Public meetings this week look at how Covid affected high school graduation rates, reforming the city’s Plan E charter, planning for a cohesive Alewife neighborhood, two potential Neighborhood Conservation Districts and a remake of The Garage in Harvard Square.

Big changes are coming to the Cambridge Historical Society – so big that you’ll begin to see it in a whole new light, starting with the most fundamental of things: its name.

Public meetings this week look at the future of public safety, a vision for Harvard Square, how Neighborhood Conservation Districts are created and run, and climate change-friendly buildings; check in with the DPW, city water utility and Eversource; and wade back into Middle East politics.

Benjamin F. Olken partially financed his MIT engineering degree by swapping or selling secondhand goods. After graduation in the 1930s, Olken began a tiny bicycle rental business – and by the 1970s was catering to a booming market with rentals (tandems extra), sales, maps and touring guidance.

Harvard Square’s Garage mall would be remade under a proposal by owners Trinity Property Management with expanded restaurant and entertainment space below ground; street-level shops and eateries with more access from sidewalks; and offices on five stories overhead. 

Black History in Action for Cambridgeport has been awarded a $110,000 matching grant for exterior restorations at St. Augustine’s African-Orthodox Cathedral, established in 1921 at 137 Allston St.

A Fayerweather Street School class in the 1980s spent five months studying a stretch of Huron Avenue, with students from age 8 to 11 interviewing the elderly, shopkeepers, customers and passersby, surveying, mapping and finally publishing an intensive snapshot of the era.

The Cambridge Historical Society is rebranding after 116 years as History Cambridge, with among its first public events under the new name coming June 8 and Aug. 10 to the Starlight Square outdoor entertainment complex: “Cambridge Love Letters.”

Cambridge’s Basket Club was a women’s community service organization in the 19th and 20th centuries that sewed linens for donation to hospitals, orphanages and other charities – like many Cantabrigians did during the spring and summer of 2020.

From its creation by a group defined by religious and political extremism, Cambridge has been the home of people with strongly held convictions.