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Thursday, March 28, 2024

A perfect match? A candy shop and exercise outpost are coming to Massachusetts Avenue between Porter and Harvard squares. (Photos: Marc Levy)

The same conflicted twist of fate that put an ice cream shop by a gym in Porter Square has a new mismatch coming to the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue closer to Harvard Square:

At 1702 Massachusetts Ave., lawyer Yalonda Howze is opening Evelyn & Angel’s Candy Shop, where she will make and sell chocolates, candy and roasted nuts and run a soda fountain. The space held the Topaz gift store before it moved to Harvard Square.

(Unless there’s been an astonishing coincidence, Howze, a Linnaean Street resident, is also an associate at Boston law firm Mintz Levin — two years ago named as one of only 25 “Rising Stars” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and this year elected by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce as one of the “Boston’s Future Leaders.” Despite her professional success in commercial and product liability disputes and liability prevention strategies and personal successes in civil rights and immigration issues and aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina, she told the Weekly: “I’d always hoped to be a singer.” A message has been left with Howze at Mintz Levin.)

At 1764 Massachusetts Ave., the Needham-based Get In Shape for Women is opening its latest weight-loss and exercise location. The chain has more than 75 sites in 18 states. The Cambridge space was once City Housewares and the Greenward ecological gift store, which moved down the avenue toward Porter.

It’ll take a candy shopper 0.1 miles, or a three-minute walk, to suffer guilt on the way to Get In Shape for Women, or the same for someone to buy candy after a workout. The situation is a little more extreme in Porter Square, where Emack & Bolio’s Ice Cream is literally next door to a Healthworks women’s gym.