Touring Cambridge, the country’s original college town
By Christopher Reynolds,
Hanging around in Cambridge has its drawbacks. You may stub your toe or splinter a heel on the uneven sidewalks. You may discover that
But spend the time anyway.
Whether or not you have a prospective freshman in your family, this country’s first college town is full of far more American history, smart shops, cool museums, inviting restaurants and all-around entertainment than your average city of 95,000.
An out-of-towner could easily ignore Boston, just across the river, and spend days just digesting Cambridge. So I did, for three days in September, as thousands of students were settling in for the new term -- about 1,700 freshmen at Harvard, 1,100 or so at MIT, plus legions more at Lesley (also in Cambridge), Tufts (in
But today’s short course is more specific than that. This is Cambridge 101, tuition-free. Your instructor today is a Fresno State alum whose grandfather went to MIT and whose mother went to Radcliffe when it was Harvard’s little sister. In other words, I’m still working out whether I should be biased against the place or in favor of it. Class is now in session. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
1. Everyone has an opinion in Harvard Square, and everyone has an opinion on Harvard Square.
This is where town and gown tangle. Old-timers bemoan the real estate boom that banished much of the neighborhood’s Bohemian feel, but newcomers love bumping into big shots who were on CNN the night before. If you don’t spot a human statue in a blue leotard striking poses for tips or a PETA activist in a chicken suit, you’re looking too hard for Wolf Blitzer.
Harvard Book Store (since 1932) is a great independent bookshop. Leavitt & Peirce (since 1885) still furnishes tobacco and “gentlemen’s accessories” (chess sets, for instance). And Out of Town News (1955), the magazine stand and paper peddler in the middle of it all, survived a closure scare in January and continues under new management.
You get folk music at Club Passim, jazz at Regattabar or Ryles Jazz Club, rock at the Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub near Central Square. On Wednesday, a wall notice announces, there’s a Queer Town Hall meeting. On Thursday, a Korean martial arts class. On Saturday, choral auditions. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
3. No matter how much fun it is to say, it’s unwise to pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd.
Leave your vehicle far away and dodge the congestion around Harvard Square by exploring Cambridge by foot, bike, bus or subway train. Also, don’t say Massachusetts Avenue. (The shorthand is Mass Ave.) And don’t call that student store the co-op. (The preferred pronunciation is “coop,” as in chicken dwelling.) The proper term for Cambridge residents, if you can say it with a straight face, is Cantabrigians. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
8. Maybe men are losing their clout at Harvard. Or maybe not.
Partly because it had all-female Radcliffe right next door, Harvard got away without admitting female students until 1977. But now the president’s office is occupied by Drew G. Faust, the first woman to land the job. And in 2008-09, women undergraduates narrowly outnumbered men, 3,363 to 3,315.
As for former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, who created a stir in 2005 by suggesting that women’s brains might be less suited to math and science than men’s, he’s been forced to settle for work as President Obama’s top economic advisor.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s all-male, invitation-only “final clubs” have lasted more than a century. The Harvard Crimson has reported that several of the clubs (which sport such names as Fox, Fly and Owl) own Harvard Square real estate worth millions. Because they don’t offer clubhouse tours, just glance up at the second-story windows as you stroll on Mass Ave. and Holyoke Street, and imagine the chosen few at play. (Matt Rourke / Associated Press)
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The other mandatory stop is the Harvard Art Museum’s Sackler building. Because the campus Fogg and Reisinger museums will be under renovation for the next few years, curators have chosen favorite pieces from those collections and united them (often in witty combinations) in a greatest-hits art exhibit called Re-View.
In the space of a few steps, you get ancient Roman statuary, 20th century American abstraction, Impressionist masterworks (including a riveting Van Gogh self-portrait) and pioneering photography, including an 1887 motion-study series by Eadweard Muybridge of a topless woman jumping up and down. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
11. H.W. Longfellow continues to sleep here.
So does Mary Baker Eddy. The poet and the founder of the Christian Science movement occupy just two of the many plots in the immaculately landscaped hills of Mount Auburn Cemetery. If you catch a clear day and it’s not winter, head straight for Mount Auburn and climb the 125-foot Washington Tower. From up there you can look down on all of Cambridge, which is especially fun if you went to a state school. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
12. If you must revisit the Cambridge Police Department’s globally famous arrest and release of Professor Gates in July, don’t go looking for his house.
Instead, shoulder your way into the crowd at Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers (a.k.a. Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage), a Mass Ave. fixture since Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were chowing down here in the 1960s. The Bartley family likes to keep the menu topical.
Accordingly, you can order the Skip Gates burger (teriyaki sauce, grilled pineapple, onion rings) or the Sgt. Crowley burger (American cheese, sautéed onions, gravy French fries). Your choice. Bear in mind, however, that Gates has been a customer for years and could be behind you in line. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
13. Look both ways.
The streets are teeming with not only New England drivers(not known for their congeniality), but also Cambridge pedestrians, which is just a fancy way of saying jaywalkers.
“When I first got here, I would wait for the lights to change,” said Kylie Thompson, a 19-year-old sophomore who came to Harvard from Los Angeles. “But I was the only one waiting.”
Maybe the locals will think you’re a dweeb, waiting for a green light. But sometimes dweebs live longer. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
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15. If you have an extra 45 minutes, check out the MIT Museum.
It’s no match for the art and natural history collections at Harvard, but it has a batch of clever devices (robots, holograms), along with a series of displays showing how military contracts helped the institution grow dramatically during World War II and how brainy pranks have pervaded student culture for decades.
Once, in 1994, those wacky kids put a police car on the roof of the campus’ Great Dome. In 1982, an MIT frat crew inflated and harmlessly exploded a balloon on the 46-yard line of a Harvard-Yale football game. In 1998, the university’s home page was replaced by an announcement that the Walt Disney Co. had purchased MIT for $6.9 billion. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
16. Women might at last be gaining clout at MIT. Or not.
Neuroscientist Susan Hockfield has been MIT’s president since 2004, and over the decades, female undergrad enrollment has gradually climbed to 45%. But the numbers are much smaller for grad students and smaller still for faculty -- “the leaky pipeline,” they call it.
On the Friday night of my visit, playwright and actress Gioia De Cari addressed that issue (and a few others) in a one-woman show (since closed) at the Central Square Theater -- “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp Through M.I.T.’s Male Math Maze.”
Standing before a sold-out audience, De Cari, an ‘80s MIT grad school alumna, spun and sang tales of desperation, sexism and self-discovery among the numerati. Serious math, she mused, is really thought sculpture, built from the poetry of pattern but comprehensible to only about six people.
At about this point, De Cari grinned wickedly, pulled out her thesis and began reading aloud a passage of stupefying density. Cambridge comedy gold. If you see only one play this year about reflexive nonbinary relations, make it this one.
chris.reynolds@latimes.com (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
