my latest article - a short travel piece on harvard square

http://www.hindu.com/mp/2009/02/16/stories/2009021650210500.htm

The city of Boston, unlike most American cities, is visibly historic. The North End teems with Italian restaurants and little red brick houses stacked against each other like squatters on either side of narrow roads. The row houses on Commonwealth Av enue bring to mind the gilded age and old family money.

Throw in Boston’s various landmarks as the centre of the American struggle for independence and a hurried tourist could very well overlook its little twin — the city of Cambridge — were it not for the college it houses: Harvard.

The first time I rode the subway system that connects Boston, it was by chance that I got off at Harvard Square. The station is situated in a circle of sorts, right in the middle of the square with Harvard College behind it, the Harvard Coop in front, and streets and shops shooting off from the remaining corners.

I returned to it after three years and remembered how the busy criss-crossing streets, plied by buses and cars and SUVs, seem to bear a historical grudge against motorised transport.

The cars that ply Harvard Square appear to be squeezing themselves between its only rightful occupants — the pedestrians.

A 10-minute walk from the station’s brick landing is the home of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was here that George Washington took command of the army during the American Revolution.

The square’s unassuming 300-year-old Christ Church has bullet holes in it (safely, respectfully preserved), bringing to the fore the comparison that our old forts have too many bullet holes to preserve; the American independence struggle was a blink compared to ours. But above this short story of rebellion towers Harvard and it’s many offshoots in the Square.

One is The Grolier Poetry Book Shop, which, since 1927 has been frequented by the likes of T.S Eliot and Conrad Aiken. You can linger, if only to re-imagine what might have passed here between the greatest American poets of the twentieth century: which collection did Elizabeth Bishop pick up and where did e.e.cummings hang his art.

The Harvard Coop — short for cooperative — was formed, like most Harvard related groups, more than a 100 years ago in 1882 by students needing a place to buy books, wood and fuel for hearth fires. Today, its heavy, old wooden doors swing the visitor into an American college book and apparel store like any other.

Here, I met with a group of poets that gathered on Sundays at The Coop under the guidance of an old gentleman with a long beard and long coat who appeared to have modelled himself upon Boston’s grand old men of American letters.

Poetry, however, is not all that grows around Harvard. Punks and Goths in Mohawks, black attire and belly-piercings love the square too. A group of them once accompanied our every poem recitation with a squeeze of the Fart Cushion, an aptly named piece that emits the sound each time you sit on it.

Across the street from the Coop, bound in the curving belt of Massachusetts Avenue, is Harvard yard. Rising above it is the blue and white bell tower of Lowell Hall, former home of the Danilov bells.

They were purchased and brought to Harvard to save them from the Stalinists in 1929 and returned in 2008 to their home in the Danilov monastery in Russia.

Harvard college itself was established in 1636, only 16 years after the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth; it was named after a young minister named John Harvard who bequeathed half his estate and library to the fledgling college.

Entering Harvard yard through the tall wrought iron gates, one is immediately taken by the simple red brick buildings, the college’s deep democratic convictions that play out in faculty and students working and living alongside; the office of the President of Harvard in Massachusetts Hall is a few floors above a freshman dormitory.

Not here the heft and eternity of Cambridge University’s tall, silent spires.

Where Cambridge’s Trinity College stands grandly against a vast, uninterrupted green, Harvard’s halls are smaller; they ‘assemble’ around a crowded yard. But here too, there are Widener Library’s marbled pillars and the ornate, cathedral-like Memorial hall where Harvard undergraduates dine in the diffuse light of stained-glass windows from Tiffany.

Though its buildings might not, nomenclature at Harvard bespeaks tradition. The school of education stands on a street named ‘The Appian Way’ and an undergraduate social club named the ‘Porcellian’ is so exclusive as to make Harvardians crave.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt was not invited to join! But exclusivity and excellence are bylines for Harvard. The closed-door libraries and unseen celebrities remain silent; no matter, for in Harvard Square, it’s awe that talks.