Ipswich off

By Marc Levy

Published: June 25, 2004

The First National Bank of Ipswich is expanding rapidly. It has 12 branches, having opened one in Beverly this month, less than two months after opening its sole Cambridge branch here in Galvin Square. Next up is Portsmouth, N.H.
How is this possible, if the people running the bank — and handling calls at its flagship [...]

Squares squared

By Marc Levy

Published: June 13, 2004

Galvin Square, where I live, isn’t as great as I thought. Now that I’m paying more attention to the tiny honorary areas along Massachusetts Avenue, I notice that they’re almost as common as street signs — some disguised by the simple fact that they’re not important enough to be noticeable even from across the street. [...]

Galvin Square

By Marc Levy

Published: June 4, 2004

Instead of complaining about Porter Square, perhaps it makes more sense to secede.
Thanks to the city’s endless gratitude for soldiers and firefighters, there is no shortage of subsquares clustering about and overlapping the larger ones, along the lines of Harvard Square including Brattle Square, but obscure to the point of uselessness (as honors go, it’s [...]

Cooking some feud

By Marc Levy

Published: June 3, 2004

My lazy conjecture about Felipe’s Taqueria, the newest tenant in Harvard Square’s Garage mall, was that it was an Anna’s Taqueria in disguise — to keep its higher prices from smearing the Anna’s name.
I hypothesized this without asking the people behind the counter or even consulting the menu. (The line was too long to even [...]