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The Harvard Square of Memory
A Walk in the Present Through My Past
November 17, 2006
During the second week of November, 2006, while my spouse Judith attended sessions and delivered a paper at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting in Boston, I took the “T” (formerly known as the MTA and the MBTA) to Harvard Square to revisit a most important scene of my youth.
In the past 25 years I've been in Harvard Square only a few times, the last time several years ago. In past visits I don't recall thinking about what the contemporary Square is versus what it was when I first started hanging out there 50 years ago. That, however, is precisely what my current visit to The Square was all about. I had a mission: find what's left and what it looks like now and identify what's gone.
I walked all of the streets one normally associates with The Square: Mass. Ave., John F. Kennedy Street (Boylston St. until 1982), Brattle St., Mt. Auburn St., Church St., Palmer St., Dunster St., Holyoke St., Linden St., Plympton St., Bow St., DeWolf St. Some I walked twice.
I started by walking from a “T” exit on Mass Ave. near Harvard Yard across to the old “Out of Town Newspapers” kiosk (it's still there) and from there to the corner of J.F. Kennedy/Boylston St. I walked J. F. K. Street, passing in front of where The Wursthaus used to be (it's not any more) and down to Mt. Auburn St. I turned on Mt. Auburn toward Central Square and walked to the “Garage” building at the corner of Dunster. This building contains a number of national-chain and other small shops. A separate entrance a couple of steps up Dunster from the Garage Building entrance leads into John Harvard's Brew House, where I had lunch, two fine beers and a talk with one of the brewers (that's a different topic) and with a guy who wanted to tell me about how winning lots of money on a TV contest show was allowing him to tour local bicycle factories preparatory to buying a new (presumably very expensive) two-wheeler.
After lunch I began my serious walking, starting by walking up Dunster to Mass. Ave., back to JFK Street, and across into the Harvard Coop. Over time the part of the Coop that faces The Square has housed stationery, clothing, shoes, health/toiletry supplies, furniture, and the Coop “Record Store” (LPs, tapes and other obsolete media for music storage). Years ago the Coop acquired substantial space across Palmer St., where they had trade books on the first floor, LPs and CDs on the second, and textbooks on the third. Now the Square-facing Coop is half its former width, and is entirely for trade books. The bookstore is run by Barnes and Noble and looks it. Its book selection is more in keeping with its location at Harvard, but it is set up like a B&N store, including the usual coffee cafe. The store across Palmer place now extends all the way out to Brattle St. (where a restaurant and ice cream shop used to be) and contains clothing and accessories on the first floor, computer equipment and supplies on the second (along with items for the Harvard dorm room) and textbooks on the third.
I walked across the third-floor bridge from the Palmer Street building to the old Coop, and after dawdling in a couple of sections of books and taking a couple of cell phone calls, exited out the front of the store. I went around the corner onto Brattle St., in front of the huge newsstand on the corner that used to be Dini's, I think, and is now called something else. I strolled past the apparently unchanged Cardullo's Deli and down around the corner in Brattle Square, noting that Dickson Bros. Hardware is still across the street and Wordsworth Bookstore is not (it closed its doors in October, 2004). I passed the location of the old Sage's Market (gone), seeing that the Brattle Theater (now “Cinema”) is still in the old location across the street, and that the glassy, classy Design Research Building is still there, now occupied by Crate and Barrel. Sheldon Cohen's bookstore, Reading International, once at the corner of Church and Brattle, is no more.
I continued up Church Street back to Mass. Ave. and cut back down toward the Coop entrance, passing a street guitarist/singer who resembled Jack Elliot. His face and voice bespoke many years of hard living, reminding me of how Chet Baker looked and sounded toward the end of his life. He actually was a good guitarist. As I was crossing over to the “T”/Out Of Town News island again, I could hear the Andean band Inca Son that had been playing when I first emerged from the subway into The Square. They bring a remarkable sound to The Square – haunting, beautiful and very well-played music. This time I noticed that they were displaying a tri-fold brochure and multiple CDs (the brochure lists 12).
