As trendier stores and national chains move into the area, residents say they fear for the survival of the Square's traditional mom and pop shops

Cambridge Mayor Alice K. Wolf has lived within walking distance of Harvard Square for 35 years.

In the past 10 years or so, Wolf has seen the Square undergo a gradual metamorphosis that she says she finds "disappointing." Many of the distinctive specialty shops and family-owned retail stores she used to walk by are gone, replaced by big-name chain outlets and trendy yuppie havens. Where once she saw a panoply of individualistic store fronts, she now sees a high-rise facade of modernized merchandising.

"It tended to be a unique place," Wolf says. "If anything, it's sort of getting younger. There are people over 19 who go to Harvard Square, [but] it's sometimes hard to find businesses that serve them."

Wolf says she has noticed "a physical difference, a difference in who is being served [and] a difference in Harvard Square's difference from other places."

It is impossible not to notice. The yuppification of Harvard Square, long foreseen by city planners, municipal officials and Cambridge residents, has become an unavoidable reality.

Harvard Study

A 1984 study by the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the city's Community Development Department states that "penetration of the Square by regional and to a lesser extent national chains...is transforming its general character, raising rents while making it less specific as a place. These operations are attracted by the high volume of business in the Square just as they might be attracted to a particularly thriving shopping mall."

The study, entitled "Development in the Harvard Square Overlay District," goes on to note that "in the current market, specialized bookstores, music shops and service businesses are at an increasing disadvantage and will be forced to leave the Square or move to side streets, basements of second-story spaces."

Those facts are no surprise to any longtime denizen of the Square.

Lifetime Cambridge resident Cornelia B. Wheeler, who served on the City Council from 1958 through 1970, says she can no longer do her day-to-day shopping and errands in the Square, as she was once accustomed to. "Now for me there's nothing left," she says.

But Wheeler adds that "if you are in the middle of an urban city you can't expect to keep it a small town."

According to Howard D. Medwed, vice president of the Harvard Square Defense Fund--a citizens group that tries to control development--concerned residents can do little to put the brakes on the build-up in the Square.

Because of the large amount of land Harvard Real Estate owns in the Square, if it opposes downzoning measures which would slow down development, it can activate a state law which requires seven votes in the City Council to pass downzoning petitions, instead of a simple five-vote majority.

Harvard consistently opposes efforts to downzone, Medwed says, and "the seventh vote is almost impossible to get."