in the right location and there was space nearby for possible expansion. We totally remodeled the building and made it very attractive. The lab space was intimate but quite nice.”

It was a first for Massachusetts – a commercial laboratory built for biotechnology research. In 1981, Biogen would receive the first permit allowing rDNA research issued to a commercial biotech lab operator by the Cambridge Board of Health.

Biogen soon needed more space. From the windows of 223 Binney, future Nobel Laureates Gilbert and Sharp could see the 13-story Five Cambridge Center across the empty parcels abandoned by NASA. What followed was the forging of a relationship between Biogen and Boston Properties which lasts to this day. With Boston Properties’ construction of the 62,576-square-foot Fourteen Cambridge Center for Biogen, Boston Properties entered the biotech business.

“We built the building for Biogen and they built out the laboratory inside,” recalled Mike Cantalupa, today the executive vice president at Boston Properties.

Amidst the growing need for laboratory space in Cambridge, Boston Properties would develop more than 300,000 more square feet of laboratory space for Biogen and the Whitehead Institute in the 1980s.

Where Is One Kendall?

The area at Broadway and Portland Street was a thriving industrial district for 100 years. But by the 1970s, it was a wasteland.

David Clem, a founder and principal of The Athenaeum Group, was cognizant of the new opportunity that biotechnology research presented to East Cambridge. The Athenaeum Group acquired the Old Boston Woven campus and named the campus One Kendall Square – forever creating havoc for cabbies, since the actual Kendall Square is several blocks away.

They had acquired the right buildings for the new biotech industry. The Kendall Square buildings had high floor heights, heavier floor loads, and could be adapted readily – at a cost – for lab uses.

“We were always robbing from Peter to pay Paul” to fund improvements for new lab tenants, Clem recalled. “We’d look at the existing floor, do some drawings and establish rates for improvements, but always work with the [lab prospects] on pricing to get to yes.”

One Kendall had build-out challenges, with infrastructure being built on a tenant-by-tenant basis. But it became the destination of choice for startup biotech companies because there were so few other options. “We owned the market,” says Clem. “It was MIT, MIT, MIT, MIT, location, location, location.”

Peter Abair is director of economic development and global affairs at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio).