The Other Square

I have conducted a random, although modest, survey of Harvard-Radcliffe students and discovered just one type of person who can tell a story, albeit weak, about Central Square. This type turned 18 before December of 1972--when the military started relying entirely on volunteers to flesh out its ranks--and he had to amble on down to the fringes of Central Square to register for the draft. He remembers City Hall, where the draft cards were issued, as a tabular and turreted brick fortress with rows of arched windows through which he got a sidewise view of neon wriggles in the shopping district.

Other respondents considered Central Square too ordinary a place to think of a story about. What did they mean by ordinary? Well, there are neighborhoods resembling it in a lot of people's home towns. Broadway in New York is flanked by a similar utilitarian snarl of dingy department stores and stark donut or submarine joints. From my own experience in Midwestern cities of about 200,000 inhabitants or less, I can cull couples and triples of Central Square cafes with blacked out windows and steel doors bearing discreet Budweiser placards, or upper stories rented by optometrists, orthodontists and somebody named Arthur Savage, Tax Acct. Not even the neon camel propped above A Nubian Notion is unique; it glows in Roxbury, too.

The layout doesn't tempt outsiders to poke around in places like Central Square. The buildings form a jarringly uncomplementary string of facades. Each business has developed independently. There isn't an architectural plan, historic tradition, emotional ambience or standard of quality to conform to. The smattering of fast-food franchises with their corny and tediously familiar fronts in Dunkin'-Donuts pink, Brigham's blue, white and red, and Jack-In-the-Box orange is accepted without any qualms. The only required feature seems to be functionality. A store that can supply "reliable shades and screens" is going to come in handy from time to time, even if it isn't a pleasant place to browse.

But the haphazard organization of Central Square doesn't preclude original designs--it might even encourage whimsical businessmen. I'm sort of partial to weeds, myself, and the dowdy, uncouth window display at Fashion Junction, where the man-nequins' limbs are out of kilter under synthetic negligees in translucent shades of green and blue, fascinates me, while Corcoran's spacious, well-tended window doesn't interest me. Some charming stores have sprouted between the frowzy ones, too. I like Paul's Shoes because the cobbler printed his sign in slithery black letters. And I'm sorry the miniscule take-out stand for Greek food on River St. closed down, because it was shaped like two graduated sizes of building blocks stacked one on the other and painted in chalky blue and white stripes after the Greek national colors--the place looked as though it might have been built for a carnival. Recordings of reggae and soul music clatter from the threshold of A Nubian Notion, but the sound is all right for someone strolling past to shuffle around to.

The sidewalk is broad in Central Square and people often stop in its middle or on its edges, so the general flow has to meander around these bunched-up pedestrians who have recognized each other as Greek or Spanish-speaking and who want to exchange news before they rejoin the crowd, which, it seems to me, is mostly English-speaking. I'm startled by the number of old people. At the intersection of River St. and Massachusetts Ave. there is a triangular island with a row of benches along its base; old men sit there in the evening with their hands clasped between their knees. Once, a benchsitter said hello to me and I didn't bother to answer. Now I figure that I should have. After all, he didn't mumble like the younger men in Harvard Square, and it must get pretty boring, watching the traffic. I don't think people are particularly impudent in Central Square. They don't look through passersby, or around them, perhaps because there are fewer pedestrians coming at them.

I sat across from an old woman in Dunkin' Donuts who just stared at me. I don't think she was impudent, simply curious. Her fingers were stained by nicotine and they were fiddling with a fag end. The rivulets in the skin of her face never moved. I was smoking a cigarette. A friend was sitting next to me. That must have been the old woman's husband next to her, although they didn't seem to be paying each other any mind. She eyed my friend and me as we tried to understand what the Greek baker was telling us about making donuts. "Six doughs," he informed us earnestly, ticking them off on his fingers, but I only remember the chocolate, cake and butternut.

Since my survey, I have developed a theory to explain why students at this University don't venture too far east of Harvard Square. To begin with, I figure that they're conditioned to respect a busy attitude. In Harvard Square, especially on Saturday afternoons, a slew of strangers hustles around looking gravely purposeful. On the other side of Cambridge, people straggle here and there, no one pushes his neighbor along and the card players are plainly visible through the plate glass windows of the YMCA. Then, I suspect that students here are nervous about the possibility of getting lost in a place like Central Square; not now, perhaps only figuratively speaking, but Central Square reminds them of the possibility. Their association with Harvard, on the other hand, is supposed to assure that they'll never be trapped in a community that seems sort of shiftless, sort of dreary and ordinary.

