Harvard Square Classic Cafe Algiers Closing Forever Sunday | Hacker News Reader

Harvard Square Classic Cafe Algiers Closing Forever Sunday

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119 pointsdanielmorozoff75 comments

Sad. I have fond memories of the place through grad school, Viaweb, and the beginnings of Y Combinator.

It was notable for unreliable service. About 70% of the things you ordered would actually arrive at your table. But the atmos was great, and the ibrik coffee was strong.

You'll be glad to know its (well earned) reputation for unreliable service survived to the end. Algiers was an institution and will be sorely missed.

I don't see the big deal. It's just a restaurant, it will be replaced by another one, and even if not why does it matter?

Routine and nostalgia are both very powerful.

When institutions die, they take some of our memories with them. Without any cues to recall the old memory, it becomes a sort of neural dark matter that lingers within us but can never be accessed. Because people strongly tie their identities to their memories, in a way we lose a part of ourselves. Old friends and family can help here, providing throwbacks that revive memories on the brink.

While not a Havard alum myself there were traditions and parallel institutions at my alma matter that existed long before my grandparents did.

There's something to be said about the culture that these places provide and the atmosphere that is forever lost when they close.

Something might replace, something may not, but the tradition will be reset.

>It's just a restaurant. As opposed to being what, a nuclear reactor? I'm curious what type of institutions you consider important, and see if there are any parallels between those and a restaurant.

It has sentimental value to some people

While I've never lived in Boston Cambrigde, my friends would take me here every time I visited them at Harvard. It was a place with an unique atmosphere. Sad to see it go. Woodside bakery and cafe is now gone after 40+ years (landlords wouldn't even give them the chance to renew). It's sad to lose community gathering spots.

I used to skip class in high school to go drink turkish coffee, chain-smoke, and discuss life, poetry, code, and philosophy at Cafe Algiers. I think I learned more there than I did in class. Sad to see it go, kicking myself for not dropping in last time I was in Boston, but all things must pass.

Farewell, Algiers, thanks for all the memories and conversations.

Is it my skewed perception or have cafes stopped being places to drink coffee and have great discussions. They now seem to be mainly filled with people on laptops or on their cel phones.

I also miss European cafes with waiters...

Just my personal observations over the past 15 years or so, but I think laptops and headphones killed the cafe.

Sounds like a business plan for Cafe Faraday. "No wireless signal, guaranteed!"

Wow, how is this not a thing?

Great idea.

They're just another place to do homework or work now. Not sure where people discuss things in real life nowadays.

Cigar lounges and boxing gyms.

Please tell me this isn't a joke!

Cinemas, during the film :)

It's getting harder and harder to find a place for a good conversation. I thought this piece explored the idea well. It can be really frustrating if you're looking for a place for a coffee (or pint) and a chat.

Bars are too loud and Cafes are too Quiet - http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/bars_a...

While that's a good piece, in my experience it overstates the situation a lot. Not that I go to them a lot, but there seem to be plenty of bars/pubs where music isn't blaring. Yeah, most are probably pretty crowded and noisy on a Saturday night but not sure when this wasn't the case.

As for cafes, I pretty regularly meet someone in a Starbucks or whatever to have a discussion. I'm probably not going to talk about my top secret plans for world domination there--but, again, I'm not sure at what point in time I'd be comfortable discussing something that the next someone the next table over could overhear.

Before they were mainly filled with people reading newspapers and writing in notebooks. Discussion still happens when people find it valuable.

Well, come over to Europe!

I share your point of view, so if you're ever in my part of the world, I'll be happy to buy you a coffee in exchange for a conversation.

Well, the little town in Germany I went to school in used to have four awesome family run cafes with great service and even better products. I believe there is now one left. Instead there are now self service bakeries and fake Starbucks.

What country are you in?

I'm currently in Germany, too, but the small town I live in has only one Starbucks and plenty of traditional coffee shops. The one Subway that opened here had to shut down again because locals continued to go to the hole-in-the-wall pizza slice vendor across from them. (They sell exactly one kind of pizza and about three pasta al forno dishes, but lines are huge on weekend nights.)

It depends on the venue. Almost every time I go to Houndstooth Coffee on Congress here in Austin I bump into someone I know and spend time catching up. The majority of people there are usually talking, not working solo. I can think of other coffee shops and cafes here that are the same.

Your comment brings memories. When I landed in US, fresh off the boat, this is what I implicitly expected of a café. So it was a significant culture shock to run into the typical Starbucks'ish café.

