‘Street Fighting Days’ overlays violence of 1970s on a still-familiar geography of Harvard Square

You could pair your next $40 lobster roll in Harvard Square with a pour of 2011 Domaine Fontaine-Gagnard La Grande Montagne – or something far more bracing: a first-person account of the square in the 1970s, when feral 15-year-olds hurled rocks at cops in antiwar demonstrations, looked for places to sleep off acid trips and, in the morning, panhandled long enough for the $1.25 needed to get eggs, bacon, toast and coffee at a 24-hour restaurant.

That’s the world of “Street Fighting Days: A Street Memoir of Cambridge in the Seventies,” over and over again until it exhausts itself after just 86 pages. It is an absolutely wild, true small book that will astonish in its comparison of eras, the recognizability of turning a corner in the text to find 200 riot cops running straight at you and realizing you’re on the street with, in 2025, an $18 kale Caesar salad where the closest thing to violence in the past month has been a disagreement over mimosas about the last good Weezer album.

While the action can be followed page by page overlaid on a Google map just by squinting and applying a Technicolor filter, the brutality and relationship with police feels strange. Even in the worst current critiques, our police force is unrecognizable from the shock troops of the book and the casual violence and contempt they have for the homeless kids of the early 1970s. Part of the tension is around the 1972 death of a 17-year-old named Larry Largey after a beating by police and a cover-up – news that led to five nights of rioting at the Roosevelt Towers public housing.

For a sense of how disorienting this is, here’s some reporting from early in the text that follows the bombing of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs at 6 Divinity Ave. – now the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. The culprits were the Proud Eagle Tribe, an all but forgotten offshoot of the Weathermen, itself a faction of Students for a Democratic Society that the FBI called domestic terrorists. Authors Lobo and Morgan M. Morgan, writing with Eric Leif Davin, are helped along with their memories by the reporting of The Harvard Crimson:

As the invaders finished trashing the center and fled the building, they left behind a small paper fire burning on the second floor and water gushing from an open pipe. Then, the Crimson said, the leadership of the march cried, “on to IBM,” and the crowd surged toward the nearby IBM building on Cambridge Street next to the Cambridge High and Latin School. There, they smashed windows and prepared to invade the building for more trashing. “Their plans were interrupted,” continued the Crimson, “when a Cambridge police car screamed west on Cambridge Street and its driver jumped out and fired two shots into the air with his service revolver.”

The mind reels that this action was the product of teens too young to have even graduated the high schools they weren’t attending. Though the pretext for all of this is demonstrating against the Vietnam War, the authors don’t disguise the pleasure they took in sleeping rough, antagonizing “the pigs” and the sheer thrill of a lifestyle of revolt, if not the piety of its moral underpinnings. “We were already rebelling against society,” Morgan writes. “Now, though, we were more than just criminal gangsters. The radicals put a label on us, telling us we were actually revolutionaries.” (This is from a section that begins: “The best riot I was ever in …”)

“It’s shocking collection of stories, I agree, but it rings true,” says Charlie Sullivan, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, who picked up a copy when asked about its veracity. “There really was a contingent of street kids – some from Cambridge, some not – who got into continual trouble during that period. They weren’t politically inclined, but loved causing mayhem on the fringes of the serious antiwar agitation of the era.”

To Sullivan’s reading of the news from the time of the Largey death and Roosevelt Towers riots, the book’s recollections “seem accurately described,” and he recalls the repeated antiwar marches and their local results. 

“The trashing that occurred during the marches was the reason that until fairly recently almost every storefront between here and Boston had roll-down steel grates,” Sullivan says. 

He does have one cautionary note from a historian’s perspective: “While the authors make it seem like the violence was widespread, habitual and almost continuous, probably only a small minority of demonstrators acted out that way,” Sullivan says. “The ones that did, though, were really into it – and so were some of the cops.”

“Street Fighting Days: A Street Memoir of Cambridge in the Seventies” is $12.50 to $14 through lulu.com and can be read in a Cambridge public library.

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