16th
What Is Wrong With Harvard Square
A perennial subject in Cambridge is what is wrong with Harvard Square. Plainly something is wrong with Harvard Square. It is not as busy as it once was. There are fewer street musicians and more available parking spaces. A large number of empty storefronts go unrented. The Square has a lot of banks and a lot of Mexican food places. If the Banco de Mexico opened a combination taqueria/ATM hotel it would win the 2007 award for Retailer of the Year.
Harvard always says that they’re not to blame for the Square’s problems and point out that many of the worst things to be found are located in buildings others own. But when the Harvard Credit Union relocated to the bottom of Holyoke Center it ruined half of Holyoke Street since they are closed after 5PM and on weekends.
And something you can only discover on the internet is that Harvard Dining runs 13 cafes in addiition to the residential dining facilities. 13 cafes can feed a lot of people who would otherwise be eating in private businesses. Harvard also has its own eyeglass shop and a big print center. It even runs the worst bar in the city, beneath Memorial Hall. In a very handsome space you can wait five minutes for the bartender to digitally copy your license and then wrap a little plastic bracelet around your wrist, just like you were at an all-ages concert. A five-minute procedure for every beer assures the party atmosphere once found in Bulgarian post offices. Harvard has plans for more restaurants and more glacially-paced bars.
Another factor is that the state’s population is in decline but the metropolitan area is sprawling like a sunbelt city. Once people move beyond 128 they are very unlikely to come into central Boston, including Cambridge. Some of this is due to the discouraging efforts of Massachusetts’ small towns which actively discourage new housing. I’d give the hopeless MBTA a lot of credit for running an increasingly irrelevant transportation system.
And of course the internet has directly affected a lot of businesses, most obviously photo stores, bookstores and music stores. The number of Cambridge bookstores that have closed is amazing and a sad comment on the book-buying habits of the nation’s biggest college town. Maybe the most unique factor is the disappearance of music-buying as a sociable activity. Before file-sharing and the iPod thousands of people would come to Harvard Square’s many music stores to peruse and shop. Much of it was pointless. You might save thirty-five cents if you went from The Coop to NE Music City to Discount Records (which never had a discount on anything) but the weekend music promenade was a social fact on a par with an evening walk in an Italian piazza.
