Harvard Square by Catherine J. Turco (chapter 4)

A LOVE STORY HARVARD S QUARE

Catherine J. Turco

Chapter Four

A TRICKY RELATIONSHIP

Our adventure in time travel can help start to unravel the puzzle of why Harvard Square has always been not what it used to be. At first, that sentiment sounded like such a trite expression of nostalgia it was capable of boring even the most dedicated college research assistant. Who, after all, hasn’t heard someone from the old neighborhood lament that things aren’t what they used to be? Who, after a certain age at least, hasn’t heard themselves say the same about their own hometown Main Street or favorite urban village?

People often get nostalgic for the supposedly more authentic pasts of these places. People often get attached to their favorite old haunts. A college-town square is especially likely to provoke such sentimentality.

Our one-block stroll down memory lane—or JFK Street, in this case— offered additional perspective. Harvard Square is a marketplace, and markets change all the time. As we watched all the different forces continually roll through and transform the marketplace by carrying some businesses in and others out, one thing was clear: Harvard Square has actually, quite literally, always been not what it used to be.

Yet if it were this simple—that markets change and people get nostalgic— why do we see such recurrent upset? Why hasn’t everyone absorbed these rather straightforward lessons by now? It is not as if all the smart people passing through Harvard Square over the years have been unaware they are participating in a market or unaware that markets change all the time. The Square has been a commercial district for almost four centuries. Everyone

there knows it is a marketplace, just like everyone who has talked about the special meaning of a particular shop or restaurant has known they were talking about a commercial entity and that such entities come and go. In 1920, as the Cambridge Tribune mourned Wyeth & Co.’s closing on our block, we saw the newspaper’s staff acknowledge, “The closing out of this business comes about as one of the almost inevitable changes in business life.” Sixteen years later, as locals mourned Amee Brothers’ closing just around the corner, we saw the same newspaper remark that, of course, “in a few years the old will be almost forgotten, so readily do we adapt ourselves to change.” Nearly a century of repeated upset later, we saw how the familiar Death Discourse had evolved to incorporate its own relentless persistence so that, now, when denizens lament changes in the Square, they often begin by saying they know theirs is a time-worn lament.

If everyone knows that change is such an inevitable aspect of market life, why do they keep getting so upset about it? Why, in short, do people keep getting upset when a market acts like a market and changes on them? A quick trip back to the blacksmith’s old house can offer some perspective.

HOW MARKETS STABILIZE AND DESTABILIZE US

As much as change defined the story of 54 Brattle Street, that little dwelling taught us something else important—it taught us about the preciousness of stability in an inherently unstable world. Why, after all, was it so important to keep the Window Shop bakery going until its last refugee employees retired? Why did Mary Walker, a former slave, want to ensure 54 Brattle Street remained in her family for as many generations as possible?

Walker, her children, and the Window Shop’s employees had suffered some of the most incomparable and brutal forms of instability human beings can face. They had experienced the sort of total, existential destabilization that comes from being denied basic human freedom and agency, from being completely uprooted, ripped out of one’s existing life and torn from one’s closest ties. No single dwelling or employer could give them back what had been taken nor redress all the suffering that had been inflicted upon them. However, life and work at 54 Brattle Street had offered them a small measure of stability after all the wrenching instability they had been forced to endure—and, more than anyone, they knew the value of that. That little house, once shaded by a sturdy, spreading chestnut tree, was a place where they could begin to re-root themselves in the world. It was where Mary

Walker and her family were able to reaffirm and rebuild their connections with one another and where they could begin to dream of a future that, this time, they might control. It was where the Holocaust survivors and refugees who worked at the Window Shop began to reconstruct their lives and forge new ties in a new homeland.

To draw comparisons between the sort of destabilization Mary Walker, her children, and the Window Shop’s employees faced and any other sort of instability in life is problematic. However, we can still learn from their experiences, and what they teach us is a crucial lesson concerning the human need for even just a little bit of stability amidst the sea of changes life throws our way.

