"Juan" huddles outside of Store 24, shivering. His thin leather jacket offers no protection from the 20-degree weather. He wears earplugs--the kind sold at CVS, six for $2.

Juan says he wears the earplugs so he can tune out snide comments made by passerby.

"Every evil thing that you can possibly imagine has been said to me," Juan says. "They spit at me, tell me I'm going to be dead or say they're going to kick my face in."

"See the spit on the windows here?" Juan asks, pointing to streaks of mucous plastered on the Store 24 window. "People spit on me and at me quite often."

Homelessness is never pretty, but it has long been thought things were better in Harvard Square. The people who work and study in the Harvard area were thought to be kinder, more generous and more liberal than most.

That impression, however, doesn't square with the experience of the Square's homeless. In interviews, they describe almost constant harassment.

"People tell me, "Why don't you go into detox?' I've never drank in my life," Ed A. Springman, homeless for two months, says while selling Spare Change outside of Bay Bank. "[People say] 'Get a job.' This is my job."

"Sal," another Spare Change vendor, agrees.

"I've had people throw hot coffee on me, spit on me," he says. "They say 'Drop dead' or 'I don't give a shit about the homeless.'"

Negative remarks are devastating for the homeless. "They make me feel like shit, worse than I already feel," Sal says.

John B. Hayman, who works regularly as a panhandler in front of the Coop, says the people he sees on the street seem very concerned with material things.

"Everybody will look [in the Coop] more than they will say 'Hi' to me," Hayman says. "They'd rather look at something inside the window."

"Let Him Eat Cake"

Many of their tormentors, the homeless say, are Harvard students.

"[Some Harvard students] have spit on me, some have thrown their snot rags on me," Juan says. "There were some female Harvard students who told their boyfriends not to give me a dime when they were going to give me a dollar. [The girls] said 'Let him eat cake,' you know, the famous words of Marie Antoinette."

Hayman says he thinks Harvard's insular nature contributes to students' ignorance of the homeless. "Harvard students have been conditioned in classes to think of people as less intelligent then they are," he says. 'If [I] say 'Hi', they don't say 'Hi' back."