Memories of coffee in places sometimes layer over each other; there’s been a lot of movement and those of us who remember have followed the coffee aromas across town. The space on the corner of Wendell Street and Massachusetts Avenue now holds a Pavement café where a Hi-Rise Café used to sit (now just on Concord Avenue). Before that, Hi-Rise was on Brattle Street, in the Blacksmith House where the Cambridge Center for Adult Education now sits. And to add another historical layer, the Blacksmith House was earlier The Window Shop, a wondrous pastry café offering delicacies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And Pavement, in my Boston University experience, was previously Espresso Royale, sitting on Commonwealth Avenue and offering hot bagels and reasonable coffee. Across the street from the current Lesley University Pavement was a Starbucks in recent memory, but in ancient memory it was the Shepard Drug Store, frequented by undergraduates who lived just up Shepard Street at the Radcliffe Quad. Need a map?
I am part of a Friday coffee group, one that has persisted for more than a decade and that has moved from venue to venue as the café scene has shifted. We map some of Cambridge’s change in coffee. Having begun at the Hi-Rise on Brattle Street, we moved to the next Hi-Rise on Pavement’s site and thence, when that was shuttered during the pandemic, to several other sites on spec, including the Vietnamese Cicada in Central Square. When you travel you still remember characters from each location: Hi-Rise had serious coffee people, people with whom you could talk origin, roast and brew method. Cicada had its vibrant owner and a lot of ardent regulars. We have finally (?) settled at Café Zing only to be shuttled back and now forth as Zing has changed spaces during remodeling, but still in Porter Square in what I am reluctant to call The Mix, the developer’s oddly chosen moniker for the cluster of shops and restaurants next to the Porter T stop.
There’s always a particle of regret in movements such as these, an implied comparison of the present with the past, and sometimes those measurements lead to avoidance of the new incumbent. I’ve stayed away from Pavement for no good reason, though the location is really good for my local perambulations. The coffee shop that had been there briefly before Pavement didn’t attract me, so the space fell away from my personal geography.
I’m back though, and the coffee is fine, though not a connoisseur cup. The roasts are their own and they offer their own bagels as did their Commonwealth Avenue antecedent, Espresso Royale. The space still has the shape of the Hi-Rise era there, but instead of the slightly beaten-up wooden tables and chairs of the earlier time, there are interesting brightly decorated round tables with sort of Mexican or Andean motifs and a variety of other forms of seating, inside and out. I like the changing population in those seats, from early coffee grabbers who may not even sit down to midmorning appointment-keepers and stroller parents sipping on their coffees while a toddler snoozes. There’s a mix also of Harvard Law School and Lesley University, elbows adjacent and conversation divergent.
Midday there are bagel munchers and all afternoon, laptops and conferences dominate activities. Pavement’s hours are generous: daily, from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. it offers space for the consolation of coffee and the community of friends, colleagues and chance encounters. There’s continuity even in the constancy of change.
Pavement at Lesley, 1663 Massachusetts Ave., Baldwin, Cambridge (7 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily)
Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