Although we rarely think of them in such terms, it turns out that streetlevel markets and the shops and restaurants in them are quite like that little house at 54 Brattle Street. These markets see a lot of change pass through them, but they also offer a lot of stability and, in the process, help us feel rooted in the world at least for a brief period. They are surprisingly good, that is, at providing us with what psychologists and sociologists call a sense of “ontological security”—i.e., a basic trust that our world is stable and as it appears to be, and that our place in it is secure. Without a sense of ontological security, human beings feel unmoored. Without a sense of ontological security, we can feel a sort of existential anxiety and a disconcerting lack of control and agency in our lives.

Part 2 of this book will explore the ontological security we derive from all the different ways a street-level market like Harvard Square brings us together and helps us forge a stabilizing sense of community. For now, however, let’s consider a more basic form of ontological security we derive from these markets: the predictable, routine interactions they afford. In the Constitution of Society, sociologist Anthony Giddens lays out some of the defining features of stabilizing routines. Giddens is not writing specifically about markets—in fact, his work tends to emphasize the instability, not the stability, of modern market life—yet the image one gets from his description of routines that provide ontological security is oddly familiar: it reads like an account of an everyday visit to your favorite local shop. It reminds me, personally, of the hundreds of trips I made to Crimson Corner to buy a newspaper.

For many years, I set out from home each morning and followed the same path to Crimson Corner, crossing first Mount Auburn Street, then Brattle Street. (For a sense of ontological security, Giddens says it is important to feel

physically situated in time and space and to experience oneself in the flow of action, oriented to a task at hand.) As I approached, I saw the familiar sandwich board out on the sidewalk. It told me the shop was open, and I could go in to buy my paper. (Giddens writes that there must be a clear interpretive frame for understanding what the situation is and, thus, what interactional rules will apply in it—e.g., one is about to step into a shop for a commercial transaction, not a date or a party or a class.) Once there, I pulled the shop’s door open and entered. A little bell jingled, and Chris Kotelly, the owner, greeted me. (There should be clear markers to signal the interaction’s beginning.) I pulled my paper from the rack and approached the counter to hand Chris my cash. (There should be clear social roles for individuals to assume and orient to—e.g., customer, shopkeeper, clerk. There should also be clear physical rules for how individuals position themselves in relation to one another—e.g., one side of the counter or the other.) Chris and I chatted as we completed the transaction. I asked how business was or noted that I saw his son working over the weekend; he asked how Philip and the dog were doing or how my research was coming along. New England weather came up a lot. (There is conversational turn-taking and a shared understanding of what is tactful versus not in the particular setting.) We said goodbye, and I left with my paper. (There is a clear end to the interaction.)

Comparing my regular visits to Crimson Corner with Giddens’s recipe for ontological security, it is humbling to realize how much more than a newspaper I got there each day. Yet it’s true: on a deeper, psychological level than I ever contemplated when contemplating my morning paper, I really did experience a sense of agency and intentionality as I cut my way across the Square each morning. When I saw the sandwich board out on the sidewalk and spotted Chris standing in the back when I entered, I actually did feel reassured that the world had not changed on me overnight. When I selected my paper from among the options on the rack, if I’m being truly honest with myself, I was not just grabbing something to read once I got back home; I was also, on some level, making a claim (to myself? to the world?) about who I was as a person. And, when Chris asked after my family or my work, it reassured me that my unique presence in this world had, in some small but very real way, been marked. After he and I successfully completed our morning choreography, I felt buoyed by the experience even if I didn’t often reflect upon why—that we had just reconfirmed for each other that the social fabric of which we both were a part remained intact.

Once we come to appreciate how a simple commercial transaction like buying the morning paper can provide a meaningful sense of ontological security in our lives, we can start to see how the many routines of market life are constantly stabilizing and grounding us in similar, and similarly profound, ways. When we walk down the same streets each day, the sight of familiar signs and shop windows reassures us that the world is still as we have come to know it. All the small daily, weekly, and seasonal market rituals we develop help lend our lives a reassuring sense of predictability, whether it involves us stopping at the same coffee shop on the way to work each morning, or meeting up with friends for a drink after work at the same bar each week, or buying one’s favorite notebooks and pens from the same stationer before the start of each school year.

