Assembly Required

From Dave Brigham:

I'll admit it, the first (and to date only) time I roamed through Somerville's new mixed-use Assembly Row neighborhood, I thought perhaps some of the buildings were old and had been spit-and-polished up for the millennials who live, work and shop here. I knew the development, along with the adjacent Assembly Square Marketplace (home to Staples, HomeGoods, TJ Maxx, Bed, Bath & Beyond and other stores), had been built on the site of a former Ford Motor assembly plant. But I didn't know whether the redevelopment had left intact any former factory buildings. The building above wouldn't look out of place in South Boston's wharf district.

You could be convinced, right?

Well, you're wrong. And I'm wrong. But that's OK, because I like that the buildings of Assembly Row, home to software companies including SmartBear, scads of restaurants (Earl's Kitchen + Bar, Southern Kin Cookhouse & Bar, J.P. Licks) and retailers (Nike, J. Crew, True Religion, Steve Madden, ad nauseam), have at least a modicum of auto assembly nostalgia to them.

The developers could have just ignored the history of the site and put up a complete cookie cutter of every other outdoor shopping destination/really expensive housing/hipster workforce district. But they made a bit of an effort, which I applaud.

Am I being snide? Maybe. Look, the world needed to move beyond the industrial wasteland that evidently was here before. If you want some idea of what the site looked like before being redeveloped, and have a LOT Of extra time, check out this U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set of documents about the project.

Here are some more cool new details.

The last building I passed on my way back to the subway station was this one.

I love the industrial look of this place, especially the giant letter "A."

And I definitely love the fact that inside this funky space is a barbecue joint. While some of the food is fancier than what the Joe Six Packs of the Ford Motor Plant would have eaten back in the day -- Pork Belly & Peaches? Bacon Collards w/ Blackstrap Molasses? -- most of the menu of ribs, fried chicken and pulled pork would have convinced them to leave their lunch pails home once in a while.