OxyContin plays a role in heroin increase

By Rick Guinness

Published: October 31, 2005

Police are seeing younger heroin addicts, as well as many who have switched to heroin after using drugs such as OxyContin.
OxyContin is an effective painkiller designed to help people in severe distress, said Anthony Pettigrew, spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at its Boston headquarters. But when it became news people were using it [...]

Small businesses circle wagons to capture shoppers

By Marc Levy

Published: October 31, 2005

Laury Hammel, Frank Kramer and Simon Shapiro discuss Cambridge’s business environment at a Cambridge Local First meeting held Oct. 27, 2005, at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. The three are leading the “shop local” effort. (Photo: Schuyler Pisha)

Laury Hammel, Frank Kramer and Simon Shapiro discuss Cambridge’s business environment at a Cambridge Local First meeting held Oct. 27, 2005, at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. The three are leading the “shop local” effort. (Photo: Schuyler Pisha)  | read this item

The small-business owners are gloomy, gloomy, gloomy.
The summer was wretched, the fall is proceeding poorly, the winter likely to be lost to the high cost of keeping warm. The shoppers are going to malls, or superstores and discounters such as Target, or buying online.
In Harvard Square, there’s desperation over the lack of customers, the national-bank [...]

Hauntings are plentiful, but they’re not always scary

By Marilyn Fernandez

Published: October 31, 2005

There’s a ghost at Harvard Square’s Harvard Lampoon building, seen decorated for the historic humor magazine’s Halloween pumpkin sale Oct. 29, 2005, but its occupants haven’t lost their sense of humor. (Photo: Lawrence E. Miller)

There’s a ghost at Harvard Square’s Harvard Lampoon building, seen decorated for the historic humor magazine’s Halloween pumpkin sale Oct. 29, 2005, but its occupants haven’t lost their sense of humor. (Photo: Lawrence E. Miller)  | read this item

A haunted sphinx lies in Harvard Square, brick upon brick with outstretched paws. Built in 1909, it houses the oldest U.S. humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon, and has a lot of personality.
Possibly too much.
Curator Joe Hickey will laugh if you ask how many rooms are inside, or if there are any hidden passages. He can’t [...]

Heroin traffickers drive around laws

By Rick Guinness

Published: October 31, 2005

Police patrol Inman Square on Oct. 30, 2005, as reports of drug use flare in Cambridge. (Photo: Ken S. Kotch)

Police patrol Inman Square on Oct. 30, 2005, as reports of drug use flare in Cambridge. (Photo: Ken S. Kotch)  | read this item

Heroin is here, and it’s cheap. The people of Inman Square say they can see it every day, in the form of needles left in bathrooms, open-air drug sales and loiterers from the nearby methadone clinic, which, like many others in the area, is full to capacity, unable to take one more patient until another [...]

Always enough room at Sandy’s sessions

By Marc Levy

Published: October 31, 2005

Players wedge themselves into Sandy’s Music for an October 2005 Monday old-time music jam sessions, including John Ostwald, Len Katz, Richard Schwenterly, Rebecca Bearden and Bob Miller. Sandy Sheehan stays behind his PC. (Photo: Lawrence E. Miller)

Players wedge themselves into Sandy’s Music for an October 2005 Monday old-time music jam sessions, including John Ostwald, Len Katz, Richard Schwenterly, Rebecca Bearden and Bob Miller. Sandy Sheehan stays behind his PC. (Photo: Lawrence E. Miller)  | read this item

Blocks away, where Central Square’s nightclubs dominate and black-clad youth throng sidewalks to smoke, the muffled sound of amplified rock has become mere background. The lively, crisp sound leaking onto the street from Sandy’s Music, though, still startles, even after a dozen years of Monday night jam sessions.
Passers-by glance into the shop in surprise, drawn [...]

Missing in actually

By Marc Levy

Published: October 19, 2005

“Harvard Square is in crisis,” one shopkeeper said tonight after a two -hour public brainstorming session on the square at Christ Church, and the sentiment was hardly unique. While the event offered optimism alongside group critiques of the area, the afterparty was distinctly dark