Cambridge Street itself is retail commercial, along with Monsignor O'Brien Highway, the Twin Cities Plaza strip mall, and the enclosed Cambridgeside Galleria.
The southern half of the grid is largely office and laboratory space for hundreds of dot-com companies, research labs and startups associated with MIT, biotechnology firms including Genzyme, Biogen and Moderna, the Athenaeum Press Building, light industry, an NRG Energy power station (formerly Mirant Kendall), and various small businesses.
Around 1956–57,[6] additional ramps, referred to as the Cambridge Viaduct,[7][8] were installed to double the capacity of Memorial Drive under the Longfellow Bridge.
The new configuration prevents safe pedestrian access to a stairway to the Longfellow Bridge, requiring a longer path of travel than by following the original seawall.
A widened Binney Street, the riverside apartment buildings, the CambridgeSide Galleria, and the re-landscaping of the remaining Lechmere Canal with access to The Front were also enabled by this plan.
The plan envisioned relocating Lechmere Station to the north side of Monsignor O'Brien Highway with a pedestrian overpass.
Since the late 1990s, East Cambridge and its neighbor Lechmere Square have undergone a gentrification process, as old factories have been converted into condominiums and office space.
The neighborhood is currently the site of most of large scale developments in Cambridge, including North Point, which plans over a dozen residential towers.
Dorothea Lynde Dix became an advocate for the humane treatment of the insane during the Antebellum era, during which time she volunteered as a Sunday school teacher in East Cambridge.