"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.
