“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“O tempora o mores!” - Cicero
One JFK St. is, by any objective measure, a beautiful piece of property. You could argue it’s the nicest in the Square. Settled snugly in the acute angle created by the bifurcation of Mass. Ave into Brattle and JFK, the building is a charming combination of marble foundation and red-brick upper levels. Its least attractive feature is without a doubt its first-floor tenant: the self-styled “The World’s Only Curious George Store.”
More than anything else, the store is an assault on the senses. Primary colors, towering product displays, and decorations hanging from the ceilings create a swirling claustrophobic nightmare made worse by the piercing cries of children pawing over the newest Lego set. While a poster stuck in the window by the entrance claims that the store “seeks to celebrate Curious George, [authors of the Curious George book series] the Reys, and their local roots,” the merchandise has a decidedly non-literary bent.
And the stuffed Georges! Perched on seemingly every available vertical surface sit hordes of stuffed Curious Georges. Curious George as a doctor; as a fireman; as a pirate; as a baseball player. Two oversized stuffed Georges in red shirts (one 16 inches tall and priced at $50 and one 36 inches tall and priced at $100) claim the highest shelf at the back of the store, their dead plastic eyes gazing gloomily over their domain. Stretched taut across their simian visages are the gloomiest, grimmest mouths I have ever seen sewn onto a stuffed animal.
The real trouble with The World’s Only Curious George Store, though, is not its extreme unpleasantness. The trouble with TWOCGS is that it misunderstands the origins of its current predicament.
For those not abreast of the latest Harvard Square Business news: TWOCGS is in something of a crisis at the moment. Its landlord, Equity One, has decided that developing 1 JFK St. into a mall of sorts would be the best use of its capital, leaving TWOCGS to face the possibility that it will not have real estate in the near future.
A change.org petition, articles in numerous Boston-based outlets, and a pleading sign outside the store’s entrance urging supporters to tweet using hashtags #savegeorge and #staycurious paint the store as a Harvard Square staple in the process of being forced out by the faceless corporate power of Square gentrification—a convenient narrative based on lies, misdirection, and a cynical tug on naive heartstrings.
TWOCGS is not a tragic victim, however. The store swept into the Square in 1996 under the management of WordsWorth’s, a real bookstore with operations just down the road at Brattle St. By 2004, however, the owner of WordsWorth’s was shuttering its doors, claiming that TWOCGS was the only one of his two stores that could “stand on its own.” In 2012, its current managers took over, introducing toys in addition to books in an effort to bolster sales among a consumer base less and less interested in the written word.
Ultimately, the store rode to success on the wave of kitschy gentrification that so ravaged the Square’s once-distinctive culture over the past half-century. It was started and has remained a monument to kitsch. Harvard promised us Veritas and the Square gave us Lego sets and a volume called “JavaScript for Babies” masquerading as children’s literature.
The World’s Only Curious George Store does not have any editions of the Bible. If they did, though, they would be wise to take a look at Galatians: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