This other side of Cambridge has always reminded me of my home town, and I go walking there. Yet I have to admit that I never liked my home town a whole lot, so it's odd that I'm drawn to Central Square. When this puzzle occurs to me, I think about a phrase that Ezra Pound wrote, "Old friends the most," and that solves it in a simple way, for a while.

If Cambridge has a downtown, it's probably the business district in Central Square. This seems to be the place, for example, where most residents do their Christmas shopping. It's also the only group of stores that features a roving Santa Claus throughout December, who speaks a different language each week. I tracked down one of these fellows a few days ago on Pearl St. with a small crowd and two elves milling around him. The elves were wearing sandwich boards advertising Bargains Unlimited, but Santa Claus ignored them and struck me as a nonaligned, straightforward type. He didn't seem embarrassed about jerking his beard down so that he could be heard (speaking English) more distinctly. A police car turned up to drive him away, and one cop confided to a bewildered little girl that he was taking Santa into custody at the police station. Unphased, the urchin next to her started reeling off requests for the cop to pass on to his ward with the crooked beard.

The people who live in the neighborhood of Central Square aren't particularly faithful to the business area of their community. They pick up everyday commodities there, but Watertown, Arlington, Somerville and Boston rake in their share of Cambridge clientele also. The Central Square Association of Business and Professionals, Inc., is trying to deal with this problem and ethnic Santas are part of the solution. The organization has been around since 1934, but membership has doubled over the past year, to allow for seven committees with five to twelve members apiece. There are plenty of women active in business in Central Square--the managers of Eve Kanes and Fashion Junction, for example--and about a third of the Association's members are, quite appropriately, women.

Chuck Smith, the Association's president, says it aims to make businessmen and the community more comfortable with each other. He guesses that merchants in Central Square tend to become discouraged because Cambridge shoppers don't focus on the district, and spend their time worrying about and waiting for retirement. Smith concedes that bringing his community together is sort of a tricky proposition because of language barriers and cultural differences: "Almost everybody in the world lives here, Haitians, Indians, Turks, Chinese and Japanese (he hesitates for awhile before deciding there aren't any Koreans) Italians and Portugese, it's hard to say who we don't have, actually." But he has some projects in mind, and claims they are already being undertaken.

Whenever a job is available in a member's store, says Smith, the Association plans to notify the community so that it can employ as many local residents as possible in the Square. Beginning next year, it will hold a contest to decorate stores for Christmas, with awards for the designers, rather than the managers. This year's Christmas ornaments consist of strands of orange bulbs separated by reflecting squares of aluminum sheet, hanging over Massachusetts Ave. The Association has already planted some trees, which look kind of scrawny, but I guess their height is an asset. Smith says hopefully that the trees "make it look as though humanity can exist around here." Central Square, he explains, has a reputation as a "tough" neighborhood. The bars are one sort of rallying point for the community he's not so sure about promoting.

Bars are all right by me, though. They seem to attract the most provocative and carefully designed art form in the square. I've come across posters announcing lectures on "Feminism and Anarchism," "Communism: A Dying Business," "Portugese Revolutionary Speaks!" and "Cyprus and Greece," tacked to the walls of Central Square bars. The nicest name in Central Square belongs to a bar, too: the Paradise Cafe; it reminds me of a song Maria Muldaur might sing.

Inside, the Paradise Cafe is cramped and dim, furnished with an erratic array of small wooden and linoleum-topped tables. There's a juke box pressed against the front wall that a cluster of waifs and their serene elders stray in to dance around. The bar is on the periphery of Central Square, fairly close to MIT, and it's frequented by locals, mostly, with a sprinkling of students. From the stools under the television a string of posters of the likes of Tiny Tim, W.C. Fields and Jack Palladine is visible, although it is hidden from the opposite side of the room by a rafter.

Another intriguing place in Central Square is the Odd Fellows Hall, a narrow brick building with stained glass windows. The Joy of Movement Center rents it now, but an outgoing dancer with unkempt hair and lots of bedraggled skirts assured me that there are still Odd Fellows in Central Square; she said the organization was "for old men, essentially, like the Elks or the Moose Club." There must be something to this group that the other two lack, though, because it alone rates a cryptic definition in the American Heritage Dictionary: "Odd Fellow: A member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal and benevolent secret society." I can't figure them out; the only odd fellows I've met in Central Square were bums and drunks