Pinball, Disco, Food. It's Found in Cambridge

Hungry? In Harvard Square, your food dollar will buy you anything from paella to Oreo Cookie ice cream, the only flavor in the world with a cult following. Depressed? There is a 24-hour store in the Square that markets marijuana paraphernalia, or, if you're broke, there's the Hare Krishna group that congas through the Square regularly. Bored? Some nice man, usually representing a stereo store, will hand you things to read, and when you're finished, there's a construction project, with real cranes and jackhammers and union members to watch. Wowie zowie.

In short, Harvard Square is a paradise on earth, a promised land for the collegian, a magnet for Wellesley women. But a day will come when you will want to leave the Square. After all, it is only six streets wide and three deep, and if you don't want to feel like a cop walking a beat, you can only stroll for a half hour or so.

For those times, you have several options. The one taken by most students is visiting the Quincy Market, Boston's Harvard Square without any of the dubious charm. Another alternative, one that most Harvard students don't take full advantage of, is to spend some time right here in the city of Cambridge.

Cambridge, a crowded city of 100,000, is more than a bureaucratic support system for the Square. It is a true Eastern city: ethnic, overdeveloped, and, in some places, tired.

Only six square miles in sizes, Cambridge is easy to become familiar with. The Charles River is one boundary, the Somerville town line the other, and in between the layout is fairly simple. Commerical life is concentrated in the four squares that dot Massachusetts Avenue, the main artery running the length of the city.

Porter Square, a mile north of Harvard Square, is a rundown area that will probably boom when its new MBTA stop is completed. Right now, Harvard students use it mainly as a landmark on the way to Steve's, a Somerville ice cream parlor famous first for its long lines, and only secondarily for its ice cream. For the adventurous, there is Game Time, a classic pinball parlor that Cambridge cops and politicians have tried several times to close down. There's also a Sears, Roebuck, a haven of middle-Americana only a mile away from the cosmopolitan--and expensive--Harvard Square. And from Porter Square all the way out to Fresh Pond at the far end of the city, Mass Ave is lined with stores and restaurants, many--like Vic's Eggs on One or the Newtowne Grille--offering the solid, if greasy, fare that you have to hunt for in Harvard Square.

A short, store-lined walk the other way down Mass Ave is Central Square, heart of non-University Cambridge. It's here you'll find Cambridge City Hall, an imposing, dingy brick hall that boasts one of the few front lawns anywhere on Mass Ave. Central Square is also where the old-style big city department stores and the Y can be found, not to mention the police station and the MacDonalds. Cambridge's best disco, the mainly black Rise Club, sits on top of a rickety brick office building here.

Keep hiking down Mass Ave and you'll reach MIT, which resembles a prestigious center of technological education and research. Actually, unless you're despondent because you chose Harvard and now yearn in vain for the chance to make rocket fuel, this area is boring.

Mass Ave is not Cambridge's only street though. On the Porter Square side of Harvard, you can follow Concord Avenue out to Fresh Pond (Huron Avenue), past the University Observatory, Keeezer's Harvard Exchange 'read pawnbroker', historic houses with leafy front yards and the National Guard armory. Brattle Street is chic Cambridge--its residents, the "Brattle Street liberal elite," are famous for their riches, their devotion to causes celebres, and their walls. If you don't see the wall at the corner of Brattle and Fresh Pond Parkway, your tuition has gone to waste. This serpentine wonder causes several traffic accidents a year, and if you're in luck a recent crash will have left a hole in the wall so you can go through it to make sure the backside is as smoothly curved as the front.

The other side of Harvard Square, though, is the most interesting part of Cambridge, for it has the oldest and most sharply-defined neighborhoods. Follow Cambridge Street, for example. From the back of Harvard Yard, Cambridge St. snakes past Hospital Row and comes into Inman Square, a miniature and somewhat rundown Harvard Square featuring the Guru Meher Baba Information Center and the In Square Men's Baba Information Center and the In Square Men's Bar (to which women are also welcome), Legal Seafood and the 1369 Jazz Club. Outside of Inman Square, Cambridge St. bolts straight into East Cambridge, the Portuguese/Italian working class section of Cambridge.

Portuguese groceries featuring sausages and squid and the Santo Christo Society with the Portuguese flag in front slowly give way to Italian East Cambridge, where everyone gathers on the main street to chat. Kids play craps on a side street crosswalk, and every home with a few feet between it and the sidewalk has a garden--lush beds of marigolds, cucumbers and tomatoes.

The old people of this community may move to Miller River, an elderly housing project right on Cambridge St. Where they can continue to sit on folding chairs on the sidewalk, greeting passersby and keeping an eye on the community. A fat man dressed meticulously in black stands guard outside his funeral home, keeping the parking lot clear for mourners whom he welcomes with just the right mix of reserve and geniality. A baseball game half a block off Cambridge St. is more an occasion for drinking Schlitz than playing ball, but abusing the ump is the favorite sport. "Only ump in the world with a seeing-eye dog," mumbles the pitcher loudly in the direction of home plate.

Between Mass Ave and Cambridge St., Broadway runs through a middle-class integrated neighborhood, past playgrounds and missile research facilities, till it finally reaches the river. Broadway is a nice place to walk through quiet streets with houses, not stores, and friendly people.

More interesting is Western Avenue, which runs from Central Square straight to the Charles. The neighborhood it bisects is Riverside, one of Cambridge's heavily black communities. When it's hot, people are out all over; Donnell's Store does brisk business in ice, soda pop and ice cream despite a sign admonishing "No Checks Accepted Unless You Are 99 With Your Mother 109." Further down, near the river, you may find a tent crusade. All this summer, the Reverend Ezra kept his congregation under the canvas with his message that riches lead to misery. "He don't own that million dollars, it owns him," Ezra proclaims. "None of us owns anything. Whatever we accumulate, God can come anytime he wants and pick our pockets clean, and there is nothing we can do." Amens rustle through the crowd, and when the altar call is sounded, several come forward to be saved.

The Charles takes up where Western Avenue ends, and you can follow this grand river in either direction. Towards Boston and the ocean it widens, a polluted but still grand expanse dotted on breezy days with the flash o sails. Walk the other way, and you're back to Harvard, Tech Hifi and Belgian Fudge.