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Boston Globe

HONK! returns with a multi-day music extravaganza

The 17th annual HONK! Festival returns for Indigenous People’s Day weekend with 20 marching bands convening in Cambridge to promote music, community, and a sprinkle of local activism. Musical groups such as the Jamaica Plain Honk Band, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, and Bread and Puppet Circus Band will partner with local nonprofit organizations to get the word out about various causes, from voter registration to gentrification.

The festival will kick off on Oct. 6 with Chilean band Rim Bam Bum, which will perform at the Main Branch of the Cambridge Public Library at 6:30 p.m., with a lantern parade through the streets of Davis Square the following evening. Most band performances will commence on Oct. 8, with the 20 brass bands performing at six locations around Davis Square. A concert featuring four performance venues around Harvard Square on Oct. 9 will coincide with the Harvard Square Business Association’s annual Oktoberfest celebration.

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Broadway World

43RD ANNUAL OKTOBERFEST and HONK! PARADE To Be Held This Week

The festivities will take place Sunday, October 9th, 2022.

The Harvard Square Business Association has announced the return of the 43rd Annual Oktoberfest and slightly irrepressible and fabulously madcap 17th Annual HONK! Parade on Sunday, October 9th, 2022. Come be a part of this unique, irreverent, family-friendly annual tradition where musicians and spectators “reclaim the streets for horns, bikes and feet”!

New this year: The Filipino American Festival and The Grolier Poetry Book Shop 95th Anniversary Festival!

Harvard Square’s Oktoberfest features food from all over the world, arts, crafts, vintage goods, free samples, sidewalk sales and one-of-a-kind gifts. In addition, Oktoberfest boasts beer gardens hosted by Alden & Harlow and Wusong Road and a first this year, a wine garden hosted by Commonwealth Wine School.

This annual celebration of fall features live music, including a Passim stage and an all HONK! Review on the main stage. Dancing in the streets is encouraged!

One of the highlights of the festival is the HONK! Parade which arrives in the Square at approximately 1pm. In its 17th year, the HONK! movement has become a global phenomenon. This year, more than 20 HONK! bands from around the country will march from Davis Square to Harvard Square. Spectators will be treated to a horn-tooting, hand-clapping, foot-stomping, mind-blowing spectacle and everyone is welcome to join the back of the parade and make their way to Oktoberfest.

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Dezeen

Home Studios adds soft seating to Italian restaurant Bar Enza

Brooklyn-based Home Studios has filled an Italian restaurant close to Harvard University with plush booths and banquettes to introduce colour and texture to the space.

Bar Enza is situated in a prime spot on Harvard Square next to the Ivy League college in Cambridge, Massachusetts – just across the Charles River from Boston.

Home Studios revamped Bar Enza to include a variety of soft seating

The project involved the revamp of an existing restaurant on the ground floor of The Charles Hotel.

To complement chef Mark Ladner’s menu, Home Studios pulled references from a range of regions and styles across Italy – from Rome’s trattorias to Milanese villas – and combined them to create interiors that feel elevated yet cosy.

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Gazette

A look ’round the Square

The seasons and the shops may change, but the spirit and streets are ever-exciting

How to describe Harvard Square? Busy and bustling with bikes and buses, cars and crowds, trucks and kick-scooters fighting for space on streets and crossways. Intimate with its hidden alleys and entryways, venerable (quirky tobacconist Leavitt and Peirce), modern (a fine wine shop, a cannabis boutique), upscale (Harvest Restaurant), and working-class (late-night standby Charlie’s Kitchen). Preppies in polo shirts and grunge punks in ragged jeans, coffee-table books and counter-culture comics, tweedy professors and four-year drop-ins and the drop-outs who never left … in short, the Square epitomizes all that’s eclectic, and that is precisely why we like it. With stylistic contrasts at every corner, the energy here is catching, challenging us to understand how the pieces all fit.

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The Crimson

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Laverne Cox to be Awarded Harvard’s Highest Honor for African and African American Studies

Seven individuals — including basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and actress Laverne Cox — will be awarded the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African and African American studies, next month.

The awards will be handed down by Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, which announced the recipients last Wednesday.

Five others will receive the honor at an award ceremony next month: Award-winning author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, arts patron and philanthropist Agnes Gund, Citigroup executive Raymond J. McGuire ’79, former Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick ’78, and pioneering artist Betye Saar. The ceremony will be held on Oct. 6 in Sanders Theatre.

Abdul-Jabbar is the National Basketball Association’s all-time leading scorer and the only six-time Most Valued Player in league history. Since retiring from the court, Abdul-Jabbar has been a prolific cultural critic, writing several books on African-American history and serving as a U.S. Cultural ambassador under President Barack Obama. In 2016, former President Obama awarded Abdul-Jabbar the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Cox, the first transgender actress to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award, is a prominent LGBTQ+ rights activist. Since rising to fame for her performance in Netflix’s hit show “Orange is the New Black,” Cox has been nominated for Emmys in four of the last eight years.

