About Cambridge

Picture a ragged and askew bow-tie, tilting low to the right, and you’ve got the rough shape of Cambridge. Harvard Square is in the knot, central among the city’s 13 official areas and their overlapping six stops on the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority train line. (Untidily, five of those stops are on the Red Line and one is isolated on the Green.)

The land that would become Cambridge was first occupied in 1630, but for its first eight years the Puritan settlers called it Newtowne. The top men in town were all graduates of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, including the John Harvard whose contributions led to the founding of Harvard College in 1636. Smart they may have been, but not very original; when they chose a name to replace “Newe Towne,” the name was Cambridge.

Cambridge was finally incorporated as a city in 1840, uniting the rival villages of Cambridgeport, East Cambridge and, uh, Old Cambridge, but some would argue the city never lost the feel of villages uncomfortably coexisting. The ongoing and halting construction of the residences and offices of Northpoint, 45 acres bleeding into Boston and Somerville, is only the latest example of this — albeit one that highlights and exacerbates, rather than ameliorates, the problem; the development will be served by Cambridge’s sole stop on the Green Line, which will be moved closer to it and farther from the rest of the city, and isn’t even named sensibly; it’s in East Cambridge, and nowhere near the existing North Cambridge.

Over the years Cambridge has been a leader in an ever-changing parade of technologies ranging from bricks and ice to Polaroid instant film. Its current specialties are high-tech, biotech and alternative energy. But Cambridge has also grown to be dominated by another specialty: higher education. Harvard College has grown into Harvard University, which has swelled across the Charles River into Boston and Allston, and overlaps here with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (moved from Boston in 1912) and Lesley University. Already ethnically diverse from immigration patterns over the centuries, Cambridge has been further diversified as a center for learning. Local government boasts that more than 50 languages are heard on city streets, and residents have the benefit of cuisines from Afghan to Tibetan and everything in between.

With 15,766 people per square mile, it is the second-most densely populated community in Massachusetts (behind neighboring Somerville) and the fifth-most in the United States. The U.S. Census estimated that, as of 2007, the median household income was $58,457, but about 13 percent of the population was below the poverty line. Although Cambridge is famed as liberal and heavy on support services, City Manager Robert W. Healey has, over the roughly three decades in office, managed to keep its credit rating the highest possible (Fitch Ratings gave the city an AAA on March 9, 2009, crediting “strong financial management” that included $92 million in free cash in fiscal 2008).

The city is represented by a nine-member city council whose members select one of their own to be mayor, and there is a six-member Board of Education in addition to a superintendent of schools.