Harvard Square: Professors and Punks

At Freshman registration several years ago, incoming Harvard students were given--among mounds of other printed material--some kind of Chamber-of-Commerce hype about the "charming and multi-dimensional Harvard Square." It began, "As you emerge from the Harvard Square station of the MBTA, Massachusetts Avenue (or, as the natives say, Mass Ave) is in front of you, behind you, on your right, on your left..."

All of that was true then, and is still true, despite the best efforts of generations of Harvard and MIT engineering, architectural, and urban planning students.

The glossy little brochure went on to list and advertise a number of the "unique and intimate" specialty shops and boutiques in the Square area and to hint at a community ambience of benign craziness. It sounded like the summer of '69 had gotten a little Establishment backing and been preserved in brick and wood--all for you, the student.

Which was not exactly true then, and is certainly not true now.

The Square is a very complex mix of people and buildings, cars and buses, dogs and cats, Marxists and Libertarians, professors and punks.

But to talk about Harvard Square is really to talk about Harvard; the general ambience of the place is a derivative of the currents of traditional academe and the late stages of the counter-culture which made the Square famous for everyone who is old enough to vote but has never floated a mortgage.

The Square's primary function is service, and the shops and shopkeepers have been serving most of the needs of all classes for a long time.

J. Press, Casablanca, the Tennis and Squash Shop and a few other heavies cater to the particular desires of the sons and daughters of the ruling class. They do very well.

And tens of thousands of upwardly mobile associate faculty members and grad students have been able to cultivate tastes to match their salaries (or ambition) at a number of import and gourmet shops. They also do very well, but their market is very fluid, and, as a result, they have a tendency to come and go.

But Harvard Square also meets the needs of Cambridge's working class. These are the people who pass through the Square while most undergraduates are still asleep, stopping at greasy spoons and the subway station.

Most recently, the Square has become the home of a new form of another social class of long-standing: The lumpenproletariat. Draping the approach to the First Unitarian Church on the corner of Mass Ave and Church St. or behind solid objects in the Common are the refugees of the drug culture. Mostly young and homeless, mostly broke, "deprived of both land and capital," they fall into classic patterns of alcoholism, drug frenzies, and quasi-criminal pastimes.