September in the Square

It’s mid-September, and school has resumed. Harvard students return from their travels, vacations and thesis projects around the globe. We spent last week unpacking our belongings and digging futons out of storage. The parental units are gone, and with a day left of summer, it seems as though the last strains of a saccharine melody are still ringing in our ears. The clock above the Citizens’ Bank proclaims the minutes and hours to our little world—a beacon to students late for class and a constant reminder of the exacting pace of college life. Cambridge is a far cry from rural Canada, where I spent my summer camped in an eastern township of Quebec and had to chop wood in order to get a hot meal.

Once a working-class community, Harvard Square is an exciting zone for exploration, especially to those of us who spent our summers in rural parts. The Square is a bustling hubbub of small shops and gaudy franchises, bearing the stamp of industrialization, yet remaining quaint and colonial with brick-lined walkways. Cambridge is the seventh largest city in the state, with over 40,000 residents in the age span of 18 to 29. Despite its presence of youth, the cobblestone streets speak to a revered past when the Square was no more than a nexus of street railway routes leading to Boston suburbs.

Settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony built Harvard Square in 1630 as the colonial village of Newtown. The irregular pattern of streets formed by Massachusetts Avenue, Mount Auburn Street, Eliot Street and Boylston Street—now JFK Street—continue to frame the layout of the Square. Though a riverbed no longer courses by Eliot Street, and the boîte stores have often made way for larger businesses, Cambridge still breathes of the past. But the intersection of these time-honored streets has become a 20th century cultural phenomenon as well.

At night, the Square boasts all kinds of carnival attractions in this last breath of summer, when the air is still warm and we can walk without coats. The ice cream shops close around midnight, with throngs of Harvard students milling about the thresholds until even later. The crowds of first-years are especially self-evident. Pass under the garish glow of the streetlamps outside ABP, cross Dunster Street, and suddenly one strain of music fades while another emerges. English is drowned out by a plethora of other languages.

There are the chess-players, the guitar-players and the mimes that perform their silent acts by the pit. There are the bands playing while a crowd of Harvard students and locals mesh together. There are the coffee shops, where Pulitzer Prize winners and distinguished professors rub shoulders with the homeless.

Sometimes, when I emerge from my rabbit hole in Adams House—my window faces a brick wall approximately one foot away— I am dumbstruck by the splendor around me, the silence of my small room smashed by the tones of this tramway-streamlined world. Harvard Square is a great place to gather in these last moments of summer. The rhythm is as varied as our course catalog, a synergy of locals and intellectuals at thriving hotspots like Noch’s and the Garage. It is a place of high entropy, where disorder increases as the sun sets and the vibrant street acts emerge along Massachusetts Avenue.

Cambridge and the Square are both the greatest attractions—and distractions—of our collegiate lives. We take part in a self-sufficient ecosystem, a place of intrigue, a cacopolis. Yet almost every student manages to escape the spell by emerging from it during the summer. For now, we must abide by the clock above the Citizens’ Bank: it’s seven past the hour, and time to sprint to class.

Elena P. Sorokin ’06, a Crimson news editor, is a history concentrator in Adams House.