The Yuppification of Harvard Square:

As trendier stores and national chains move into the area, residents say they fear for the survival of the Square's traditional mom and pop shops

Cambridge Mayor Alice K. Wolf has lived within walking distance of Harvard Square for 35 years.

In the past 10 years or so, Wolf has seen the Square undergo a gradual metamorphosis that she says she finds "disappointing." Many of the distinctive specialty shops and family-owned retail stores she used to walk by are gone, replaced by big-name chain outlets and trendy yuppie havens. Where once she saw a panoply of individualistic store fronts, she now sees a high-rise facade of modernized merchandising.

"It tended to be a unique place," Wolf says. "If anything, it's sort of getting younger. There are people over 19 who go to Harvard Square, [but] it's sometimes hard to find businesses that serve them."

Wolf says she has noticed "a physical difference, a difference in who is being served [and] a difference in Harvard Square's difference from other places."

It is impossible not to notice. The yuppification of Harvard Square, long foreseen by city planners, municipal officials and Cambridge residents, has become an unavoidable reality.

Harvard Study

A 1984 study by the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the city's Community Development Department states that "penetration of the Square by regional and to a lesser extent national chains...is transforming its general character, raising rents while making it less specific as a place. These operations are attracted by the high volume of business in the Square just as they might be attracted to a particularly thriving shopping mall."

The study, entitled "Development in the Harvard Square Overlay District," goes on to note that "in the current market, specialized bookstores, music shops and service businesses are at an increasing disadvantage and will be forced to leave the Square or move to side streets, basements of second-story spaces."

Those facts are no surprise to any longtime denizen of the Square.

Lifetime Cambridge resident Cornelia B. Wheeler, who served on the City Council from 1958 through 1970, says she can no longer do her day-to-day shopping and errands in the Square, as she was once accustomed to. "Now for me there's nothing left," she says.

But Wheeler adds that "if you are in the middle of an urban city you can't expect to keep it a small town."

According to Howard D. Medwed, vice president of the Harvard Square Defense Fund--a citizens group that tries to control development--concerned residents can do little to put the brakes on the build-up in the Square.

Because of the large amount of land Harvard Real Estate owns in the Square, if it opposes downzoning measures which would slow down development, it can activate a state law which requires seven votes in the City Council to pass downzoning petitions, instead of a simple five-vote majority.

Harvard consistently opposes efforts to downzone, Medwed says, and "the seventh vote is almost impossible to get."

"I think that what Harvard Square needs most importantly is downzoning. There are far more people who actually live in Harvard Square than you realize," Medwed says. "The progressive majority on the City Council is fully aware of the need for downzoning, [but] the Independents on the council are fully in support of expansion and big business."

According to Medwed, the business boom has hurt the Square economically as well as socially. "The New England economy right now is in a downturn and the people who favor development are using this as an excuse to turn down the controls," he says. "The things we liked about Harvard Square have been hurt by this development."

Does Might Make Right?

For the owners of small businesses, especially, the reality is becoming increasingly harsh. Property values in the Square have skyrocketed in the past decade, and rents have followed.

"With all the intense development pressure and greatly increasing rents over the past decade, it has become true that you have to be a national chain to afford to move in," says R. Philip Dowds of Cambridge Citizens for Liveable Neighborhoods, a group that lobbies for citizens' concerns. "This is not, for me, the basis of a sound retailing market."

But Dowds, too, says that because of the demands on the market from students, tourists and suburbanite shoppers, "change is to some degree inevitable."

Although Cambridge residents have made some concerted attempts to stabilize the development, forming the Harvard Square Defense Fund and introducing various downzoning petitions to the City Council over the years, their efforts appear for the most part to have been futile in the face of the economic and social realities.

Dowds attributes part of the problem to the fact that many of the small business owners rent their properties from Harvard Real Estate or other large developers, and so do not want to cause a scene and antagonize the people they rent from. "Some of the smaller landlords are reluctant to get out in front, saying...the business is deteriorating," he says.

According to Wolf, much of the developmental environment in the Square is rooted in the dichotomy between the needs of small business and national business.

"The smaller stores have one kind of agenda and the property owners have another...a lot of it is economics," Wolf says. "As long as you have a situation where if you build up and up you'll make money; that's going to happen."

But not all owners of small businesses are worried about losing their corner of the Harvard Square market. In fact, some say they welcome the extra business that the national chain outlets draw.

Paul Floor, manager of Discount Records, which has been at its location on JFK St. since the mid-1960s, says that his store's unique personality has a definite place in the Square, despite increasing competition from other music outlets like newly-opened Tower Records.

If anything, he says, Tower brings more business to his store. "I don't think there's anything you can do about it. I mean, money talks," Floor says.

And for the owners of the upscale businesses that have begun to dominate the Harvard Square market, money talks very loudly indeed.

According to store manager Kristen Nelson, The Body Shop--which sells natural beauty care products--has done "phenomenal" business since it opened up at the corner of Church St. and Mass Ave. on May 31. Nelson says that the store attracts a diverse clientele, and she objects to the notion that her franchise is pushing out mom and pop shops.

In fact, Nelson says that The Body Shop Corporation has had its eye on the Church St. locale for three years as the perfect place to set up shop. "Harvard Square's always catered to people who were more environmentally and socially concerned," she says.

Like A Mall?

But Dowds contends that despite the more modern, with-the-times merchandise Harvard Square now offers, in many respects the area is becoming less user-friendly. "You cannot get a decent meal at a reasonable price in Harvard Square," he says. "The student demand brings the food down to the lowest common denominator."

And Floor says that although business at Discount Records is brisker than ever, he liked the old Square better. "Essentially, Harvard Square, almost without people noticing it, has become like a mall," he says.