Big Names Leave No Space for Mom and Pop

The future is Abercrombie & Fitch.

While city activists clamor to protect the distinctiveness of the Square, chain stores are pushing out the Mom and Pop shops of yesterday.

Replacing the 81-year-old Tasty, a beloved, 24-hour burger joint, the trendy clothier is only the most recent example of the gentrification of Harvard Square.

A&F's neighbors on Read Block, Pacific Sunwear and Finagle-a-Bagel, are two other new additions to the Square. TGIFriday's American Bar and Peet's Coffee, as well as a series of expensive high-rise condominiums, are either here or on the way.

Traditionalists take comfort in the survival of the independently-owned businesses such as Bartley's, the Hong Kong, Billings & Stover, Cardullo's and Charlie's Kitchen.

But Andrew Herrmann '82, a Cambridge resident, said the selection of stores in the Square has definitely changed since his days at Harvard as students' interests have evolved.

"I don't know that overall it's changed for the worse. It's kind of fashionable to say that. The sad thing is that it's not really a college town anymore," Hermann says of the Square.

Mayor Francis H. Duehay '55 says it is futile to fight the changes. Some change, he said, is natural and even desirable.

Duehay said that preservation of the outside facades of buildings can help to ease Cambridge into this new image.

"Historic preservation of buildings is one thing," Duehay said, "And historic preservation of businesses is another. Two hundred years ago, they may have been selling cornmeal in the Square. Do I think they should still be doing that? No."

-- Kirsten G. Studlien