BOSTON – Maybe it was the last greasy burger served at the Tasty Diner, or the final copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl sold at Wordsworth books, or the last Hohner harmonica discovered amid the dusty bins of sheet music at Briggs and Briggs.
Any longtime denizens of Harvard Square and they’ll be able to lament the exact moment the quirky, old square seemed to vanish for good, marked when a favored haunt or hole-in-the-wall gave way the latest cookie-cutter outlet.
The losses seem to be multiplying.
Earlier this year Wordsworth bookstore, which introduced generations of high schoolers to the illicit pleasures of Henry Miller, William Burroughs and Anais Nin, sold its last volume.
Now the venerable Brattle Theater, which for half a century has catered to fans of American film noir, French new wave and Russian avant-garde, is teetering on the brink.
Can the old shabby Harvard Square, where sidewalk chess fans still play blitz games against all comers and coffee shop philosophers still debate the virtues of Sartre and Camus, survive the pressures of a sleeker, brand-name culture?
It’s a question those who revel in Harvard Square’s panoply of scholars, students and miscreants have posed for years, but one that has taken on a renewed urgency.
“Is it like what is was before? Name me something that is like it was before?” Said Betsy Siggins, executive director of Club Passim, which helped give birth to the 1960’s folk music revolution. “We’re in an interesting time in Harvard Square.”
Emblematic of that struggle is the Brattle.
During the heyday of repertory film/art houses, the Brattle was ground zero for Boston film buffs, offering the best movie education in town. For many, it’s still hard to recall scenes from FranEcois Truffaut’s “400 Blows” or Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” or Humphrey Bogart’s parting scene in “Casablanca” without remembering the Brattle’s homey charms.
It’s that legacy the Brattle Film Foundation, the nonprofit that has operated the theater since 2001 is hoping to preserve.
The foundation has launched a fund-raising drive to collect $400,000 by the end of the year that it considers do-or-die.
The Brattle’s creative director, Ned Hinkle, remains hopeful Harvard Square can still support an alternative movie house.
“We are driven by people who are driven to see movies,” Hinkle said. “To really get the full experience of a film you have to see it in a theater with an audience of strangers on a big screen with a bag of popcorn.”
The Brattle is hoping to avoid the fate of another Harvard Square landmark, the Tasty Diner. The one room greasy spoon sat dead center in the heart of the square, across from the Out of Town News newsstand and kiosk.
For many, the Tasty’s informality and round-the-clock hours made it a home away from home. Plunking yourself down at the Tasty’s counter meant striking up a conversation across the spectrum of society.
The Tasty gained larger fame as the spot where Matt Damon wooed Minnie Driver in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting.” Another Harvard Square haunt used in the same film, the Bow and Arrow Pub, has also since closed.
Federico Muchnik, who used the Tasty as a high school refuge, documented its final days in his film “Touching History: Harvard Square, The Bank And The Tasty Diner,” which receives its Cambridge premier at the Brattle.
“You could walk in at any time of day and you could sit down and on your right you would have a Harvard University professor and on your left you would have a homeless person and you would have a conversation,” he said. “This went on 24 hours a day.”
The same block that hosted the Tasty was also home to another beloved Harvard Square eatery, the Wursthaus, an old-fashioned, dimly lit restaurant that made few concessions to fashion, but served up heaps of home cooked food.
Not everyone is conceding the death of the square.
Jinny Nathans, president of the Harvard Square Defense Fund, said despite the loss of landmarks like the Tasty, the Wursthaus and Wordsworth, there are plenty of gems left, from Herrell’s Ice Cream and Dickson Brothers hardware to Bob Slate’s Stationery and the 119-year-old tobacco shop Leavitt and Pierce.
And, she boasts, the square has yet to see any infiltration from McDonald’s or Burger King.
But she worries about the steady loss of shops, the most recent being the Globe Corner Bookstore, which specialized in travel books and maps.
“It’s one thing when a store has been there a long time and the person who has operated it doesn’t want to operate it anymore. It’s another thing when someone wants to continue operating a store and is prevented from keeping it open,” she said. “When those stores close, people take it very personally.”
The block now hosts a bank lobby, watch store and a brightly lit Finagle a Bagel.
Like Hinkle and Muchnik, Louisa Solano also fell in love in Harvard Square as a high school student. The object of Solano’s affection was the storied Grolier Poetry Book Store, a cramped one-room shop stuffed floor to ceiling with poetry.
Fifty years later, Solano is still in love with the Grolier, which she has owned and nurtured since 1974. The store, frequented over the years by T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg and others, is still a Mecca for poetry fans.
Like the Brattle, the Grolier is also struggling to survive, victim to what Solano described as a steady erosion of intellectual fervor in the square.
Solano remembered a time when knots of people congregated in no-frills cafeterias to spar over cheap cups of coffee. These days the Grolier can seem more like a museum than bookstore, Solano said.
“I have a fair amount of tourists come in and get really excited. They want to see books being presented triumphantly as the most important thing in Harvard Square, not blue jeans,” she said. “I do think Harvard Square, unless something drastic is done, is dying.”
One of Solano’s favorite stores was Briggs and Briggs, a family owned music store stuffed with sheet music, instruments, records and music fans of all stripes. The store is now an Adidas outlet.
Despite skyrocketing rents and encroachment from national chains, small oddball stores can still find their niche in the square.
Tucked in a basement space in the same block as a burger joint and consignment store is Twisted Village, a music shop specializing in psychedelic rock, screeching jazz and modern avant-garde – just the kind of store Harvard Square built its reputation on.
After nine years, owner Wayne Rogers has no complaints, but worries about the future of the square.
“It seems like the same people who use to come to Harvard Square still come here, but they’re finding less and less to do,” he said.
A musical cousin to the Brattle, Club Passim has also stayed true to its Harvard Square roots.
During its original incarnation as the legendary Club 47, the club showcased a 17-year-old Joan Baez who let her friend Bob Dylan perform between sets. In 1963, the club moved to its current subterranean locale and has reinvented itself as the nonprofit Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center. The club tries not to get stuck in the past, but has no plans to flee.
“Can you get back to 1960? What’s the value of that?” Siggins said. “We could move Passim tomorrow to a place that would have better parking or more parking, but none of that is as important as our being here. It’s our legacy.”
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On the Net:
Harvard Square: http://www.harvardsquare.com/
The Brattle Theater: http://www.brattlefilm.org/
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop: http://www.grolierpoetrybookshop.com/
Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center: http://www.clubpassim.org/
AP-ES-12-10-05 1228EST
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