Thankfully Austin, TX had pretty good ones too. Metro on the drag was quite awesome, not particularly good coffee (but that's missing the point).

I had a very awkward date there once; at least I thought it was a date -- she brought a friend.

That and what I remember to be uncomfortable cafe chairs and super sweet Turkish coffee, (and possibly egregiously large mediocre hummus plates) will live on in my memory for a bit longer apparently. Makes me so nostalgic!

This also reminds me of the watch store by the Harvard Square T main exit closing suddenly -- the owners were reportedly spotted on planes to another country with large suitcases of watches.. So in the canon of Harvard Square shop closings, Algiers is probably not in the top 10. Still, an institution.

EDIT: The Handa family story is pretty interesting. Boston Globe had an update in 2012: https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/04/21/return-alpha...

Even back in the late 90s / early 2000s, my friends and I felt like Harvard Square was becoming progressively less interesting -- favorite bars and cafes making way for cell phone stores and banks. Seems like a trend -- extrapolating backwards, Harvard Square must've been a nonstop party back in the mid 1600s....

Sounds like NYC as well. So where do all the cool kids go now?

Harvard student here - I would like to know as well...

Somerville :)

This is actually true.

Eh. Somerville is real quiet, except when HONK or whatever are going down. I enjoy it, but it's not that kind of scene.

Visit Aeronaut on a Saturday.

I haven't been there in a while. Maybe I'll do just that...

As a Somerville resident... what? We're cool? Are you guys talking about that one bar in Davis with the great cookery, or the Tuesday death-metal night on Highland Ave or Slumerville Brewery or what?

Probably thinking of Union Sq :) Even the New York Times thinks Somerville is hip: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/travel/out-of-the-shadow-o...

I was! I live on Bow St/Somerville Ave. :D

Hey now. You can get some good eats at Sarma and Highland kitchen.

I've never been to Highland Kitchen, but shhhhh, we do not talk about Sarma!

Montreal, seriously. I grew up in Cambridge, Montreal blows the Boston area art/culture/music scene out of the water ;-)

5 hour drive but USD goes pretty far these days up in Canada; definitely worth a road trip to get a taste of Europe in North America.

Small mountain towns that will go unnamed.

Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Maybe 5 years ago, but Bushwick has been absorbed into the real estate/media industrial complex. Look at KCMO or Atlanta instead.

Where the rent is cheaper, always.

Lisbon

Also Chicago Bank of America took over Filter Cafe and Bucktown was worse for it

My folks were there in the 1960s. Their stories are wild, and I don't know that they are exaggerating much.

My ancestor's neighbor attended then (one of about 20 or so students in the Harvard class of 1655 of whom about 2/3rds droppped out in protest over a 4th year being added to the formerly 3-yr bachelor's degree) and ran up a pretty large bar tab across the river in Boston but not in Cambridge itself, which wasn't much of a party town, apparently. (And I'm not kidding about any of this.)

Damn it, I remember the days when one could sit there inside until 2am in the morning smoking and drinking coffee until closing then driving to Boston sea port watch the airplanes land at night. Good times. The place well be missed :(

One of the most memorable coffee shops I've visited. The architecture, culture, and Turkish coffee were fantastic.

I went on a first date with someone who turned out to become a close longtime friend. I worked with my cofounder for 8-hour blocks at a time wired on Turkish coffee (he preferred the mint tea) as we built our first product (DNA Nutrition) and raised our first angel money.

It's an amazing coincidence that my cofounder and I found ourselves in Algiers for what was the first time in many months just 2 days before they shut the doors for good.

Happy to see this make the front page. This closure stings.

This place is an excellent example of an institution that thrives because of its patrons: people hung out here for no reason other than to shoot the shit and drink tea. The food was definitely nothing to write home about.

The hummus was good.

I maintain a small list of places friends should visit when they are in Boston. Algiers was on that list. The Curious George Store and Out of Town News are on that list, but they'll soon be gone too. My recommended Harvard Square places are now Club Passim, Harvard Book Store, and Grolier Poetry Bookshop. It's a bummer.

If you are going for Hsq institutions Grendel's Den should really be on that list, they've been around more than 40 years and even won a case that went to the supreme court.

Plus daily $5 lunch specials, which basically sustained me through a startup and grad school...

It's great for me to hear that Grendel's is still there. I used to love to go there for their Sour Cream Chocolate cake.

I don't imagine Elsie's diner is there (and also Tommy's). I loved to get bagels at Elsie's of a morning, knowing that the bagel would be infused with whatever else was on the grill that morning.

