New Cool Spots Bring Shade and Social Space to Porter Square in 2026!

In April 2026, the City of Cambridge installed a new series of Cool Spots across Porter Square – welcoming outdoor seating areas designed to bring shade, comfort, and social connection to some of the neighborhood’s hottest and most well-traveled public plazas and sidewalks. Funded through the City’s Participatory Budgeting process, these six Cool Spots create a central cluster of inviting places for people to pause, gather, cool down and enjoy the square throughout the day. 

The new Cool Spots include 22 tables and 56 chairs placed in plaza and sidewalk spaces in the heart of Porter Square and south along Mass Ave in the following areas: 

• Plaza spaces at the Mass Ave entrance of the Porter Square Shopping Center 
• the space beneath the Gift of the Wind kinetic sculpture, 
  
• the block anchored by Porter Square Books, Page & Leaf Café, the Porter Exchange Food Hall, and Yume Ga Arukara and Izakaya Ittoku restaurants. 
  
• the Lunder Arts Center, and 
  
• the lively stretch between Arlington Street and Linnean Street.

These locations offer comfortable places to stop while moving through Porter Square – whether you’re waiting for the Red Line or the bus, or meeting a friend between errands, or simply enjoying the outdoors. As temperatures rise and we experience more frequent and extreme heat waves, shaded seating helps people stay cooler and more comfortable throughout the day. Umbrellas will be added in the coming weeks to provide even more relief from the sun.

The Resilient Cambridge Plan, completed in 2021, identified Mass Ave as a cooling corridor. In the summer of 2025, the City’s heat and humidity sensor project documented dangerous heat index readings in Porter Square and helped inform the locations of new Cool Spots.

By creating welcoming places to rest and gather, the approach to Cool Spots draws on lessons from the City’s Public Space Lab, which has piloted people‑focused public space experiments across Cambridge. 

The Community Development Department worked with the Department of Public Works to implement the new Cool Spots, with ongoing support from the local business community and institutional partners.

To learn more about public space projects like this – and hear about upcoming improvements, events, and opportunities to get involved – sign up for the City’s new Parks and Open Spaces newsletter.