Word: plympton
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...landmark Grolier Poetry Bookshop on Plympton, a former hangout for poets like E. E. Cummings ’15, T. S. Eliot ’10 and Allen Ginsberg and one of only two for-profit poetry-only stores in the country, would have to spend money changing all of their mailing labels and packaging, and it may at first lose customers who have trouble finding the street with a different name. It could be enough to put the struggling bookstore, which was sold in 2006 after losing money for two years, out of business...
...Before Plympton Street was Plympton Street, it was Chestnut Street, named simply for the genus of tree that lined its curb. This was something of a tradition in early Cambridge, which also boasted Acacia, Ash, Camellia, and Linden Streets. Prior to the steeples and bell towers that now define Harvard Square, there were soaring tree trunks...
...block between Chestnut and Linden Streets stood the home of Cambridge selectman Sylvanus Plympton ’80. (That’s 1780.) He and his wife Mary died in the 1830s, and four decades later, a nostalgic city council decreed that Chestnut would henceforth be known as Plympton Street...
...point is: this city changes, Plympton Street as much as anywhere. Earlier this month, a former mayor of Cambridge proposed renaming the road yet again in honor of his Harvard classmate, David L. Halberstam ’55, who died last year after a storied journalistic career. Like Plympton before him, Halberstam once lived on the street that might bear his name—in the newsroom of The Harvard Crimson, at parcel...
Still, the idea of renaming Chestnut-cum-Plympton after Halberstam strikes some, including this newspaper’s leadership, as heresy. The post office can’t be too eager, either. But Cambridge has a long tradition of rechristening its thoroughfares: Holyoke Street was once Crooked Lane; Charles River Road yielded to Memorial Drive. In 1982, the Cambridge city council worried that Harvard was about to drop the Kennedy name from its School of Government. So they promptly turned the road outside the school’s front door into John F. Kennedy Street. It had three previous names...