"Central Square has hit some bad economic times. We hope the trend can be reversed. We are trying to create an identity, give it a positive image and get the vacancies filled."

But with city banks currently reluctant to loan the money the area needs to rebuild itself, the renaissance of Central Square seems increasingly remote, Woodbury says. And meanwhile, the complaints about the homeless continue to mount.

A Lack of Resources

From his office at 5 Western Ave., just on the edge of Central Square proper, Police Chief Anthony G. Paolillo has an ideal vantage point from which to survey the area's problems. And despite the three patrol routes which he says already go through the square, he doesn't see a cure coming out of the police department.

"The burden has fallen on the police to solve a social problem and I don't have the where-withall or resources to deal with it," says Paolillo, whose office in the city police department sits just outside the square proper. "It's not getting any better in the last three or four years--it's gotten a heck of a lot worse."

Adding to the problem, he said, is that foot patrols are encouraged to establish ties with the communities they serve, and often feel a bond with the disenfranchised that makes them reluctant to take official action.

"There is no one closer to these people than the beat officer. It is extremely frustrating--we feel for these people. He knows them as people and thinks twice about sending them here," says Paolillo, gesturing toward the city's cell block. Because of a state law to prevent suicides, the bars in the room are covered with plexiglass, creating a suffocating heat that lingers in the lungs even in the air-condiditioned hallway.

"My own officers give them a buck so they can get a glass of wine," says Paolillo clearly frustrated with the problems that plagued the square he has worked in for most of his career. "How do we solve it?"

Indeed, one of Central Square's ironies is that the solutions are sometimes inextricably enmeshed with the problems.

Nestled on Albany St. at the edge of the square, a set of red brick buildings marks the beginning of the new Cambridge, a cluster of high-tech firms with names like BASF Bioresearch, Transkaryotic Therapies, and Kurzweil. But next door to the MIT plasma fusion center, at 240 Albany St., lies a complex of two trailers that seems oddly misplaced in this new industrial mecca.

This is home to the Emergency Service Center an arm of Cambridge and Somerville Alcoholism Rehabilitation (CASPAR) and only shelter in the area willing to provide beds for homeless alcoholics. Last year, the center housed 25,357 people--an average of 55 each night--in its 45 beds.

The Emergency Service Center is the only "wet" shelter in the area taking active alcoholics from Cambridge and Somerville--even those who are visibly intoxicated when entering the center.

Some of the Central Square merchants grumble about the shelter, describing it as a magnet drawing fresh crowds of vagrants to the area. But to hear Win Poor, the shelter's director, tell the story, people's attitudes are--slowly--beginning to change.

"There seems to be a split among the ranks," says Poor. "I think there is growing support for us."

Poor says that in the shelter's 11 years, not one major problem has been caused by a visitor to the shelter, pointing to that fact to show that 240 Albany St. is part of the solution, not the problem.