Posts Tagged “02139”

Just about two years ago, I wrote about Cambridge’s Cronin Park, a triangle of green near Central Square. These days, location-based stuff is all the rage, and I was pleased to note that Cronin Park is a place on Foursquare.  I quickly became the mayor.

But when I was taking screenshots for this post, I noticed that something was off. Foursquare’s Cronin Park pin, if you zoom in on it, turns out to be across the street from the actual place – in an adjacent green patch that is authoritatively labeled by Google Maps as… James Cronin Park.  Didn’t I add James Cronin Park to Google Maps two years ago?  What gives?

A search for “Cronin Park” shows two places: map point A is next to Google’s mislabeled Cronin Park; map point B is the center of the actual Cronin Park as added to the map by yours truly in 2008.  Indeed, you can see my car parked across from the park on Franklin street.

Just to make sure, I visited the site today, and “my” Cronin Park – the triangular one – is indeed, still James P. Cronin Park, still marked by a big rock with a plaque on it.  The park across Franklin Street has no name that I could find on site, but it seems to have been anointed by Google Maps.  Neither place is mentioned at the City of Cambridge’s DPW page of parks or shown on the Park Maintenance district 2 map.

What does this all mean?  Probably not much you didn’t already know.  Google Maps isn’t perfect, crowdsourcing with curation cuts both ways, the City of Cambridge website isn’t encyclopedic.  We’ll see if this post or my efforts with Google and Foursquare make any progress in getting Cronin Park properly located and noted.  In the mean time, be sure to check in if you’re passing by.

A lot of the people who said that microblogging or Twitter was the Big Thing of 2008 or 2009 are saying that location or Foursquare is the Big Thing of 2010 or beyond.  I don’t know if Foursquare is played yet, or if Twitter already has jumped the shark, but I’m starting to worry that the actual, physical concept of location might be on the way out as businesses evaporate from downtowns, especially in my own Central Square.

Earlier this week, I noted a bit in xconomy singing the praises of Central Square as a new startup hub, singling out a particular office building and featuring a couple of its startuppy tenants.  I’m all for it, having previously noted Beta House and OpenCoffee among others.  Plus, Central is home to Harmonix Music.  Good news, to be sure.

But the day before that article, Hollywood Express closed their Central Square store, adding to a distressing list of businesses vacating Central Square and its environs.  In fact, I was both pleased and saddened to discover an entire blog devoted to the disappearance of businesses along Cambridge’s Massachusetts Avenue.  Compare for example my February 2009 post on the decline of the furniture cluster to Empty Mass Ave’s post on the same topic in February of this year.  Apparently, we’re all in this together.  Empty retail space around Central now includes the long-gone Gap, Pearl Paint, all those furniture stores, the space next to the Central Square Theater, and I’m sure more.

The other good news is that restaurants seem to be thriving even as retail suffers – Rendezvous, Four Burgers, Craigie on Main and Garden at the Cellar are all great –  but I can’t help worry that we need a bit of everything to make a neighborhood that all those fancy startup types will actually want to inhabit.

We can blame the economy for some closures, especially the furniture stores.  We can blame changes in technology and media for the demise of record stores, video stores and maybe even bookstores. We can blame landlords, that’s always popular.  I think we often forget to blame ourselves for not shopping, working and doing business enough in our own neighborhoods and cities.

OK, it might not be the most hotly-contested category, but it’s a tasty one.  I met up with intrepid gastronaut J to check out the Plough and Stars Sunday Night Chicken and Fish Fry and we were not disappointed.  And believe me, we’ve tried our share of fried chicken.

Arriving at the Plough towards the end of a set by Frank Drake and the Aristocrats (did I mention that the Plough might also offer the best country music of any Irish bar in Cambridge?), we settled in to a booth amid an atmosphere of pubby conviviality.   The chicken and fish menu was straightforward, with a handful of combos and sides.  We each had a three-piece dinner with cheddar grits, collard greens and cornbread. I washed mine down with a Magners.

The chicken was juicy and the crust crispy and well-seasoned.  Our worst fear – blandness – was totally unfounded.  The cornbread was sweet, the collards smoky, and the cheese grits, well, cheesy. Everything in its place.  Perhaps not the healthiest dinner of the week, but most food groups were present and all were satisfying.

As we left, the Frank Morey Band was just getting started.  The Plough crowd showed no sign of any care in the world, blissfully disinterested in the looming shadow of Monday morning. If Brigadoon were every Sunday night and came with southern cooking and country swing, I think it would be something like this.

Looking for a place to get away from it all yesterday morning, I trudged a few blocks in the rain to the Atomic Bean Cafe, which had opened in the shell of Mojo Records a few months ago.  I knew I could go a few more blocks to Dado Tea for a nice savory scone, but seeing Aranciata in the case reminded me the arancini at St. Anthony’s Feast and so I ordered a ham and cheese croissant and settled in for a spell.

Wifi at Atomic Bean is free, but you have to remember to borrow (and return!) one of the secret password cards near the register.

Atomic Bean is also a gallery of sorts, and they currently feature paintings by Sara Theophall and others.  Wall text and price lists were scant, but the work is well worth a look.  Theophall’s work reminded me a bit of that of Ariel Freiberg, seen at least year’s Somerville Open Studios, where I also first met Tova Speter, whose woodgrain-based work has also graced the walls of Atomic Bean.  Small art world indeed.

I’m a big proponent of the rights of authors to profit from the sale of their work, but I’m also a fan of the first-sale doctrine that lets me give away, lend or sell my copy of that work once I legally acquire it.  So, while I am mindful that when I buy a used book (or borrow one) I’m not contributing to author royalties, I support used bookstores for several reasons:

• they make more books available to more people who are price-sensitive
• they are the only way to get books that are out of print
• sometimes, you find something interesting in a used book that you would never find in a new one: an inscription or notes, or a bookmark or some other ephemera

That last one, by the way, is something that future generations of digital book buyers will probably never know they’re missing.  See my recent posts on Kindle-related stuff for more on ebooks and intellectual property.  But it’s also worth noting that Google books, by scanning books, sometimes preserves this old stuff.  Check out page 8 of Google’s scan of a 1905 edition of Wuthering Heights for a taste.

Anyway… I popped in to my local used book emporium, Rodney’s Bookstore, this week seeking a copy of Wuthering Heights for book club. (My desire to contribute to author royalties and publisher revenues diminishes with the deadness of the author.)  I found three paperback copies in totally different editions and varying conditions, priced from $1.90 to $4.80.

One was a standard-issue trade paperback, part of some classic series.  It was in very good condition and the most expensive of the lot.

Next up, a Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic edition, billed on the Harlequin Romance inspired cover as “The Classic Novel with 763 SAT Vocabulary Words Identified and Defined!” The definitions were on the facing page to the text, swelling this edition to over 600 pages.  The bold SAT words might be a little distracting, but this one was well-proportioned and a relative bargain at $3.80.

Finally, the highbrow edition.  A St. Martin’s Press press trade paperback with a heavy paper cover, boasting the 1847 text and essays from “five contemporary critical perspectives” namely, psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstruction, Marxist, and cultural criticism.  Wow.  The downside, marked in pencil on the flyleaf, “$1.90 AS IS ROUGH” It was beat up, but appeared complete and had no highlighting or underlining, which are generally deal-breakers for me when buying a book.

Each edition certainly had its merits, but until I got my purchase home, I didn’t know the extent.  Here’s something you probably won’t ever see in your Kindle.

PS I also bought the Kaplan edition, just for laughs, and just in case I need to look up a word.  What does “Wuthering” mean anyway?