Most important, we begin to see how all the different attachments we forge in the context of the market’s routines and within the market’s spaces help stabilize and ground us. The most meaningful of these ties help define our unique sense of self. Sunday bagels with one’s father or seeing the same show with loved ones every year offers more than comfort through consistency; these become key scenes and recurring motifs in the compositions that are our lives. They become a part of who we are. More casual connections, like the sort formed across a counter or standing in line, help ground us in the way my daily exchanges with Chris Kotelly grounded me. When a waiter asks if you want “the usual” or a bartender begins to prepare your favorite drink before you’ve even asked for it, that small gesture reassures you on some level that you have been seen and recognized as the distinct individual you feel yourself to be. Even when we are simply making our way down the street during a crowded weekend street festival or on a Tuesday afternoon errand, the shared co-presence of so many other human beings offers its own form of reassurance. As we make our way through the world, weaving ourselves successfully around each other, we continually, implicitly take one another into account and mark one another’s existence.

In short, markets support and call forth all sorts of routine interactions that help us trust in the social world we inhabit, and trust that we are securely rooted in it. Yet we rarely think about them this way. We think of how religious rituals (e.g., weekly Shabbat, Sunday Mass) can provide a stabilizing sense of continuity to life and how they help individuals feel more securely integrated into a community. We think of how large ritualistic gatherings (whether sporting events or rock concerts or religious revivals) can evoke a sort of collective effervescence that builds solidarity and reaffirms

people’s shared humanity. But markets, too, can help generate feelings like these. They can help us feel rooted in our sense of self, in our community, in our world.

We underappreciate this aspect of markets, but it has been right in front of us all along, both in our daily lives and in the academic literature. Past studies of both urban and small-town life contain all sorts of evidence that streetlevel markets provide us with the streetscapes we come to expect, the daily rituals that stabilize and ground us, the third places in which we regularly interact and connect with one another. Yet so often these things have been attributed to other important phenomena like the “neighborhood” or the “character” of a place. Such a focus has not been wrong, but it has diverted our attention from the market’s fundamental role in all this; diverted our attention from the fact that it is the market in the place that is giving us so much of what we have attributed to place over the years.

Once we appreciate the market’s role in offering such stability and security, we begin to unravel the puzzle of why people are so continually upset over market change. We understand better why “it’s not what it used to be” is such a persistent lament of market life. The answer lies in the very nature of the market itself—in how it offers us both a lot of the same and a lot of change. This dual nature creates a deep, abiding tension for us, for it means the very same thing that is so good at giving us all this precious stability is also forever changing on us, destabilizing us in the process. That which gives us such a reassuring sense of ontological security also takes it away. Who wouldn’t get upset by that?

Our time-traveling exercise in the previous chapter revealed just how relentlessly unsettled a setting a street-level market can be. Its instability arises from multiple, complex factors. Prior work has tended to train its gaze on one of the many forces at play and give that one thing sustained attention, whether it be residential dynamics, or technological disruption, or the interests of real estate owners and urban elites. However, monocausal depictions overlook just how multiple and complex the forces for change are in these markets and what that implies for the overall instability of the setting. All of these forces interact with one another and amplify each other’s destabilizing effects. A business may be in the midst of navigating creative destruction in its industry when an exogenous shock like a financial crisis hits the entire economy or when something changes in the local property market. The proximate cause of Wyeth & Co.’s closing in 1920 was that its new landlord had doubled the rent, but part of why the independent grocer could not

afford that new rent was that its sales had fallen in recent years because of competition from chain stores; not to mention that when the rent increase hit, one of the business’s two partners was ninety years old and had scaled back his involvement in the business.

Once we appreciate how numerous and layered the changes are that continually transform the commercial landscape, we begin to appreciate more clearly just how difficult—at times, how impossible—it is to predict when those changes are coming and what exact form they will take. We also better appreciate just how challenging it can be to even understand them once they have arrived. Some of what unfolds at the street level is embedded in complex macro-level transformations concerning national and global markets, capital flows, and technological innovations that may initially be obscured from our street-level view or that might at first seem unrelated to our daily lives. One struggling Harvard Square shop owner purchased her business—a woman’s clothing boutique—in the early 2000s after having worked at the shop for fifteen years. She was a skilled craftsperson who had developed her own clothing line and had finely tuned instincts for what styles and products appealed to the shop’s customers. But she was not much into technology at the time. Within two years of taking over the business, she began to feel the effects of online commerce, and they only grew stronger from there. Looking back, she said, “I thought I knew the business. I’d worked in it. It seemed like not much would change. Little did I know!”

