a thousand furnished rooms

Yet Central Square has only a tenuous hold on its role as the municipal center of Cambridge. In the classic tension of town versus gown, Central Square is every bit of town as Harvard and MIT are gown. It has stores that most Harvard and MIT students have never visited and likely never will have to--discount stores and dollar-amas, Goodwill Thrift Stores, and convenience stores that really are Keno parlors that happen to sell cigarettes and candy bars. It has a few bars that attract a younger crowd, but many more that don't--the sort of places that used to be called "Taps"--where older men nurse a few drinks for hours.

And it has street people. I started to write "homeless people," but I honestly don't know if they are homeless or not. Many of them are fighting one demon or more. They talk to themselves. They wander aimlessly. They ask you for money--some of them more menacingly than others. They idle at the benches, at the corners, and in the cavernous Dunkin Donuts where I get my morning coffee. One hot day this August, a giant of a man stood stalk still in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue, stopping all traffic, and then lay down. He didn't budge when first one pair of cops, then another, tried to rouse him. I watched for about 10 minutes, some EMTs arrived, and I moved on. The other day I watched a man wretching into a trash barrel, his female companion, nonplussed, waiting next to him. A couple of months ago, a handsome young black man sprinted by me on the sidewalk, three uniformed cops huffing and puffing behind him. No one took much notice.

You get the picture.

Yet despite these problems, Central Square has a lot of good things to point at. You can find almost any kind of restaurant in Central Square. It cornered the Boston-area market on Indian food ages ago, and you can walk for five minutes through Central Square and find excellent Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, Bengali, Ethiopian, and Tibetan food. The last few years have seen upscale restaurants move in, but the mix of restaurants is far more interesting than any single one. I have guessed, but have yet to prove, that you could eat at a different restaurant every day for several months before starting to repeat yourself.

And it has vitality. Central Square is never empty, and it is rarely quiet. It has the dollar-amas and the thrift stores, but it also has bookstores, record stores, artisan shops, ethnic food stores, and more liquor stores in a few blocks than any neighborhood should have. Cheapo Records, the first used record store that I haunted, is still there, as are independent book stores and a Ten Thousand Villages, which sells fairly traded handicrafts from around the world.

It is all these things together that make Central Square so appealing to me. It is the good and the bad, the seedy and the hip, the way it struggles and the way it somehow thrives. When I climb the stairs out of the subway in the morning, I know I'm not stepping onto some chic avenue or into the hermetic seal of an office tower. I'll duck in and out of Dunkin Donuts, fend off an angry beggar or two. And then I'll make my way down the wide sidewalk of Massachusetts Avenue, and take in a few minutes of Central Square before reaching my office and the business of the day.