Archives: Media Room

Someone always sounds the death knell for Harvard Square whenever a long-established business closes or a national chain store moves in. We’re certainly no fans of corporate homogenization, but the passing of Harvard Square, as Mark Twain once observed about reports of his death, has been “greatly exaggerated.” A few shop fronts change nearly as often as the fresh faces of each new class of students, but across the generations Harvard Square remains the crossroads of funk and philosophy, of idealism and consumerism, of red brick and green politics.

Retailers rolled out a variety of promotions and discounts with mixed results last Friday in an effort to lure recession-weary consumers into Harvard Square stores, hoping that the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season might boost revenues battered in recent months by a tumbling economy.

Bad news, bad news. Out of Town News will likely be shutting its doors…

They survived when Barnes & Noble took over the Harvard Coop, and even when the Tasty, a 16-stool diner with a fanatical following, gave way to an Abercrombie & Fitch.

The nation’s truly authentic urban village is Harvard Sq. Since as early as 1636, commerce has been a key ingredient of life here in the heart of Cambridge, and for nearly one hundred of those years, commerce has had some help.

While most thesis-writing seniors are making the library their second home, Cydney E. Gray ’09 is taking her thesis to the streets of Harvard Square.

Plenty of big companies – from Google to Earthlink – have tried setting up citywide Wi-Fi networks and failed. San Francisco-based Meraki, a wireless company spun off of a research project at MIT, is taking a different tack.

Within the offices of the Passim Center on Church Street, the ’60s folk music revival is alive and well. Photographs of Joan Baez crowd the walls. A framed, unpublished Bob Dylan poem memorializes a local, late-night writing frenzy. Jim Field from the ’60s bluegrass band Charles River Valley Boys stops in to “drop off his bags” before taking a walk around Harvard Square. And Betsy Siggins, the 69-year-old artistic director, keeps a sign in her entranceway that reads: “Hippies use side door.”

A voracious reader and zealous book collector, Jeff Mayersohn always harbored the fantasy of retiring from his hectic high-tech career and owning a bookstore.