Life at Harvard is also life in Cambridge (and Boston, for that matter). With a population of 101,000, Cambridge is now the seventh-largest city in the state and 41% of that population are between the ages of 18 and 29.
Cambridge (and Boston) was founded by English Puritans leaving Charlestown in 1630. Initial construction was begun upon meadowland by the side of the Charles River and was called New Towne Village; six years later a college was established there by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638, that school was named after a Charlestown minister by the name of Harvard, who bequeathed to it his library and half of his meager estate. That same year, the name of the town was changed to Cambridge, in honor of the alma mater of John Harvard and most of the Puritan ruling elite.
Cambridge was originally composed of several communities within a 22mi. radius. Over the years they broke off to form towns such as Arlington, Lexington, and Watertown. In 1846, the town that had grown up around the College was incorporated, and in the following years it combined with two larger riverside communities, Cambridgeport and East Cambridge, towns that housed communities of Irish, Portuguese, French Canadians, Italians, and Poles. In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved across the river (from a site in Back Bay, where it had been founded in 1861) to its current location near Kendall Square.
Cambridge’s radical heyday came, along with the rest of the nation’s, in the late 1960s; Harvard saw the likes of the late LSD guru Timothy Leary and a takeover of University Hall. Vestiges of ultra-liberal Cambridge, affectionately nicknamed the “People’s Republic of Cambridge” and also the “Kremlin on the Charles,” remain in some bookstores and cafés (see Revolution Books). Cambridge’s blend of intellectual achievement, enlightened politics, and integrated neighborhoods is increasingly disappearing to the same gentrification that dramatically changed Boston.
Now dominated by students from all walks of life and all latitudes of the world, Cambridge boasts an extremely diverse and unique character. Although corporate America and cookie-cutter chains are slowly replacing many family-run neighborhood shops and cafes, Cambridge somehow manages to fuse some of its old charm with a funny 21st-century type of punk-rocking, Shakespeare-reading, tourist-breeding, “R”-dropping, multi-lingualing (you try coming up with a way to say that) flair that never ceases to entertain. Too bustling for a suburb yet not quite commercial enough for a city, Cambridge sits happily, albeit awkwardly, somewhere-in-between.
