Take a bow

Farewell to a Harvard Square institution

by Seth Gitell

END OF AN ERA: the only bar in Cambridge where you might find a homeless person debating a Harvard professor is closing next month.

The first time I set foot in the Bow & Arrow, it was a cold, blustery Thursday night. A guy wearing a red Budweiser baseball cap greeted me with these words: "I think the Bow, lately, sucks. There are too many yuppies now."

That was December 1990. Nine years later, the yuppies have won. The building that houses the Bow is scheduled to be renovated in February. The bar will close and isn't expected to reopen -- the owners are planning a huge rent increase.

What led me into the Bow that night wasn't just the urge to have a drink. I was a reporter at the Harvard Crimson. My editor, knowing I was a local kid, thought I should be the one to write the story of the Bow's transformation from a biker bar into a Harvard-student hangout. I spent the evening there, meeting Rick the Bouncer and all the regulars. They told me how they'd gravitated to the Bow from North Cambridge, Belmont, Watertown, and Arlington. They remembered when Bruce Springsteen did his first Boston performance at the bar (though no one seems to remember whether it was called the Bow back then). They regaled me with tales of how they stuck together. They likened their bar to a real-life version of the one on Cheers.

I wrote up the piece and then worried as our publication date approached. I didn't know how these guys would react. The Crimson headline read FROM BIKERS TO PREPPIES, BUD HATS TO CHINOS. The first person to tell me what she thought was a woman who lived in my dorm. She didn't like the way I had treated the pretentious Harvard students who were making the Bow their playground. "How could you do that to us?" she scolded.

But there was no need to worry about the Bow regulars. They loved it. They hung the feature up on the wall by the door -- with a photo of the gang for everyone to see. (I swear I caught a glimpse of it during Good Will Hunting, whose star, Matt Damon, patronized the Bow when he went to Harvard.) I started spending more time there. I went for quiet beers with my friends early in the night, before the bar got crowded. I ordered a Jack Daniel's on the rocks when my friend and fellow reporter Theresa Mullin died. I finished up my drink and went back to the Crimson to write my tribute to her.

When our newspaper had our final dinner, my editor gave me a black-and-white Bow & Arrow T-shirt. At first I resented the gift, thinking that my colleagues viewed me as a simple townie. Later, I learned to value it because I realized they saw a quality in me that they -- stuffed shirts -- didn't have.

I went back to the Bow this past Tuesday night, knowing that the bar's days are numbered. I explained who I was to one regular and gestured to the Crimson article still hanging on the wall. "All those people are gone," he said. "They all moved on with their lives." Some had married. Some had moved away. Local rents are too high to keep a dedicated base of regulars anymore.

As the night wore on, I saw other people like me: guys coming in to have one last beer at the Bow & Arrow. A handful of regulars remained. Despite my early fears, they and the Harvard students had learned to coexist rather well. The regulars were lamenting the loss of one of the few bars where you could see a homeless guy debating a Harvard professor. They listed the places that have now fallen victim to the gentrification of Harvard Square: the real Tommy's Lunch, Elsie's, the Tasty. They vowed to throw one last bash at the Bow this Friday, January 21, and eventually to find a new place to re-create what they have there.

Some people are talking about a place in Cambridgeport. Others are mentioning more-distant locales. I wish them luck, but the Bow has already become an anachronism, a fossil from another age. And there's something about the energy of a special bar that's almost impossible to replicate anywhere else. Veterans of the old Eliot Lounge (now the site of Clio) have said they tried but were never successful.

After my drink at the Bow, I walked back into the cold, where I had first seen the guy in the red Budweiser cap so many years ago. The woman who chastised me about my piece is now a Fox News correspondent in Russia. And Matt Damon's a big movie star who's brought the Bow some fame.

I hurried through Harvard Square on my way out. I don't know when I'll be back to the old neighborhood. Probably not anytime soon.