If it is hard for a seasoned business owner like her to see change coming, it can be even harder for us as consumers to see it. Some drivers of change, such as a longtime landlord’s or proprietor’s death, or a fire, or a global pandemic, are essentially impossible to predict. According to Giddens, if one had a perverse desire to create ontological insecurity in another, one might start by generating unpredictable and hard-to-decipher disruptions to the individual’s everyday life. That is to say, one might drop that person into a market.

When I graduated from college, Crimson Corner was still called Nini’s Corner, and it was in a different location. It sat just across from the start of our block in chapter 3, right at the busy intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street, and JFK Street. At some point after I graduated, the owner of Nini’s Corner, Philip Nini, began to have health issues, and his nephew, Chris Kotelly, took the family business over and renamed it. (Philip’s father—Chris’s grandfather—had founded the business in 1963.) When I moved back to the Square, I went to Crimson Corner as I’d gone to

Nini’s Corner before, and I didn’t much mark the name change. The place seemed mostly the same to me as when my father and I had stopped to browse its outdoor racks each Sunday. Then one day the shop was gone. The building’s landlord had forced Crimson Corner out so that a new restaurant chain could move in. Chris managed to keep his business going by securing a small space around the corner, but newspaper and magazine sales had been sliding in recent years, so when he reopened, the shop carried more tourist-oriented Harvard insignia than periodicals at its new address. I still went in for the newspapers and magazines, but now they filled just one narrow rack in the corner of the shop. Then one day there were no more magazines at all.

Even when we see and welcome market changes that are coming, like those that bring us exciting new innovations or offer us greater convenience or better prices—even when we as consumers drive the market’s transformation with our evolving habits and preferences—those very same changes can confront us as exogenous and destabilizing. When the magazine rack disappeared, it’s not like I wasn’t reading news online myself by then. It’s not like my own purchases of print periodicals hadn’t declined in the years leading up to Crimson Corner’s forced relocation. Yet still I felt shaken when I saw the shop gone from its old corner that first morning; and still I felt a pang when the magazine rack disappeared from the back of the store. And, when Chris closed his shop for good after the business was hit hard by the pandemic, I felt much more than a pang.

In 2011, when Amazon.com reported that Cambridge had the highest per capita online purchases of books of any large U.S. city, many Harvard Square denizens genuinely mourned the closing of bookstores and lamented the changing face of the marketplace. Even when reactions like this seem irrational or hypocritical from one angle, they make sense from another: We can still miss routines that we helped hasten the end of, because those routines were a taken-for-granted part of our everyday lives and meant so much more to us than the transaction itself. I missed wandering the aisles of Tower Records looking for CDs even as I embraced the iPod when it came out. Like many patrons of the Harvard Book Store, I hope never to have to miss wandering the store’s aisles even though I have at times ordered from Amazon.

We feel even more acutely destabilized when it feels as if market changes have been foisted on us against our will. Think about the profound sense of vulnerability and dislocation a proprietor like Chris Kotelly must have felt when he and his whole life’s work were uprooted simply because a landlord

decided that higher rent could be obtained from a new tenant. Or, if we can sit with the uncomfortable feeling for a moment, consider the hurt and perhaps even betrayal someone like Chris might have felt when the woman who used to come in every morning like clockwork to get her newspaper started to show up more sporadically. And it’s not just proprietors who can feel destabilized. As consumers, the simple arrival of an out-of-town real estate investor and eviction of a few local haunts can drive some of us to rage—or at least to hurling snowballs.