Hutchins Center director Henry Louis Gates Jr. praised the honorees for “their unyielding commitment to pushing the boundaries of representation and creating opportunities for advancement and participation for people who have been too often shut out from the great promise of our times.”

This year’s slate of honorees is the first since 2019. The Hutchins Center did not award the medal during the pandemic.

The Du Bois Medal, first presented in 2000, honors its namesake, the pre-eminent African American scholar and civil rights activist. Du Bois graduated from Harvard College in 1890 and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895.

Past honorees include Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, former U.S. Congressman John R. Lewis, author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, talk show host and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

The Crimson

Spilling the Beans: Starbucks to Rejoin Harvard Square — In a New Location

Just in time for peppermint and holiday drinks, Starbucks will return to Harvard Square in November — right down the road from its previous location on Massachusetts Avenue.

The new location will join the recently renovated El Jefe’s Taqueria and the new Central Rock Gym in the Abbot Building, which previously housed the famous Curious George Store.

Since 2018, three Starbucks coffee shops have closed in Harvard Square — the most recent one in November 2021, when the company closed its popular 1380 Massachusetts Ave. location.

A Starbucks spokesperson wrote in a November email that the decision to close the store last year came “after careful consideration” and a review “to ensure a healthy store portfolio.” The location has since been taken over by the Harvard Shop.

Harvard Square Business Association Executive Director Denise A. Jillson said many who frequent the Square were left mourning the loss of the last Starbucks shop after its doors closed.

“There has been a lot of lamenting since Starbucks at Harvard Yard closed, because, as you might remember, we had four Starbucks at one point,” Jillson said.

“You discover how much you really miss something when it’s no longer there,” she added.

Nearly a year later, students said they are excited about the return of Starbucks to the Square.

Peter A. Jin ‘25 said he thinks “it makes sense that there should be the option for Starbucks for anyone” on a college campus.

Jillson described the incoming manager of the new Starbucks, John Corredor, as “a veteran Starbucks employee” who is “very familiar with the Square.” Corredor previously worked at the Harvard Yard Starbucks location.

“Starbucks has been a long-time member of the Harvard Square Business Association. They are terrific community partners,” Jillson said.

Though the new Starbucks location in the Abbot building will be smaller, Jillson said the Square is “delighted to have them back.”

“We’re anxious for November. We’re anxious for that iconic location,” Jillson said.

—Staff writer Kate Delval Gonzalez can be reached at kate.delvalgonzalez@thecrimson.com.

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Elle Decor

Alongside Harvard’s Historic Campus, a Trattoria That Has Beauty and Brains

Smart design moves (not to mention a killer lasagna) make date night at Bar Enza a must.

If there’s one image diners at Bar Enza tend to flaunt on social media, it’s photo evidence of the Harvard Square trattoria’s 100-layer lasagna, a dish whose densely packed sheets of noodles (go ahead, count them) and bubbles of molten mozzarella would bring a Whole30 adherent to tears.

The artfully layered pasta isn’t the only draw at Bar Enza; the soft, Italian-inspired interiors of the restaurant, helmed by Brooklyn firm Home Studios, are also proof that simple ingredients can come together to create a thing of beautiful simplicity. The vibe? “It kinda feels like a great living room,” says firm founder and creative director Oliver Haslegrave.

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The Crimson

El Jefe’s Food Review: Bigger and Better, but It Just Isn’t the Same

At 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 7, Mt. Auburn Street lost a beloved giant of popular Harvard Square chains. The iconic, delectable El Jefe’s moved from its original spot by Tasty Burger to a larger, more expansive location a tad closer to the Yard (and their rival Felipe’s) on JFK Street. The move came with an upgraded interior as well, with two stories of seating and a larger space for eating, talking, and general loitering. Although nearly everything new about the popular Mexican joint was changed for the better, the memory of old El Jefe’s — cozy, familiar, and grimy — still lingers. So, let’s see how the new location measures up, piece by piece.

The Space – 8/10

At first glance, the space is an intoxicated college student’s dream. There are two stories of seating, more room for the food line (which can grow to snake all the way up the stairs), and more space to socialize. While this expanded capacity is great business for El Jefe’s, attracting even more customers, it has also led to increased wait times and foot traffic within the Mexican joint. However long the wait may be, at least El Jefe’s has the space to support it. As a prime spot of late-night eats for college students, the restaurant’s choice to expand their square footage and capacity was a smart idea and will only bring in more business for them.

