Harvard Square
A love story
Catherine J. Turco
“HARVARD SQUARE ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE.” Spend any time there, and you’re bound to hear that lament. Yet people have been saying the very same thing for well over a century. So what does it really mean that Harvard Square—or any other beloved Main Street or downtown—“isn’t what it used to be”? Catherine J. Turco, an economic sociologist and longtime denizen of Harvard Square, set out to answer this question after she started to wonder about her own complicated feelings concerning the changing Square.
Diving into Harvard Square’s past and present, Turco explores why we love our local marketplaces and why we so often struggle with changes in them. Along the way, she introduces readers to a compelling set of characters, including the early twentieth-century businessmen who bonded over scotch and cigars to found the Harvard Square Business Association; a feisty, frugal landlady who became one of the Square’s most powerful property owners in the mid-1900s; a neighborhood group calling itself the Harvard Square Defense Fund that fought real estate developers throughout the 1980s and ’90s; and a local businesswoman who, in recent years, strove to keep her shop afloat amid personal tragedy, the rise of Amazon, and a globalizing property market that sent her rent soaring.
Harvard Square tells the crazy, complicated love story of one quirky little marketplace and, in the process, reveals the hidden love story Americans everywhere have long had with their own Main Streets and downtowns. Offering a new and powerful lens that exposes the stability and instability, the security and insecurity, markets provide, Turco transforms how we think about our cherished local marketplaces and markets in general. We come to see that our relationship with the markets in our lives is, and has always been, about our relationship with ourselves and one another, how we come together and how we come apart.
Available at the Harvard Book Store, the Harvard Coop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and bookstores near you
Praise for Harvard Square
“Catherine J. Turco brings a novelist’s subtle sense of character, place, and pacing to an incisive, truly new consideration of a universal, though often invisible, fact of life: how we relate to where we live. And, on a deeper level, how we relate to change. A twenty-first-century Jane Jacobs, Turco’s intellect, compassion, and commitment come through on each page.”
— LEA CARPENTER, AUTHOR OF ELEVEN DAYS AND RED, WHITE, BLUE: A NOVEL
“This book is an intellectual and emotional revelation about why street-level marketplaces—the places where people dine and shop, meet others, and feel part of the scene—mean so much to us and why this ‘love story’ is inherently fraught. It is original and insightful about both markets and people.”
—CECILIA L. RIDGEWAY, AUTHOR OF STATUS: WHY IS IT EVERYWHERE? WHY DOES IT MATTER?
“Turco uses the example of Harvard Square, a neighborhood she knows well and loves dearly, to examine the role of marketplaces in our lives. She shows how we develop affective ties to these dynamic markets and then deplore the changes that market forces bring about. This book raises important questions about the tensions between markets and communities and the extent to which we both crave and resist change.”
—MARY WATERS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
“You will simply fall in love with how Turco draws you in and how she guides you to appreciate the paradox that markets are both source for and threat to what is sacred and intimate in our lives.”
— EZRA W. ZUCKERMAN SIVAN, MIT
“Turco’s history will forever change my daily commute of walking through Harvard Square. She provides amazing insight into the changes that have happened and will continue to happen and demonstrates that those who observe that the Square is changing are repeating a claim that has been made for centuries.”
— MAX H. BAZERMAN, HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
“Harvard Square is an emotionally gripping historical ethnography, powerfully connected to both the archive and to the lived experience of our attachments to a real street-level market and the people within it.”
—PETER BEARMAN, COAUTHOR OF WORKING FOR RESPECT: COMMUNITY AND CONFLICT AT WALMART
“A lovely, well-told story that will change how you think about markets, marketplaces, and perhaps even your own shopping.”
—JOSEPH L. BADARACCO, AUTHOR OF STEP BACK: HOW TO BRING THE ART OF REFLECTION INTO YOUR BUSY LIFE
Harvard Square, 2022
In front of Harvard Square T
Catherine j. Turco
CATHERINE J. TURCO is an economic sociologist and the author of The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media (Columbia, 2016).
She teaches at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she is the Michael M. Koerner (1949) Professor of Entrepreneurship and associate professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategy. Turco is a graduate of Harvard University, from which she received her BA in Economics, MBA, and PhD in Sociology.
She lives in Harvard Square with her husband, Philip, and their dog, Winona.
Harvard Square: A Love Story
Published 2023 by Columbia University Press