In a chapter titled “Pissed Off in L.A.” in his book How Emotions Work, sociologist Jack Katz describes an emotional response many of us have had at the street level and which is quite useful for understanding why market change, especially when it feels forced upon us by others, can be so unsettling. Katz investigates the source of road rage. He concludes that it arises from the sudden shock of ontological insecurity drivers experience when they get cut off. Driving along in our cars—like heading out to buy the newspaper or grab our morning cup of coffee—we tend to feel a certain continuity and control over our life’s course. We are literally making our way through society, and, as we travel on our respective journeys, we feel a sense of agency and also that our presence is being marked and recognized by all those other drivers with whom we are implicitly coordinating. However, all of this is jarringly disrupted when someone cuts us off. When someone cuts us off—when, say, a fancy investment firm pushes out the businesses we have come to know and expect and replaces them with ones we don’t—we are jolted out of our taken-for-granted sense of ourselves and the surrounding environment. We can feel unsettled, temporarily disoriented. Sometimes anxious. Oftentimes angry—after all, the person who cut us off acted like we were not even there, as if our path through the world was not significant enough to be taken into account.

Market change at the street level is a cutting off of sorts—from the streetscape we have come to expect, from the routines that have grounded us, from the ties that have rooted us to one another and to our place in the world. Sometimes it is an even more profound, more existential, cutting off. When the market changes because it has started attending less to us and our preferences and more to the next generation and that generation’s preferences, it reminds us of our mortality—and there is nothing that provokes ontological insecurity quite like that. Most of us of a certain age can empathize with what those older men in the 1960s must have felt when they could no longer go to the barbershop they’d been going to for years not because

they or their preferences had changed, but because the world had. I felt a bit of that when the magazine rack disappeared from Crimson Corner.

And therein lies the tension and therein lies the trickiness: markets are very good at giving us ontological security, and they are very good at taking all that security away from us. They continually stabilize us and destabilize us. We attach, and they cut the tie. This is our relationship with them, and this is why it is so damn tricky. The sort of upset that has recurred throughout Harvard Square’s history and which is common to many street-level markets may sound like trite nostalgia or naïve sentimentalism, but it is more aptly seen as the result of the rather poignant, Sisyphean task we set for ourselves when we decided to live our lives in a market society. We continually seek— and momentarily find—stability and security in something that is destined to destabilize us in the very next moment.

Praise for

HARVARD S QUARE

“Catherine J. Turco brings a novelist’s subtle sense of character, place, and pacing to an incisive, truly new consideration of a universal, though often invisible, fact of life: how we relate to where we live. And, on a deeper level, how we relate to change. A twenty-first-century Jane Jacobs, Turco’s intellect, compassion, and commitment come through on each page.”

—LEA CARPENTER, AUTHOR OF ELEVEN DAYS AND RED, WHITE, BLUE: A NOVEL

“A lovely, well-told story that will change how you think about markets, marketplaces, and perhaps even your own shopping.”

—JOSEPH L. BADARACCO, AUTHOR OF STEP BACK: HOW TO BRING THE ART OF REFLECTION INTO YOUR BUSY LIFE

“Turco’s history will forever change my daily commute of walking through Harvard Square. She provides amazing insight into the changes that have happened and will continue to happen and demonstrates that those who observe that the Square is changing are repeating a claim that has been made for centuries.”

—MAX

“Harvard Square is an emotionally gripping historical ethnography, powerfully connected to both the archive and to the lived experience of our attachments to a real street-level market and the people within it.”

—PETER BEARMAN, COAUTHOR OF WORKING FOR RESPECT: COMMUNITY AND CONFLICT AT WALMART

“This book is an intellectual and emotional revelation about why street-level marketplaces—the places where people dine and shop, meet others, and feel part of the scene—mean so much to us and why this ‘love story’ is inherently fraught. It is original and insightful about both markets and people.”

—CECILIA L. RIDGEWAY, AUTHOR OF STATUS: WHY IS IT EVERYWHERE? WHY DOES IT MATTER?

“Turco uses the example of Harvard Square, a neighborhood she knows well and loves dearly, to examine the role of marketplaces in our lives. She shows how we develop affective ties to these dynamic markets and then deplore the changes that market forces bring about. This book raises important questions about the tensions between markets and communities and the extent to which we both crave and resist change.”

—MARY

“You will simply fall in love with how Turco draws you in and how she guides you to appreciate the paradox that markets are both source for and threat to what is sacred and intimate in our lives.”

—EZRA

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