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WGBH

10 years vacant, the Harvard Square Theatre may be poised to spring back to life

The Harvard Square Theatre has sat vacant and desolate on Church Street for more than a decade.

But behind the boarded-up front doors, an effort is underway that could bring the iconic movie theater back to life, according to Michael Monestime, a spokesman for billionaire Gerald Chan. Chan bought the theater in 2015 for $17.5 million, adding to his more than $100 million in properties portfolio in the heart of Cambridge.

“We’ve … hired some new staff to help reimagine what’s possible to really bring this important site back to life,” Monestime told GBH News last week, “and I hope to have more to report back to you and the Cambridge community in the near future.”

Community leaders say they would welcome any progress on the building after years of vacancy. But that progress will have to wait as designs are drawn up — new designs that reflect a new pandemic world, one where a shrewd businessman might not want to solely invest in a big screen after theaters were starved for attendance for two years.

“From time to time, we’ve been notified that there are people within the building,” said Denise A. Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, who has been working for years to reopen the theater. “And yes, you know, there are rodents because guess what? It’s an urban environment and there are rodents everywhere.”

On an otherwise busy Thursday night this month, there were only a handful of people passing by the shuttered entertainment site, aptly illustrating the decade-old void that has descended on this block of Harvard Square.

Harvard Square boosters complain that the center of gravity for nightlife in Cambridge has shifted to Central Square and say the demise of the theater may be a significant reason why.

For 28 years prior to its closing, the Harvard Square Theatre was the regional showcase site for the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a cult classic that attracted devotees in large numbers who dressed up and sang along to the raunchy lyrics while tossing rice and popcorn to the audience.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=30YuEdNkG-I%3Fenablejsapi%3D1

“Oh, God. I went to ‘Rocky Horror’ a lot,” said Mark McGovern, a longtime Cambridge City Council member and former mayor. McGovern recalls hanging out in “the pit” in Harvard Squareduring the day and taking in movies at night. He has led a five-year effort to reopen the theater. In 2017, following a deluge of complaints from residents about the empty building in the heart of Cambridge, the City Council threatened to take over the theater by eminent domain.

“Eminent domain is tough!” McGovern said. “People think it’s a very easy thing for cities to do. It’s really complicated. But I do think even putting that on the table pushed Mr. Chan a little bit into saying, ‘OK, well, I don’t want that to happen. I need to do something with the property.’”

He did. But local opposition and the pandemic got in the way.

A stalled plan

On July 8, 2012, the owners of the moment, AMC Loews, closed down the 90-year-old Harvard Square Theatre and sold it to local millionaire Richard Friedman. Just a few years later, he sold the …

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The Crimson

Baking News: Le Macaron French Pastries Opens in Harvard Square

Harvard Square officially welcomed Le Macaron French Pastries in a grand opening event Saturday.

Located on Massachusetts Avenue, Le Macaron is a Black-owned business offering a selection of French macarons and pastries, as well as gelato and European-style coffee. The shop first opened its doors on Aug. 12 during Black Business Month, but held off its official grand opening celebration until nearly a month later.

“We have been just well received by the community, the students, the locals, the Harvard Square Business Association, and particularly the Cambridge Savings Bank,” co-owner Karine Ernest said.

Cambridge City Councilor E. Denise Simmons attended the grand opening. Simmons, the former mayor of Cambridge, spoke at a ribbon-cutting ceremony and congratulated the business on its opening, calling it “a sweet, delightful surprise”.

Ernest called the business her “lifelong dream” during the ceremony.

“Thank you to all those in Harvard Square. Thank you to my friends and family, my children for coming out here to support me,” Ernest said.

David I. Heller ’79, a close friend of the owners who enjoyed a bubblegum macaron, called the establishment a “delicious addition to the Square” and a “nice place on date night.”

Two of Le Macaron’s employees are current Harvard students.

Joseph W. Hernandez ’25, who works at the shop, praised the store’s management, saying he appreciates that “they are willing to hear from the people that are working there.” He called both owners, Karine and Emmanuel Ernest, “nothing but great.”

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Le Macaron sits in what was previously an office space for the Cambridge Savings Bank. Karine Ernest called the bank an “incredible partner in this journey” of launching the pastry store.

She also previewed new flavors planned for the holiday season.

“For Christmas, we offer a gingerbread Christmas macaron, and then we also offer, in November, Pumpkin,” she said.

Noting that “it’s taken long” to set up Le Macaron in the Square, Karine Ernest advised other aspiring entrepreneurs to be persistent.

“Never forget your dream and pursue that dream, and don’t be discouraged,” she said. “The whole process may take longer than you anticipated, but if you stick by it, you’ll get there.”

“We are super excited to be in Harvard Square” Enest added. “We love the community, and we’re having fun.”