Touching History; Harvard Square, The Bank and The Tasty Diner

The closing of the beloved Harvard Square restaurant The Tasty in the late 1990s was a source of tension in Cambridge. Filmmaker Federico Muchnik documented the controversy in his short film, “Touching History; Harvard Square, The Bank and The Tasty Diner.”

From the filmmaker: “Touching History tells the story of the re-development of Harvard Square’s Read Block. The film combines interviews with archival materials to take the viewer through the hows and whys of the project, introducing audiences to the necessary, sometimes polemical, but always compelling relationships that exist between the public and the private sector. At the film’s core is the inevitable push and pull between conservation and development.”