Word: gifford
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With the Shops by Harvard Yard, HRE had an opportunity to revamp what Harvard Square Defense Fund president Gladys P. Gifford calls the "dark hole" that was Holyoke Center. This citizens advocacy group--composed of about 500 Cambridge residents and business owners--negotiated with HRE as the company made plans to remodel the Holyoke arcade. They were hoping for stores in keeping with the Square's quirky atmosphere. They were disappointed...
...think it's much more for tourists than we had hoped," Gifford says. The stores are, indeed, devoted to tourists who make impulse purchases and shop for small gifts, not staple items. According to Gifford, a "Where's Cambridge" video and souvenir shop may soon move into the arcade, clinching the "Shops'" role as a blatant tourist trap...
...festival a la Faneuil Hall, HRE is changing the very qualities that make Harvard a spectacle. At the same time, Harvard Square is losing bookstores and other shops that have been important to the students, professors and Cantabrigians who live and work here. "It's a residence for people," Gifford points out. "It's not a DisneyWorld...
...sense, the Shops by Harvard Yard seems to be a rather clever profit-making move. According to Gifford, HRE deliberately pursued the Profitable switch form large stores to small ones. The big, older stores like The Cambridge Shop had longstanding contracts that tended to favor the storeowner over the landlord. By replacing the old standbys with tiny stores, HRE can increase the amount of rent it receives...
...prose didn't seem to faze her. "My position is not to take a position," she says. "I sell books, and allow people to have their say." Yet she admits that some of Stern's material bothered her, especially his verbal assaults on her other clients, like Limbaugh and Gifford: "It is not my job to censor Howard Stern, although I have to say it was very painful to sit there and deal with the fact that he had some nasty things to say about some of my friends...