WOBURN, March 8, 2013 – Cummings Properties has announced the pending sale of Beacon Grille to veteran Boston restaurant company The Varano Group. It is expected that the Woburn eatery will become a Strega restaurant by late summer. The Varano Group, owned by well known restaurant entrepreneur Nick Varano (on left with Bill Cummings), operates several highly respected local establishments, including Strega, Strega Waterfront, and Nico Ristorante. The new location at the landmark TradeCenter 128 office park, directly fronting I-95, will be the firm's first suburban property. Cummings Properties opened Beacon Grille in January 2010 as a major amenity for the commercial real estate firm's recently built TradeCenter 128 complex. According to President and CEO Dennis Clarke, Cummings Properties had promised client firms a first-class dining establishment, but was unable to find a restaurant operator willing to take a chance…

New display at TradeCenter 128 remembers Middlesex Canal A new display in the recently upgraded lobby of 100 TradeCenter pays tribute to a piece of Woburn history. Built before the advent of the railroad, Middlesex Canal was once the principal route along which goods and materials were transported north from Boston. Reaching from Boston Harbor to Lowell, the Canal passed directly in front of what is now the site of TradeCenter 128. Completed in 1803, the Middlesex Canal was the first canal built for commercial use in the United States. Construction of this engineering marvel included aqueducts, locks, a "floating bridge" and extensive granite engineering works, all constructed well before the advent of steam power. The Canal ran 27 miles from Charlestown to Lowell, Massachusetts, and provided the first economical…

Note to all users of this document: please feel free to use any information on these sheets with or without attribution. All quotes include current information and may be used as if taken from a current interview. Additional information or quotes are readily available upon request. A variety of photos is also available, as are personal interviews with any Beverly staff by appointment or on short notice. These three pages are intended for use either intact or as general background. They may also be used in excerpt format, or as another source of quotes as outlined above. Cummings Center is "the single most important, and generally unrecognized concrete landmark in this country," Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in the October 2, 1997 issue of The Wall Street…

BioProcessors Corp., a dynamic new company that has created a cell-based platform to accelerate drug development and enable cell based screening, opened its east coast headquarters at 35-C Cabot Road, Woburn with Cummings Properties. Backed by lending venture capital firm Oxford BioScience Partners, BioProcessors reportedly leased 10,347 square feet. According to company officials, BioProcessors' focus is to expedite the discovery and development of therapeutic drugs. Andrey Zarur, CEO explained, "We use a unique micro fabricated platform to grow cells on microchips." The cell-based micro devices create faster pre-clinical testing and automated biological assay applications. The manufacturer and assembly of the platform and biologicals integration will be performed in Woburn, while BioProcessors' micro fabrication operations will remain in the San Francisco Bay Area. BioProcessors is an emerging company competing for market…

by Ada Louise Huxtable Beverly, Mass.-They call it The Shoe. It is the United Shoe Machinery plant, a pioneering, reinforced concrete structure built in 1903-1906 that was the largest building of its type in the world until 1937. With additions, its 34 acres of floor space in three 60-foot-wide wings eventually reached a quarter of a mile in length. The Shoe dominated life and labor in this historic community and its neighboring towns for more than half a century, practicing a benign economic paternalism behind maximum security fences. Its cathedral-size spaces were devoted to the manufacture of the equipment used to make the shoes that were the sustaining industry of this part of New England until antitrust laws forced the breakup of the company in the 1970s. After the plant…

In his 1986 book A Concrete Atlantis, the late architectural writer Reyner Banhamdescribed the United Shoe Machinery Corporation (USM) structure in Beverly, Massachusetts as a concrete-framed factory in its canonical form "a work of crushing self-assurance. Its absence from the general literature on the history of modern architecture is a reproach to scholarship," he added.Banham also described Beverly as "that ultimate masterpiece of [engineer Ernest L.] Ransome's declining years." Ransome, known worldwide for his then revolutionary technology, himself authored a book, Reinforced Concrete Buildings, with co-author Alexis Saurbrey in 1912, published in New York City by McGraw-Hill.Cummings Center, the former USM site, is today a massive complex of Ransome's renovated commercial buildings and landscape features on a 74-acre site near Beverly's downtown business district. Construction of the original plant began in 1904…