The Out of Town newsstand in Harvard Square reopens Friday as the Cambridge Kiosk, a hub for community events and tourist information.
The opening ceremony from 10 a.m. to noon includes guest speakers, music, refreshments and a ribbon cutting – a celebration of of the kiosk’s activation after five years of closed doors and a reported $3.3 million in updates and an introduction to it as a “reimagined space,” in the words of Candice Beaulieu, executive director of the Cambridge Office of Tourism.
The structure at Zero Harvard Square operated originally as a headhouse for the Harvard subway station and famously became home to Out of Town News in 1983, after the newsstand had operated next to the headhouse beginning in 1954.
In 2017, the City of Cambridge created a Harvard Square Kiosk and Plaza Working Group to establish a vision for the structure for public use. When the Out of Town News closed in 2019, CultureHouse, an urban design nonprofit with an office in Somerville, took over the space for eight months, testing functions and running events and programs, said Aaron Greiner, executive director of the organization.
Construction at the plaza began in 2021; while kiosk construction is complete, construction on the plaza is expected to continue until the fall of 2026, according to a timeline posted online by the Department Public Works.
The working group chose the Cambridge Office of Tourism and CultureHouse to program the new kiosk together – as a “a return to what the space served as at the height of the Out of Town News days, with a bit of a shift,” Greiner said.
Out of Town News “specialized in bringing people information from across the world” when it was difficult to do so, and when “it was actually very easy to get local information,” Greiner said.
“We now live in a world where that’s a bit flipped,” Greiner said. The name of the structure is stylized as “KiOSK” to highlight the “i” as representing that it is “a place for information,” he said.
A focus of the kiosk will be on reviving the community space of a newsstand with a bigger emphasis on local connections, he said.
The Boston Institute of Nonprofit Journalism will occupy the kiosk for at least the month of June with an exhibition of iconic and historical Cambridge publications chosen from among the David Bieber Archives. Bieber owns a nearly 2 million-piece pop culture artifact collection from the past century that he stores in a warehouse in Norwood.
“Newsprint is supposed to be disposable,” Bieber said. “I want people to see what journalism was like – what was sold at Out of Town News.”
The exhibition includes copies of The Cambridge Observer dating back to 1880 and a blown-up version of Lou Reed’s poem about Nini’s Corner, a newsstand that used to be across from Out of Town News.
Beyond pop-up exhibitions, CultureHouse plans to host music events, art installations and workshops with “a focus on highlighting and connecting” with local communities, marginalized communities, residents and tourists alike.
The volunteer staff of the Cambridge Office of Tourism, many of whom are former customers of Out of Town News, will “introduce people to what Cambridge is,” Beaulieu said.
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