Saving Harvard Square

So often—in the midst of dorm parties, papers, study breaks and midterms—we forget to appreciate the wonders of Harvard Square. By sophomore year, the whole area between Mount Auburn and Mass Ave becomes a pale rank of brick buildings between class and lunch, nothing more.
Too many of us leave Cambridge without having pawed through the slender volumes of poetry at Grolier’s, or the radical literature of Bob Avakian’s Marxist bookstore on Harvard Street. Too few have enjoyed a Café Arabica and a plump chocolate biscotti on the mezzanine of Café Algiers, or a stout beer on the frosty portico of Shay’s. Though many have made the pilgrimage to Alewife to watch a blockbuster with roommates, far fewer have taken in an indie film at the diminutive Brattle Street Theater. Fewer still have spent an evening at The Sinclair or the jazz-infused depths of Club Passim.
Everyday, we take these bohemian enclaves for granted as if we’ll always live at a central node of the intellectual universe with few responsibilities and a lax schedule. Though we’re living like kings, we don’t even know it.
To be sure, we’re not the first generation to underappreciate our surroundings and the uniqueness of our situation. For decades, consumers in the Harvard community have chosen the commercial and corporate over the bohemian, and as a result, the Square is a husk of its former self—far cooler than most of the places we come from—but a husk nevertheless.
Next to the main T station, we can still buy artisanal sweets at Cardullo’s, or grab a copy of Ploughshares at Out of Town News. But we can also grab some snack food from CVS, a coffee drink from Starbucks, and frozen yogurt from Pinkberry. Walking down Mass Ave toward the Barker Center, we’ll often duck into TD Bank or Citizen’s to withdraw some cash—then proceed to Au Bon Pain or Panera, as if Crema and Algiers didn’t even exist.
Our experience reflects and abets the modern composition of local commerce—a bunch of funky, independent, if touristy stores, being slowly suffocated by national chains. I say we stop this bleeding now, so that when our children go here, Harvard Square is still somewhat unique, rather than another outpost of Anywhere, USA.
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This battle against conformity has two fronts, and on one of them, we, the students, are the unwitting infantrymen. To a great extent, the composition of Cambridge’s businesses reflects consumer choice, and we consumers keep choosing the lamest businesses.
I remember a year ago, several of my friends celebrating the opening of Panera; that would be where they spent their time during reading period, quaffing down elaborate coffee drinks and munching on pastries. No Café Arabicas for them! When it comes time for ice cream, we sometimes venture to JP Licks, but we also end up at the tacky Ben and Jerry’s or the candy-colored Baskin Robbins on the corner of Arrow Street. Even the Classics department—whose stereotype dictates that its members frequent an obscure, boutique patisserie—held their weekly luncheons at Bertucci’s before it closed, never sampling the other, more eccentric options that come and go in the area.
I get it. The chains are consistent, convenient, and often cheaper. But frequenting them too often will leave the Square soulless—indistinguishable from so many other banal, lustered American downtowns.
Of course, the fight can’t come only from us transients who arrive and leave in punctual four-year cycles. On the second front of this battle are the city’s leaders, most of whom have been less than active in the promotion of independent business. Whereas some cities have decreed outright bans on chain stores in certain districts, the zoning laws for the Square are relatively lax. And though a brief scan of the city’s byzantine, multicolored commercial use map reveals layer upon layer of technocratic zoning regulations, very few of these—in some areas, none of them—are designed to preserve a sense of communal authenticity.
Part of the problem is the famously complex structure of Cambridge city government, which affords almost no power over licensing rules to the Council. With municipal elections coming up November 5, several candidates—most notably Marc McGovern, Nadeem Mazen, and Janneke House—have expressed an urgent need to repress “formula,” or chain stores, while bolstering mom-and-pop establishments. But without dramatic reform in the city’s governing structure proposed by any of the candidates, these calls for change, The Crimson points out, have no teeth, and remain nothing more than verbal platitudes.
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Let’s examine the counterexample of San Francisco. This year marks the 10th anniversary of a popular law in which all neighborhoods are allowed to set their own regulations regarding the arrival of chain stores. By 2006, hundreds of city blocks required that the planning board approve of all corporate arrivals in a special meeting, and businesses with 11 or more branches nationwide were banned altogether in dozens of areas. Now, the future of San Fran’s historical streetfronts is looking as funky, heterogeneous, and pleasantly chaotic as ever.
Many argue that these policy instruments take the decisions out of the hands of consumers, which, to a great extent, is true. But they also help level the inherently tilted playing field between commercial Goliaths and independent Davids in high-rent locales. As Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Self-Reliance pointed out to Salon, the chains have massive start-up capital and landlords prefer them for their steady credit. So all else equal, gentrification leads to homogenization.
In terms of the economic effects of chains—their externalities as an Ec major would say—a study by the group, Civic Economics, has showed that for every $100 spent at a chain, only $13 recirculates locally. Among independent stores, this figure jumps to $45.
Most importantly, however, a community of chains isn’t a community at all. As social beings, this troubles us, at least subconsciously, and we try desperately to artificialize genuine community where it no longer exists. The portraits of the meat-grinders at b.good, the little agricultural maps in the dining halls showing the ‘local’ source of our food, and our constant need to buy fair trade and biodynamic are at least partially functions of this need. I propose we stop settling for these artificialities—all of us, both students and councilmen—so that we might preserve the genuineness of our urban surroundings for years to come.
Harvard Square is still peppered with outposts of funkiness, and we know where they are. It’s time, for everyone’s sake, that we start enjoying them.
Image credit: Flickr