Posts Tagged “central square”

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.

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This morning, like many Sunday mornings, I headed down Mass Ave to what’s always a difficult brunch choice, Mariposa Bakery on the right, and Cafe Luna on the left.   Today I went left.

Cafe Luna has spiffed up a bit of late, and I definitely approve.  When I arrived near 11am, it was close to empty but by noon there was a line out front.  They have a full brunch menu, but I tend to stick with the smaller savory items, such as the breakfast sandwich (bacon egg and cheese with spinach grilled on a ciabatta, $4.95) or the healthy wrap (egg whites, spinach, cheese and roasted red pepper in a whole wheat wrap, $4.95) and of course coffee.

Cafe Luna is also the source of some fine gelato and free wifi, and they have a scrabble set too.  I will forgive them for once stocking “puffo” flavor.

Sunday brunch is augmented by live jazz most weeks.  The usual combo seems to be Hiro Honshuku’s Trio La Luna, with Honshuku on flute and EWI, Casper Gyldensøe on guitar, and Alex Raymond Busby Smith on bass.  Last time I was there a quartet was playing but I didn’t get their name.  If you can ID them, I’d be hapy to link, they were quite good.

If you arrive early, don’t get too comfortable in the window, that’s where the band will start setting up.

Maybe Central Square isn’t going to the dogs after all.  This weekend I caught a performance of a stage adaptation of one of my favorite books ever, Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.  The show is closed now, and you can read better reviews of it in the Phoenix for example.  I enjoyed it a great deal, but more than that, I’m happy that it was put on in a new theater space in my neighborhood in collaboration with another neighbor, MIT.

If you don’t know, the Central Square Theater opened this summer or fall at 450 Mass Ave, on or near what I think was once the site of Pho Republique.  The production of Einstein’s Dreams is the work of something called the Catalyst Collaborative, a joint venture of MIT and Underground Railway Theater (URT) for “creating and presenting plays that deepen public understanding about science, while simultaneously providing an artistic and emotional experience not available in other forms of dialogue about science.“  How cool is that?  In addition, I spotted MIT Prof. Robert Jaffe’s name on the advisory board – you might remember him from another excellent MIT arts collaboration, the MIT-Photographic Resource Center gallery at the Center for Theoretical Physics.  And yes, the show did feature blackboards.  The next Catalyst Collaborative joint is going to be Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo – with puppets! – in conjunction with the Cambridge Science Festival in the spring.

One should’t have to choose, but I’d probably take a theater over a police station as a neighbor.  But I’d certainly rather have police patrolling the neighborhood than actors.