Tommy's Owner Fights for Late Hours

The quiet opening of the new Tommy’s market at 7: 30 a.m. yesterday did little to raise owner Mian Iftikhar’s spirits.

After a contentious hearing last night, the Cambridge Licensing Commission will decide tomorrow morning whether Tommy’s House of Pizza can have a permit to close at 3 a.m.

The City changed the pizzeria’s closing time to 2 a.m. last spring in response to noise complaints from the eatery’s elderly neighbor and Iftikhar said his sales are down about 15 percent as a result.

If he is not allowed to stay open until 3 a.m., Iftikhar said, he may be forced to sell the business he bought just nine months ago.

“I’ll have to take the loss and try to sell,” Iftikhar said. “Believe me, it’s a question of my survival now—seriously.”

Three Cambridge residents spoke out against the late-night institution and its noisy patrons at yesterday evening’s hearing.

Fifty three Mount Auburn Street resident Norman Hurst said that living above Tommy’s is intolerable. Noise at the pizzeria continues to make sleep impossible, he said.

“In my opinion, 2 a.m. is a late enough hour,” Hurst told the licensing commission. “People are loaded and they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s hazardous.”

Forty Bow Street resident Genevieve McMillan, whose complaints last spring originally resulted in pushing back Tommy’s closing time, also attended the meeting to speak.

McMillan has lived directly above the pizzeria for 25 years. In the past five years, she said, drunk Tommy’s patrons have screamed, thrown food at her car and even urinated on her back porch. She said she is often forced to call the police to disperse the crowds in front of her porch.

“I can’t even count on a whole night’s sleep on the weekends,” she said.

Former president of the Harvard Square Defense Fund G. Pebble Gifford said she has been in regular correspondence with her friend McMillan about the difficulties of living next to the pizzeria.

Gifford suggested that Iftikhar take better control of his patrons and not allow them to talk loudly on the street outside the eatery.

“I don’t think this is fair. This is a residential neighborhood,” Gifford said to the commission.

‘This has been a problem for a long time and the same clientele keeps coming,” she continued. “It’s certainly not going to get better with a 3 a.m. closing time.”

Following the three presentations, Iftikhar appeared disheartened.

“I need the business. I am losing money every day,” he said to the commission.

Ifitkhar also questionned why the permit was pushed back one hour only after he purchased the business nine months ago.

“When I bought this place, it had a license to 3 a.m.,” he said at yesterday’s hearing. “Does this have something to do with the students or something to do with me?”

According to Gifford, Iftikhar was duped by the previous owners when he purchased the property.

Tommy’s has a history of conflict with the licensing commission and nearby residents and was even forced to place a police detail in the shop between 2 and 3 a.m. a few years ago, Gifford said.

Iftikhar said he was unaware of these problems when he bought the pizzeria.

“He made a mistake to buy this without proper representation,” Gifford said. “They unloaded this on him with all these problems.”

After the licensing commission adjourned to deliberate until tomorrow at 10 a.m, Iftikhar walked slowly back to the pizzeria to cook and man the store until closing time.

Even as he confronts the possibility of leaving the Square, Iftikhar seemed a bit more excited as he described the market that opened yesterday morning, more than two months behind schedule.

Although the store is now stocked with a full supply of soda and candy bars, Iftikhar is waiting for a shipment of “handicrafts”—shawls and lamps from Pakistan.

But he said he wished he had never considered buying the pizzeria.

“Believe me, I have no clue what to do. I put all my heart and money into this,” he said. “It really looks like they want me to leave.”

—Staff writer Daniela J. Lamas can be reached at lamas@fas.harvard.edu.