The view has changed since he started serving burgers on Feb. 6, 1961.
When he moved from Long Island to Cambridge at age 30--"I even had red hair then," the now white-haired Bartley says--he borrowed $10,000 to buy a grocery store at the Harvard-owned property and convert it into a restaurant.
He had always been interested in the restaurant business, Bartley says, and found a need in the Square that needed to be filled.
"When I first came here, I realized that no one had a good hamburger," Bartley says. "And that's what I wanted to give them."
Bartley has been serving burgers to the Square ever since.
"And my mother told me I wasn't steady," he jokes.
Forty years later, he says he never dreamed his restaurant would become so successful.
Bartley credits some of his restaurant's popularity to a story that ran in The Harvard Crimson in 1961.
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