I managed to buy Bonnie Raitt several rounds at Jacks one night, does that count as Harvard Square?
Or The Orson Welles? where does Central Square start? The Plough?
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Everything begins and ends at the Plough.
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Yep, I remember Harvest from when it opened in 1975. I was a poor undergrad and one of my graduate student tutors said we were all invited to meet some of the really famous faculty members at Harvest, and weâd have to pay $20 for our meal. She said they wouldnât meet students at any other restaurant. It was 1976 and I didnât have $20 to spend for one meal. I lost out on that âopportunity.â
That whole complex was architecturally interesting for DR (Gropius, etc) and other tenants, including Crate and Barrel. Years later I worked in a Harvard office in that complex. The HVAC was horrendously bad with air pouring through the beautiful glass. The Harvest outdoor garden dining after the several remodels was beautiful. Probably still is; I havenât been back for at least a decade.
Very close by was the AR, Acoustic Research store. My husband is still sad he never bought their most expensive speakers. We still have the less expensive speakers he bought around 1976.
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oh wow. The Harvard expansion to Allston isâŚwell, I wonât say more than to state that in my opinion, a really bad move for many reasons. Moving the ART/ Loeb there!!!
Great âHarvestâ story!
I first heard about what became the WWW while a grad student at Stanford in the 1980sâŚnot tech, art history. One of my fellow students knew someone then who worked at the Media Lab at MIT. He came to give us art history students a presentation about how some day, weâd be able to see real time images of street fronts, see the outside of restaurants, âclickâ on the building and be able to see the menu of the restaurant.
We didnât believe him, but we were intrigued at being able to compare visual images on a computer without needing a slide projector and slides.
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Really great stories!
The H chemistry department had a tradition of letting a few grad students take visiting speakers out to lunch, with the department footing the bill. Typically it would be Grendelâs or Iruna. My turn came around when a famous professor from Columbia U visited, and I said letâs go to Harvest. We all really enjoyed it. I think that was the last of the grad student lunches, at least while I was there.
Just saw an article in the LA Times about a house purchased by Marc Andressen, a principal developer of the original Mosaic browser for the WWW. Some people have done rather well off of HTML.
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I think the Orion Welles would be considered Harvard Square. Not only great films, but also one of the better restaurants.
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A more recent Harvest story is the ventilation system in the bar. During the last remodel they put in a highly efficient (and expensive) system to sweep cigarette smoke out of the bar. Within a short time, however, Cambridge banned indoor smoking. It might be one of the safest places in the time of Covid to grab a drink indoors.
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Gilbert Stork or Ronald Breslow ?
My old man had a Acoustic Research XA turntable that he ran through a no-name preamp and a 35 watt Tube amplifier that he and I built from a DYNAKIT into KLH 6âs. The sound was actually pretty impressive.
Passing Thru and I abused that turntable for YEARS and it just kept working.
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by the time i took it to college, you had to kick start it by hand spinning it before playing an LP to get it to 33 rpm. Otherwise it would play at something like 8 rpm.
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A lot of the move has already happened for theater, I think. The last shows at the Oberon on Arrow were this week and that space has been put out for lease. Not totally sure about the ART, though my theory is whatâs going to go there will be the new building for the econ department that Penny Pritzker just gave them 100 million dollars for. (This is total speculation on my part!)
The new buildings in Allston where theyâre moving to are really nice, fwiw.
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Stephen Lippard, of cisplatin fame. He later moved to MIT and served a term as department chair.
Harvard chem had a weird (and wired) connection to Columbia around then. Famous for its âevery tub on its own bottomâ approach, Harvard charged $$$ for use of its IBM mainframe. Instead of paying Harvard, the chem department leased time on the 360/91 at Columbia, connecting to it via a leased phone line with a line printer and card reader off the main lobby in Mallinckrodt on Oxford Street.
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Oddly my sense is that although weâve gained ubiquity as a result of digital music, weâve lost fidelity. Those analog systems were capable of amazing dynamic range. I coveted a pair of large Advents back then and I still do.
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I remember it would run backwards if you started it that way by hand.
Handy for when Paul McCartney was dead.
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Henry Kloss is my hero.
Come on, Acoustic Research, KLH, Advent, Cambridge Soundworks and Tivoli?
I bought units from every one of these companies.
Most are STILL working.
I listen to my fathers 1964 KLH model 21 FM radio in my basement shop.
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Mine too. I have a pair of set of Cambridge Soundworks speakers (tiny high range, subwoofer) still in use. They have a bit of Kloss DNA. People say they used to see him riding his bike around Harvard Square, if I did I didnât recognize him.
And what about Bose? Cambridge certainly had an outsized influence on audio.
Another Harvard Square culinary institution people might not bve aware of is the Radlciffe Schelsinger Library. Collection of works on American cookery and cookbooks. Julia Child donated her collection. I had the good fortune to get to interact with her there on a number of occasions. Canât say I knew her well, but she was amazingly unassuming and down-to-earth. Very generous with her time and happy to discuss food with anyone. No pretense whatsoever - saw her buying Campbellâs soup once at Broadway Supermarket.
After reading the tributes to John Madden I think he might be described as the Julia Child of football.
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I second that. Itâs an amazing collection and Iâve found many useful things there.
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Has anyone mentioned Croninâs or the Wursthaus?
not yet, but to continue my (probably annoying) theme of bringing this whole thread around to when I was a letter carrier, Frankie Cardullo (aka the Mayor of Harvard Square) was annually good for an Xmas tip of mediocre-but-donât-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth champagne. It was always a nice, sort of continental gesture and he made a point of passing it over himself.
I donât really remember CroninâsâŚ
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