"This book was hands-down my favorite new release of 2022. In asking and answering questions about the Square — what it once was, what it is now, and how it got that way — it throws all sorts of light on the urban environments we care so much about, and why. It's worth remembering that 'our' Harvard Square, whatever we individually feel that to be, replaced one that earlier Cantabridgians may have loved just as much. The stories of now-departed businesses (can they almost be called 'institutions'?) like the Wursthaus, the Tasty, Black Ink, and Out of Town News make this valentine to the Square a great if sometimes bittersweet experience. I enjoyed it so much."
Publisher Columbia University Press
Publication Date 2023-02-28
Section New Hardcover - Nonfiction / Boston / Cambridge / New England / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Alan H.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780231209281
“Harvard Square isn’t what it used to be.”
Spend any time there, and you’re bound to hear that lament. Yet people have been saying the very same thing for well over a century. So what does it really mean that Harvard Square—or any other beloved Main Street or downtown—“isn’t what it used to be”? Catherine J. Turco, an economic sociologist and longtime denizen of Harvard Square, set out to answer this question after she started to wonder about her own complicated feelings concerning the changing Square.
Diving into Harvard Square’s past and present, Turco explores why we love our local marketplaces and why we so often struggle with changes in them. Along the way, she introduces readers to a compelling set of characters, including the early twentieth-century businessmen who bonded over scotch and cigars to found the Harvard Square Business Association; a feisty, frugal landlady who became one of the Square’s most powerful property owners in the mid-1900s; a neighborhood group calling itself the Harvard Square Defense Fund that fought real estate developers throughout the 1980s and ’90s; and a local businesswoman who, in recent years, strove to keep her shop afloat amid personal tragedy, the rise of Amazon, and a globalizing property market that sent her rent soaring.
Harvard Square tells the crazy, complicated love story of one quirky little marketplace and in the process, reveals the hidden love story Americans everywhere have long had with their own Main Streets and downtowns. Offering a new and powerful lens that exposes the stability and instability, the security and insecurity, markets provide, Turco transforms how we think about our cherished local marketplaces and markets in general. We come to see that our relationship with the markets in our lives is, and has always been, about our relationship with ourselves and one another, how we come together and how we come apart.