Perhaps it was my heightened sensitivity to my surroundings, but it seemed to me that almost all of the street/subway musicians I ran across this day were substantially better players than I normally hear in public places. On the way to The Square I had listened with interest to a musician in the Park Street subway station (formerly known as “Park Street Under”) one of whose instruments was an electronic string instrument probably in the cello realm. He was playing music in a non-Western mode and doing a fine job of it, or at least so I thought. Just before my train arrived he switched to playing what sounded like a flute (and for all I know might still have been his electronic instrument), also in non-Western mode, also quite good. At the end of my walking tour, as I was leaving the Square and standing in the Harvard subway, I was part of a large commuter audience listening to a very fine cellist playing baroque music. We gave him a great round of applause, richly deserved.
But I hafe digressed. I was talking about Incason. I took a brochure from the Incason table and continued on my way down Mass. Ave. past the former location of the Waldorf Cafeteria, one of three 24-hour cafeterias in The Square in the old days (the other two were Hayes-Bickford and Albiani's) now all long gone. The outdoor gathering place at Holyoke Center at the corner of Dunster and Mass. Ave. still attracts large crowds of people – coffee drinkers, chess players, students hawking dire news about the war, the environment, the government, the speed with which the sky is falling. I met with many friends here in my youth – here and at the Patisserie (demised, as John Cleese would say) in the Holyoke Center down Holyoke Street.
Along Mass, Ave. I passed Bob Slate Stationers, J. August (not, apparently, still a clothier to the preppy), The Harvard Book Store, the recently closed Ferrante-Dege Photo Shop (with signs on the door about the auction of assets), Bartley's Burger Cottage, and the old Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant, where I so often got throbbing headaches from, as it turned out, the masses of MSG they used. I was amazed that Hong Kong would be among the survivors. It served basic Americanized Chinese food that wasn't really all that good. Given the way that restaurants pop up and disappear and especially the long-term trend toward themed, corporate chains, it is pretty surprising that this, of all places, would still be there. It now bills itself as a “Restaurant - Lounge - Nightclub.” Go figure. The still-in-business Bob Slate, J. August, Harvard Book Store, Bartley's even, didn't much surprise me. But the Hong Kong Throbbing Headache Place certainly did.
On past these places and around the corner onto DeWolf (never an “e” on the end!) St., I walked past the location of the bike and cycle store where I often went in just to admire the BMW motorcycle after which I lusted severely. That place is no longer there, of course. I looked down Bow Street and saw nothing of interest so continued on to Mt. Auburn, looking for the old location of Tommy's Lunch. Tommy's was my breakfast stop (at age 19 or so) on the Vespa ride I took every morning from about 1958 to 1960 to work at the MIT experimental foundry. Back then Tommy had a breakfast special for $.79 that included a fried egg over easy, a grilled English muffin, orange juice and a coffee. Tommy's was open at all hours (and my memory has Tommy himself there 24 hours a day, an unlikely circumstance). My friends and I frequently had late-night sustenance there.
Another spot I sought along this path was 47 Mt. Auburn, the original location of the famed Club 47, which started the careers of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Rush and many others. Years ago Club 47 morphed into Club Passim, which still operates at a different location. Its web site history has much to say about the old Club 47 days. Tom Rush continues the great tradition of the old club with his Club 47 concert series. Today 47 Mt. Auburn houses a dry cleaner and a small variety store.
Heading back toward the lower Square along Mt. Auburn St., I noted that Elsie's Sandwich Shop is now a Bank of America branch. Across the street, moved from their old Mass. Ave spot near the corner of Plympton, I was delighted to see Schoenhof's Foreign Books, the great source of foreign books of all sorts. They are just a few doors away from the still-operating J. Press men's clothing store. Not only that, I discovered recently on their web site that they now have a “sister store” called Europa Books in Chicago, where I live! I’m there!
It isn't as if I possess eidetic memory with a readily accessible mental map of every shop, restaurant, and stopping place of my youth. I did surprise myself with what I remembered and could locate, but I knew there were gaps. So after I got back to my hotel room I started googling some names and some general categories of things Harvard Squarish to see what I could turn up. As I’ve noted above, I found some great information about the demise of Wordsworth Bookshop and about the disappearance of many of the other book fixtures in Harvard Square: Mandrake Books, once at 8 Story Street; Starr Bookshop, once at 29 Plympton; Phillips; Thomas More Bookshop - more on some of these as we go on.
Pangloss, the antiquarian and scholarly book store, closed when its owners, Ken Rosenberg and Paulette Bradstreet, moved to Wiscasset, Maine in 2000, (according to an article in a Maine antique magazine) where they continued their business through auctions and sales on a site called Bradstreets.com, That business appears to be gone now as well.
