Businesses Well Lived

As part of our ongoing work to capture Cambridge history, we partnered with Cambridge Local First to reach out to local small business owners and find out how the pandemic has affected their livelihood.

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Touching History; Harvard Square, The Bank and The Tasty Diner [video]

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…

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Some Aspects of the East Cambridge Story

By John W. Wood, 1956 “This paper gives a totally inadequate account of an appealingly picturesque and colorful neighborhood, the area that might have been a slum and isn’t, the step-child of the University City. “ For some reason, the local history of East Cambridge has been almost completely neglected. It is a little hard…

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Cambridgeport: Its People and Their Stories

By Michael Kenney, Winter 2011  Cambridgeport stands, geographically and socially, midway between East Cambridge and Old Cambridge, neither a traditional southern European enclave nor the remnants of Puritan New England. This issue of the Newetowne Chronicle focuses on Cambridgeport and its vibrant past through a collection of articles and a report on the celebration of…

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New Wine in Old Bottles

By Michael Kenney, 2017 Sunday brunch time and weekday happy hours, the courtyard at the corner of Broadway and Hampshire Street is a lively place, with hipsters and families enjoying the bars and restaurants grouped around the open brick-paved space. Hard to believe, but it was even more bustling a century ago, when shifts of…

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The Downside of Progress

By Doug Brown, 2017 Cambridge has made a lot of things over the centuries, not all of them valuable. Our manufacturing history has its dirty, dangerous downside, and dealing with the hazards and by-products of production has always been a challenge in this jam-packed, 7.1-square-mile city. By the end of the 19th century, the technological…

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