The plan’s developers said this idea seeks to remedy a lack of information for visitors to the Square. The current tourism center, a small booth near the MBTA entrance, is rarely staffed.

Robyn Culbertson, executive director of the Cambridge Office of Tourism, said that the number one question the information booth currently gets is, “Where is Harvard Square?”

Travelers are sometimes not able to have this question answered, since the kiosk is manned only sporadically by volunteers.

“A lot of people ask for info, so it’d be nice to have,” Steven Zedros, owner of Brattle Square Florist, said about an information center.

But among those who lamented the potential demolishing of the current Out of Town News, many made reference to the newsstand’s long history.

Charles M. Sullivan, the executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, said that the current building was constructed as a railway stop in 1928. The building then served as an entrance to the MBTA station until Cohen purchased it in 1984 to house the news operation he had been running since 1955.

The kiosk came under the protection of the Cambridge Historical Commission as a national historic landmark in 1979. In order to adapt the structure for reuse as a newsstand, Cohen had to receive approval from the Commission.

The planners behind the new update of Sheldon Cohen Island kept this in mind when creating new designs for the building.

“We want it to maintain the character and the transparency,” said Sullivan, who was aware of the HSBA preliminary plan. From offering a window on the world, the stand might go to literally being made of windows.

But Patel said that despite the decline in print media sales in Harvard Square as in all parts of the country, he would be sorry to see the unusual newsstand, which vends papers from around the world, disappear from the busy gateway point of the Square.

“It should be retail. People come from all over the world and would like to get news from their country,” Patel said.

ROUGH DRAFT

Alumni from the Class of 1962 visiting for their 50th reunion said the island already looks very different from what they used to see, when it was surrounded by two-way streets without safely navigable crosswalks. They said that the construction of the past 50 years has improved the area’s aesthetics and pedestrian security, but many were hesitant about further changes.

“The less electronic application the better. There’s already plenty of that,” said Henry S. Horn ’62.

In addition to the screen, the prospect of stadium seating drew negative reactions from several Square business owners, who theorized that it might prove a place for homeless residents of the Square to sleep at night.