Happy Birthday, Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE wears its age will. The city turns 350 this weekend, still a vital, maturing place to live, work--or go to school.

The city has overcome many of the problems that plaued its development. The splits and divisions between neighborhoods have healed at least a little from the day when the snooty residents of Old Cambridge asked that they be officially separated from East Cambridge and Cambridgeport. Corruption, patronage and inefficiency, at times the hallmark of city government, have given way to an administration more professional and more competent. There are signs of a rosy economic future filled with jobs and tax dollars for a city that was hit hard by the southward industrial exodus. Tenants, once strained by rising rents, are protected by rent control, and landlords, increasingly, are guaranteed fair profit. Even the thorny problem of desegration seems to have been handled smoothly.

Much of what is wrong with Cambridge is not the city's fault--Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, must make conscious decisions to end their needless expansion into residential neighborhoods. There are other problems the city will have to face--maintaining a diverse city in the face of rising costs and increasing gentrification, or allowing economic development without sacrificing the high quality of life. But Cambridge deserves a celebration this weekend. It has come much further than most American cities, and it has the resources and the pride to go much further still.