In a feedback session shaping the next five-year plan for the Central Square Business Improvement District, there was enthusiasm for the organization’s cultural leadership and a wish list with ideas that peered into a foggy future with ideas from a distant past.
At the April 25 meeting in the organization’s offices, filmmaker Elmer Hawkes said he wanted a community theater like Off the Wall Cinema, a self-described “Coffeehouse of the Arts” that shut down in 1986 – long enough ago that he had to describe it to others at the meeting. “It really was off the wall,” Hawkes said, describing its eclectic and often obscure programs.
Another attendee described wanting to see a rooftop film screening series, much like a drive-in program. It’s important to have spaces to screen “stuff you don’t see at AMC,” he said.
Attendees also wanted to see the return of the World’s Fair, a street festival with music that presented multicultural vendors’ wares from 1993 to 2005.
“Bring back bowling!” one woman said, to widespread agreement. (The downstairs stage at The Middle East was opened in 1988 in a space that was once a bowling alley.) There was a lot of appetite for multigenerational places such as the Good Times Emporium, an Assembly Square space – closed since 2008 – that “combined the best and worst of a Chuck E. Cheese’s, an indoor Go Kart track and a sports bar,” according to The Tech.
Founded in October 2019, the BID spends on programs paid for out of mandatory fees collected from its property owners. A majority of Central Square property owners voted in February to extend the organization’s funding and status for another five years, spurring the need for an “action plan,” as district president Michael Monestime called it. Staff from Colorado’s Progressive Urban Management Associates consulting group facilitated the meeting, a final call for in-person feedback that adds to its work speaking with more than 200 local leaders.
An online survey has received more than 500 responses and is still available for comment, but the consultants said they will soon make formal recommendations to the BID.
Big-city vibrancy
Much feedback for the organization – and Central Square – was positive. Former Cambridge mayor Kenneth Reeves called it a “combination of limitless skills” that has helped the BID become an asset for the area. (Though Monestime returned the compliment: “We stand on this guy’s shoulders,” referring to the fact that Reeves first explored the idea many years ago.)
There was resounding enthusiasm for the district’s nightlife and entertainment, with one person calling the square “the only place in the area that really reminds me of New York. It’s chipping away little by little, but it’s still here.”
The square has “a soundtrack that is due to the Dance Complex,” Reeves said, referring to a hall for classes and performances that’s stood at the heart of the square for more than a quarter-century. “That doesn’t exist anywhere else I’m aware of.”
The Starlight Square shutdown
Cambridge Arts executive director Jason Weeks started the meeting by calling the work of Monestime’s team in expanding arts and culture programming in the area “night and day.”
Some of that work has been done by programming at Starlight Square, an open-air complex made of scaffolding and scrim on a city-owned parking lot at the height of the Covid pandemic to allow people to gather for entertainment, shopping and other gatherings in a safe outdoor setting. The city made tickets free for all, and Lee Mikeska Gardner, artistic director of Central Square Theater, applauded that at Starlight “we have all kinds of performing arts [from] all kinds of cultures,” that draw crowds.
“People who won’t come into our building, for whatever reason” come to Starlight, Gardner said.
Central Square resident and poet Aparna Paul said she would leave her windows open in the summertime just to hear the sounds coming from Starlight, but not everyone enjoyed it as much. In the past couple of years Starlight faced licensing troubles as some neighbors complained about noise, and the BID began shortening its hours of operation.
When the city clawed back promised Covid-relief funds to find “a path to permanence” that could resolve the noise issues, Monestime announced March 4 that Starlight would shut down and be decommissioned in July after only a half-season – despite city staff saying the money was taken away because they intended to work with the BID on building the permanent structure.
Safety, identity and business
Independent of what happens with Starlight, attendees hoped to see reinvestment in other cultural organizations. Gardner and executive director of The Dance Complex Peter DiMuro wanted to see more funding for live performances at their decades-old arts institutions, which can also host smaller-scale performances welcoming to marginalized artists.
There was also discussion of what’s not working in the square.
Safety was a common concern. One woman, emphasizing the difference between longtime members of the unhoused community and what she framed as more hostile newcomers: “I love the unhoused community, but even they’re afraid of the new energy that’s around.”
City councillor Ayesha Wilson echoed that: “Am I okay to do that walk back to my car,” she said, “or do I need to call an Uber?”
Reeves noted the lack of nightlife for Black people in the square, citing an interaction with a colleague: “Ken, where do the Black people go?” Harvard Square is going to have a couple of Black venues, Reeves said, “but what’s going on in Central? Black folks don’t have their something, something that is sort of spiritually black.”
A former Popportunity vendor specializing in reusable fashion, Aelen Unan, said she didn’t feel there’s a place for her in Central and wanted more welcoming resources for businesses like hers – as Starlight had been in hosting her Ninawa Zero-Waste Clothes for two years in its Popportunity market.
Part of the puzzle
Zoning is a core concern, one that many other things hinge on. Reeves expressed his contempt for Market Central, a development that dominates Lafayette Square where Massachusetts Avenue meets Main Street, and other properties where he said “people realized they could sell for $30 million.” There’s pressure and incentives for longtime property owners to sell in Central, which ultimately threatens everything that makes it a notable cultural district in the first place, and can affect businesses of all kinds.
There is only so much a BID can do in the face of a housing and affordability crisis, attendees acknowledged.
Part of the puzzle is to find ways for successes to stay.
For Paul, who is an organizer for the Wednesday night poetry slams taking place at The Cantab Lounge, larger, more accessible art spaces lack: “We max out the capacity of 75 people every week,” she said. “And it’s not accessible because it’s in the basement and there’s no elevator. And we can’t move elsewhere,” she said, because other venues are too expensive.
A stronger
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