Elsie's has been gone for a good couple of decades. I loved their sandwiches and thick frappes (which were called Westerns as I recall).

Any chance we can see the whole list? : )

I am curious about why you include Out of Town News. I know it is of historical interest under its original owner but I looked in the other day and it didn't seem especially interesting: as much Harvard gear, sodas, and candy as magazines and those don't seem so significant anymore.

I think it's just that it's iconic. If you had to pick a focal point [1] to meet in Cambridge, it would probably be Out of Town News for most people. But you're pretty much right. Probably no one's going to buy the newspaper from their hometown in Ireland there any longer.

The Curious George store actually isn't that old relatively speaking (from the 90s) I believe. I think it was in some way an offshoot of another Harvard Square bookstore (Wordsworth) which went out of business at the same time that lots of bookstores did. (There was a time when I would regularly make a weekend trip into Harvard Square in part to do the rounds of bookstores and record stores. Most are long gone.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

I used to hang out there all the time in the '80s. My most memorable moment would have to be the time I complained to the waitress about the cockroaches that scurried from beneath my plate. Her answer?

"What do you expect from a restaurant that's in the f*cking basement?"

Strangely, that experience didn't stop me from returning to Algiers…

As a grad student and later denizen of the area, I loved to hang out at Cafe Algiers. I have fond memories of a young waitress dumping a scalding hot pot of coffee onto my lap, then barely saying "sorry". At least they didn't charge me for the coffee.

Algiers was nice in every way. Wish I could have read a book over tea there one last time.

Really one of the few unique places left in the square, the other ones being Passim and Pamplona I guess. And the bookstores.

I heard that it got sold, and the new owner isn't into that. Bah. I hope it's not yet another samey gastropub that replaces it. Or at least I hope they keep the interior.

I can't say I'm a particular fan of the whole Grafton Street look and menu. It's one of those things that there's nothing exactly wrong about the setting or the look. But there's a certain uninspired sameness that's sort of meh.

“Harvard is for me a synonym of decadence”

Jude Law as Pius XIII in the new series "The Young Pope" coming in a screen near you. :p

What makes it slightly worse are the odds that the space will sit unused for an arbitrary length of time. Down the street from there is a big "space available" sign that three-odd years ago was a decent movie theater; how much money someone has lost from that extended vacancy is a staggering thought. Similarly, over in Central, TT the Bear's closed last year because the property owners raised the rent; it's also now an empty space in one of the highest-value areas of town.

Cambridge is becoming more and more expensive, but at the same time becoming worse managed.

So sad to see what the square is turning into. I'm sure Leavitt & Peirce isn't long for this world, either :(

I didn't spend much time in Cafe Algiers when I was there, but I did spend a ton of time (and money) at Casablanca, which is also gone :( I'm glad I got to take my wife there at least once before it closed.

I dunno. Harvard Square's always been changing. I was walking through there yesterday and nothing a number of new restaurants and cafes--most of which weren't any sort of chain. You note Casablanca and I hadn't been there for years before it closed; IMO it turned from a sort of funky place to another sleek midpriced restaurant/bar probably a couple decades ago.

My impression is actually that it's the Kendall Square to Central Square to Harvard Square corridor where there are new shops, restaurants, etc. going in these days. For a time, the center of activity seemed to have shifted to Inman Square but I don't sense that's so much the case any longer.

From what I’ve heard, Harvard Square was a whole lot funkier 40+ years ago. It’s been consistently trending toward gentrification / yuppification from then to now, with ever fewer interesting shops run by weirdo oldtimers and more and more stuff that you could find in any upper-middle-class neighborhood anywhere in the country. Not to mention bank branches on every corner, and much less social/cultural diversity among the neighboring residents.

That's probably somewhat true. (And it's certainly true of Central Square--though, to that, I pretty much say no loss.) But the advent of chains like Starbucks and Peets is pretty much universal and there's probably still a fair bit less of that in Cambridge than in other places. Sure, various old institutions close their doors over the years--and what replaces them is inevitably not as "funky"--but there are still a lot of locally-owned stores and restaurants in Harvard Square that have been there for ages.

Sad. Algiers was a good place with a nice atmosphere to sit and read for a few minutes. I'm not too worried about the Square loosing it's feel though - new places will pop up and develop their own lore.

I was surprised to find out when Forest Cafe closed that it had been there since 1935

The last time I went to Alden & Harlow mentioned in the piece it was excellent

At least Cafe Pamplona is still chugging along. Not as great atmosphere as Algiers, but still a decent spot, especially in the summer.

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