Harvard Square, where Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street and JFK Street meet, is the commercial center of one of the most intellectually dense square miles in the world. Harvard Square has been the center of Cambridge since the town's founding in 1630 — it was originally called Newtowne, the site of the new colony's planned capital before Boston was chosen instead — and for nearly four centuries the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street, and JFK Street has been the crossroads of the Harvard community and the neighborhoods that surround it. The Out of Town News kiosk in the center of the square, now a visitor information booth, was for decades one of the finest international newsstand operations in America, selling newspapers from around the world to the multilingual academic community.
The bookstores that once made Harvard Square the finest destination for book buyers in the Northeast — Wordsworth, Schoenhof's Foreign Books, the Coop — have been reduced to a fraction of their former number, but Harvard Book Store still operates and hosts regular author events. The Brattle Theatre, which has shown arthouse and foreign films since 1953, is still operating. Walk the side streets off the square and you are walking through early nineteenth-century residential Cambridge, largely unchanged.