"There's water damage throughout the restaurant that is still being assessed."
That's David Oshima, the owner of Charlie's Kitchen, describing what a malfunctioning dishwasher did to his restaurant on January 28. Eight months later, if you walk down Eliot Street, the building is still dark. The beer garden behind it, once packed on any decent evening, was cleared out sometime around the Fourth of July. Nobody's said when it's coming back.
Three blocks away, on Massachusetts Avenue, a different kind of change happened almost overnight. J. August, the merchandise shop that's sat across from Harvard Yard for nearly 140 years, closed for renovations in December and reopened under entirely new management by February. And a few streets over, Harvard Book Store, 94 years old and still doing more business than at any point in its history, just announced it's opening a second location. Not in Cambridge. In Boston.
Three storefronts, three timelines, three completely different answers to the same question: who actually gets to decide what happens next. If you live around here, that question tells you more about the Square right now than any list of what's open and what's closed.
Eight Months And No Timeline
Charlie's Kitchen opened in 1951 and has been a fixture of Harvard Square ever since, the kind of place where regulars have a standing order and students bring their families when they visit. Oshima had only recently taken over the restaurant when the dishwasher failed. According to his account, the appliance kept pumping water even after its cycle ended, releasing more than a gallon a second. By the time anyone caught it, the flood had reached all four floors and fried the electrical panels along the way.
That alone would be a bad month for any small business. What's made it a bad year is what happened after the initial cleanup. Water removal finished within days. Repairs did not follow on the same schedule. Building owner Paul Overgaag has estimated the total cost at several hundred thousand dollars, and as of early July, the beer garden behind the restaurant had been cleared out entirely, with negotiations between the insurer and the building's owner still underway. There's no reopening date, because the reopening date isn't Oshima's to set. It depends on what an insurance company and a landlord agree to, on a timeline neither of them owes the neighborhood.
The Handoff That Took A Signature, Not A Settlement
Compare that to what happened to J. August. The store closed in December for what was described as renovations. Two months later, it reopened under new operator Rally House, a Kansas-based retailer that already runs more than 300 collegiate-branded stores across 22 states. The Harvard Coop, which had managed J. August since 1995 under Barnes & Noble and purchased its lease outright in 2004, made the call to bring in an outside partner rather than continue running the store itself.
The new manager, Liebert, said he'd interviewed with the Coop several times before taking over, and that the store would stock roughly 1,500 unique items, a significant expansion from what J. August carried before. Coop CEO Jodi Goldstein framed the partnership as building on the store's heritage while broadening its merchandise. Whatever you make of the framing, the mechanics are the point: this was a decision made by an institution with the authority to make it, on its own schedule, without an adjuster or an insurance claim in the way. Two months, start to finish. Not because the damage was smaller. Because nobody was waiting on anyone else's answer.
The Bookstore That Didn't Wait For Permission Either, Just In The Other Direction
Harvard Book Store is doing something that runs against the usual direction of expansion in this city. Normally it's Boston pushing into Cambridge. This time, Cambridge is going the other way. Co-owner Jeff Mayersohn announced in June that the store will open a second location this fall at 33 Union Street, inside the old Yankee Publishing Building on Boston's Blackstone Block, near Haymarket and Faneuil Hall. He's said the space's large windows and exposed brick gave him the same feeling as the original store, even though the new location is on ground with no direct connection to Harvard Square at all.
The timing isn't a scramble. The store reported its highest revenue in its nearly century-long history over the last fiscal year, and John W. and Linda Henry, who became principal owners in 2021 through their stake in Fenway Sports Group and Boston Globe Media, have been part of the decision. The Cambridge location isn't shrinking to make room for this. It stays the flagship, keeps the company's central operations, and keeps sitting inside a stretch of Harvard Square that already has more independent bookstores than most commercial districts twice its size: Grolier Poetry Book Shop around the corner, Rodney's Bookstore for used titles, The Million Year Picnic for comics and graphic novels, and Lovestruck Books, which opened on Brattle Street in 2024. Harvard Book Store isn't leaving that crowd. It's confident enough in its footing there to plant a second flag somewhere else entirely, on its own terms, on its own timeline.
What The Ground Under All Of This Belongs To
Even the pavement isn't fully in anyone's local hands. The City of Cambridge's contractor, Newport Construction, has been replacing the existing concrete pavers with asphalt at the Super Crosswalks in the middle of the Square, work timed around the Harvard Square Business Association's own calendar. The second annual Asian Night Market, postponed once already for weather, is now set for Saturday, October 3, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Brattle Street. Even a street festival in the heart of the Square runs on somebody else's schedule this year.
None of this is a verdict on whether Harvard Square is thriving or struggling. It's simply a fact about where control currently sits. Charlie's Kitchen is waiting on an insurer and a landlord to agree on a number. J. August's fate was settled the moment the Coop decided it wanted a national partner instead of running the register itself. Harvard Book Store didn't wait on anyone, because the person who owns the decision is the same person who's been making the bread-and-butter calls in that building for decades. If you're trying to read the Square right now, the useful question isn't what closed or what opened. It's whose name is actually on the lease, the insurance policy, or the repaving contract, because that's who's setting the date.
If you've been watching the same block and wondering what any of it means for the building you live in or the one you're eyeing, Masterman Elek Group knows these streets well enough to talk through it over coffee, no obligation attached.
