Porter Square Renamed Its Shopping Center. Its Real Identity Just Moved Two Doors Down.

"I just think it's all kind of silly."

That was Sunny Schettler's response this June when the Boston Globe asked what she made of the new name on the shopping center she has used for years. Schettler, a longtime trainer at the plaza's Healthworks gym, was sitting in the shade outside Cafe Zing when she said it. She was not the only skeptic. A biologist biking through the lot that same week told the Globe he could not imagine calling it anything but the Porter Square Shopping Center, no matter what the sign said.

The sign now says The Mix. What it actually says about Porter Square this year is something else entirely, and it has nothing to do with a name.

A Rebrand Nobody Asked For

The Porter Square Shopping Center has been owned by TA Realty and managed by the Boston firm Wilder since a 2022 deal that bundled it with eight other New England shopping plazas for $390 million. For most of that ownership, the changes were physical: a redone parking lot, a refreshed Cambridge Savings Bank branch, a months-long Star Market refurbishment. This year, Wilder went further. New benches, bistro seating, murals and landscaping arrived alongside an official new name, unveiled with a launch party in June and signage that went up in July. Principal Tom Wilder framed it as an attempt to name what the plaza already is: a place where Cafe Zing and Dunkin' coexist, where Cambridge Naturals and Star Market share a parking lot with Tags Hardware.

The tenants Wilder was trying to brand did not think they needed one. Cafe Zing itself has spent the past two years quietly expanding on its own terms, not the landlord's marketing terms. When Porter Square Books moved out in October 2024 to a bigger space at Lesley University's University Hall, Zing owner Mark Ostow's coffee shop absorbed the vacated storefront and patio. Cambridge Naturals explored knocking down a wall to expand into the same space but backed out when its lease terms, which bar it from competing with Star Market as a grocer, made the numbers not work. Zing is now finishing a "Cafe Zing 2.0" buildout with a new business moving in next door. None of that required a rename. It required two local business owners figuring out, over months, what actually fit.

Two Blocks South, a Developer Is Paying to Bring Businesses Back

The more interesting story this year is not at the shopping center at all. It is a short walk south on Massachusetts Avenue, where Simon's Coffee Shop closed its doors on August 31 after 23 years, and Keezer's Classic Clothing, a Cambridge menswear fixture since 1895, packed up its inventory the same week.

Both were displaced by the same project: a six-story, 71-unit residential and retail building that Cambridge-based Old North Development plans to build at 1740 Massachusetts Avenue, replacing a Walgreens and the storefronts around it. Demolition is expected to begin this month, with the full project taking 21 to 22 months, putting a realistic completion somewhere in mid-2028.

What makes this displacement different from a typical teardown is what the developer is promising to do afterward. Old North's principal, Adam Siegel, has said since the project's first public meeting that the goal was never to replace Simon's and Keezer's with something new. The architectural plans, drawn up by Peter Quinn Architects, reserve a storefront facing Linnaean Street specifically for Simon's return, with the residential lobby routed to face Massachusetts Avenue instead. Siegel has said Old North expects to accept below-market lease terms to get both businesses back.

Here is where the two businesses' paths diverge in a way worth knowing if you live nearby:

Keezer's owner Dick Robasson has a lease in hand and a tailor, Nik Louis, who is already calling the new space "the most curated rendition of Keezer's in its history." Simon's owner Simon Yu is still negotiating, telling reporters he expects to land across the street but cannot yet say when. One customer, quoted in local coverage of Keezer's move, called the shop the "Nieman Marcus of resale shops." That kind of loyalty is not something a rebrand can manufacture. It is something a developer either pays to keep or loses for good.

The Housing Fight Underneath the Storefronts

The reason none of this is guaranteed to go smoothly traces back to a lawsuit filed on August 27. Old North, through its affiliate OND 1740 Investors LLC, sued Cambridge in Middlesex Superior Court over the city's requirement that the project set aside 20 percent of its units as permanently affordable before the city will issue a building permit. The suit argues that the associated fee functions as an unauthorized tax rather than a permit charge, estimating that comparable private review and inspection would cost between $40,000 and $60,000, far less than what the city is requiring. Cambridge's fiscal 2026 budget projects $31 million in building permit revenue citywide, with more than $10.2 million of that directed to affordable housing.

There is also a financing wrinkle specific to this project. Before Cambridge will issue the permit, it wants Old North's lender, Cambridge Savings Bank, to agree that the affordable housing restrictions survive even if the bank ever forecloses. The bank has so far declined, saying in an email included with the lawsuit that the restriction could hurt the property's value as loan collateral if the project falls through, though it says it would reconsider once construction financing is in place.

None of this changes the plan to bring Simon's and Keezer's back. It does mean the timeline both businesses are working against has a legal cloud attached to it that residents should expect to see resolved, one way or another, well before the building itself is finished.

The Public Art Everyone Assumed Was Already Lost

While all of this played out on Mass. Ave., a smaller but longer-running Porter Square story quietly turned a corner. "Gift of the Wind," the 46-foot red kinetic sculpture by Susumu Shingu that has stood outside the Porter T stop since 1985, has spent years fading and creaking with no clear source of repair money. The MBTA, which owns it, no longer has a staff position dedicated to public art, and Porter Square Neighbors Association president Ruth Ryals told Cambridge Day in March that she worried the agency would eventually just take it down and shelve it as a loss.

In May, that changed. State Representative Marjorie Decker earmarked $100,000 in the state budget specifically for the sculpture's repair and began working to bring the MBTA and city leadership to the same table. It is a small line item against a much larger civic budget, but it is real money attached to a real fix, arriving the same season a shopping center a few hundred feet away spent its own money on murals and a launch party for a name most of its customers have already decided not to use.

What to Actually Watch For This Fall

If you live near Porter Square, the practical version of all this is simple. Demolition at 1740 Mass. Ave. starts this month. Keezer's is already open at 1730. Simon's is still working out its lease at 1741 and has not given a reopening date. The sculpture repair now has funding behind it, though a timeline for the actual work has not been announced. And whatever the shopping center's signage says, the businesses that make Porter Square recognizable, Zing's expanding footprint, Cambridge Naturals, the return of Simon's and Keezer's, are being decided storefront by storefront, not by a rebrand.

That is the version of Porter Square worth paying attention to this year. Not what the plaza is calling itself, but which businesses a developer thought were worth paying to keep.

If you are thinking about buying or selling near Porter Square and want a read on how a changing block affects value and timing, the Lauren Holleran Team lives and works in this neighborhood and can walk you through it.