The Square After Summer

Harvard Square has arrived: We now have our very own Hootenanny, the clothing store with a disturbingly Shuttlegirl-esque mascot. The shop resides in the space our beloved Video Pro once occupied, leaving students to trudge to Porter Square if they want to catch a rental flick. At least Harvard students, unable to continue their tradition of dateless evenings with the wholesome Forrest Gump and Casablanca, will be able to buy as many tight skirts and cleavage-baring tops as they desire in a store right above Ben & Jerry’s. Yes, Harvard Square has hit the mainstream.

Yet something seems lost amid this great leap forward. The Square underwent yet another cuisine transformation through the dog days of August as Ma Soba closed. The late-night food party is over too, as Store24 has gone to the great shopping strip in the sky. A C’est Bon café and store has opened in its place and will stay open until 2:30 a.m. on weekends, but it will have difficulty replacing the generic products and round-the-clock service of Store24.

Changes at Tommy’s House of Pizza have further restricted students’ nocturnal feeding options. The night-owl pizzeria of student choice now closes at 2 a.m. instead of 3 a.m, due to the complaints of a resident living above the restaurant. In June, the resident stated that she intended to continue her push until the City Council ordered a 1 a.m. closing time for the pizzeria, which would eliminate its prime business hours, and proprietor Mian Iftakar fears that the closing time may be moved all the way back to midnight. These new zoning requirements might also jeopardize Iftakar’s plans to open a new convenience store—a welcome development after Store24’s departure—with similarly late hours. Undergraduates’ sleep schedules do not resemble those of other city residents, and students in a college community deserve no less than other residents to have businesses that cater to their interests. After all, students are not in the habit of complaining to the City Council about noisy trucks resupplying early-morning breakfast shops that older residents frequent.

It was particularly upsetting to hear that the Harvard Square Defense Fund has joined the anti-Tommy’s crusade, rather than directing its ire at the bland commercialization of Abercrombie & Fitch or Pacific Sunwear. Undergraduates have lived in Cambridge for hundreds of years, and college life is just as much a part of historic Cambridge as quiet residential areas (which are generally not found so close to Harvard Square).

What the Harvard Square Defense Fund should be opposing is the colonization of prime space in the Square by closet-sized cell phone stores. Although we have no video store, no late-night sesame-seed pizza and no soup noodles, we do have Hootenanny, Abercrombie and the Gap—and while we walk through the upscale strip mall that Harvard Square has become, we can at least communicate our misery to each other on an embarrassment of cellular phones.

As students return from summer, however, they should keep this in mind: the Square may be less than student-friendly, but it’s still better than New Haven.