Former Cambridge Mayor Walter J. Sullivan has a tale to tell.

Once upon a time, Harvard Square was a small gathering place with two restaurants, three supermarkets, an ice cream store and a movie theater.

The Square was a place where families would go to buy their groceries, where teachers would go to play with "the kiddos" after school and where, just every once in a while, people might go for a good time.

"In the old days, no one had too much money," the 72 year-old Cambridge native explains. "We used to go the Square just to buy an ice cream."

The Coop? It once was a small bookstore on the corner of Brattle Street. BayBank? An old-fashioned cafeteria. Store 24? The University Theater, a deluxe movie house complete with reserve sections.

Sullivan recalls that he was sitting in that theater on December 7, 1941, when he learned that the U.S. had declared war on Japan.

Sullivan, who has lived 40 of his 72 years in the same flat on Putnam Avenue, leans back into his soft living room chair and smiles.

"It used to be a real nice, nice neighborhood," he says.

There are no longer many story-tellers like Walter J. Sullivan. For most long-time residents of Cambridge, the fairy tale is over.

Call it development or call it a disgrace, the fact of today's Harvard Square remains. In the past two decades, the Square has become Cambridge's equivalent of Grand Central Station.

People may stay for a day, a week or four years, but eventually everybody just passes through, residents say.

From photo-happy tourists to drunken college students, more and more people seem to think Harvard Square is a nice place to visit, but not a place to settle down.

And the recent influx of short-term visitors means that residents like Sullivan are hard-pressed to find a reasonably priced loaf of bread in what used to be the center of a quiet residential district.

Franchises

Many Cambridge residents blame the shift in the Square's dynamics on the growth of franchises. Every year, it seems, more of the mom-and-pop stores that used to fill Harvard Square are being replaced by bigger and shinier chain establishments.