Grolier Poetry Bookshop persists at 6 Plympton Street. I must have been distracted when I walked past it, since I utterly missed it. Reports of its closing circulated everywhere in early 2006 when owner Louise Solano announced that her health would no longer allow her to continue operating the store. According to an article in the November – December 2006 Harvard Magazine(“Grolier Reincarnated,” ), Solano received many offers from potential buyers, accepting none. However, “The Grolier was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy when poet Ifeanyi Menkiti, Ph.D. ’74, a philosophy professor at Wellesley College, bought the store in March to keep it from going under.” Menkiti operates it today. Its open days, according to the message on their voice mail, are Tuesday through Saturday.
The story of Mandrake Book Store is a bit murkier. A couple of undated sources on the web suggest that it might still exist. If it's still there, I probably had another blank moment as I passed it, since I did not see it at its old location at 8 Story Street. Extensive web searching for it discloses little that confirms its continuing operation, and one site that lists closed Harvard Square businesses includes Mandrake on its list.
Thomas More Bookshop (originally on Holyoke St.), according to a couple of sources, is also now closed.
A friend reminded me, during discussion of this essay, that I seemed to have forgotten Cronin's bar. I did and I didn't. I thought of it at some point, but it was not on my direct itinerary, so it simply disappeared from my internal radar. Cronin's was originally where the Holyoke Center now is, but in the late '50s moved to much larger quarters near the MTA car barn on Mt. Auburn Street. As a crass youth I had first tried to “get served” at the Wursthaus and was refused with a sneer. But I succeeded at Cronin's and was seldom, if ever, asked for ID there. As we all grew up, Cronin's became a favored location on the regular haunt circuit. Another friend tells me that “Cronin's had a movie night which also made it a good date place.” I don’t know how I could have been unaware of that, but there it is. Cronin’s has long been gone from the Square scene, having been replaced by the Kennedy Center.
I did not pass by Café Pamplona at 12 Bow Street, but found at several web sites (including a Wikipedia article updated in late October, 2006) that it's still there with its menu of “a combination of strong coffee, dessert, and Spanish main courses supplemented by grilled Cuban sandwiches.”
As I walked I thought about Sheldon Cohen, once the unofficial “Mayor of Harvard Square” He is still alive. This former president of the Harvard Square Business Association was recently made an honorary board officer of the Harvard Square Business Association. Sheldon was the owner of Out of Town Newspapers in the kiosk on the “T” island in the middle of The Square. His aunt, Bessie Cohen, was a legendary (or infamous, if you wish) apartment building owner in Cambridge. One old acquaintance of mine who worked for her for a short time loved to tell the story of hearing Bessie take a call from a renter who complained that his toilet was not working. She directed him to a window in his apartment. “See that gas station across the street?” she demanded. “Yes,” he said. “Go there,” she said, and hung up on him. When Bessie died, Sheldon inherited most or all of her holdings, or at least that was the story we got from old Harvard Square denizen Ed Aharonian. Sheldon opened Reading International at Church and Brattle. It was a very good general purpose bookstore whose direct competition was Paperback Booksmith (also gone) and, to an extent, The Harvard Coop. He was a real presence, and very interesting to talk to. He continued to man the Out of Town Newspapers kiosk for quite a while after he inherited Bessie's fortune and would engage in short conversations occasionally if he wasn't too busy.
So many of the places I mention here are part of my young life in ways that I haven't the time to chronicle here. I feel a bit like a hypertext compendium, since each of these places generates memories that take me off in different, possibly lengthy, excursions of reminiscence. So many people whom I loved (and still do), revere, or just remember fondly to this day are at the core of those memories. For example, as I walked down DeWolf Street, just as I got to Bow Street, I stopped in front of the steps to the building there because I was having a vivid memory of a very funny argument that occurred at that spot between two guys I knew at that time (in 1959 or 1960, I think).
It was a wonderful, purposeful, exhilarating walk. I recommend to my friends who were part of that world that they find reasons to take a similar memory walk. It is remarkably refreshing and renewing.
Edmund J. McDevitt
11/17/06
Postscript:
A June, 2004 Harvard Crimson article I found after writing this essay covers some of the same ground, but with a different slant. It mentions one of my favorite places in The Square, including one that had not come to mind as I walked: Briggs and Briggs, the record store on Boylston St. (now JFK St.). It had listening stations at which one could play selections from phonograph records, possibly the earliest such service in existence. It was an invaluable resource.
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