Wind Shatters Window At Henrietta’s Table

Glass shattered and sprayed onto lunchtime diners at Henrietta’s Table during a particularly strong wind storm last Friday, causing chaos in the upscale Charles Hotel restaurant and sending one woman to the emergency room.

A strong gust of wind knocked over a pole from the restaurant’s awning at around 1 p.m. The canopy twisted and spun off, smashing into a glass wall below and spraying shards onto about half of the customers in the restaurant, according to several witnesses. One woman was sent to the emergency room with non-life-threatening cuts to the cheek.

A Henrietta’s employee said the restaurant uses a safety glass that breaks into little cubes instead of shattering into pointy, more dangerous pieces. The employee did not wish to be named, citing company policy. A manager at the restaurant declined to comment.

A spokesman for the Cambridge Police Department (CPD), Frank Pasquarello, said that the incident “wasn’t a police matter.”

“We didn’t even dispatch a car,” Pasquarello said.

Katherine Vaz, the Briggs-Copeland lecturer of creative writing, had taken her three thesis advisees out to lunch at the restaurant to celebrate the completion of their first drafts. The group had just finished their meal when the wall came crashing down.

“It happened with such force that it was like a bomb exploding,” said William H.D. Frank ’06, one of the students eating with Vaz. “It was pretty terrifying. Everyone was screaming.”

Emily S. High ’06, another advisee, said she turned just in time to avoid being hit in the face with glass. She said she and the others ran to the far side of the restaurant to avoid the glass pieces that continued to swirl in the dining room because of the strong wind.

Many of the restaurant’s customers fled before finishing their food—or in some cases, before paying for it.

“People instinctively got up and ran,” Frank said.

Vaz decided to pay her bill because “I was in shock and my waitress was standing there,” she said. “To be fair they were actually telling people not to pay. We had already been given our bill. I just wanted to make sure the waitress was tipped for taking care of us.”

Diners last night found the restaurant back to normal, save for a wooden board where the shattered glass wall had previously stood.

Vaz said her California upbringing had taught her to deal with earthquakes and other sudden crises. “To me it’s part of that fatalistic California psyche that things can happen in nature out of nowhere, making you feel suddenly and completely out of control,” she said.

The shaken group retired to the hotel lobby afterward to collect themselves, where Vaz immediately connected the incident with the challenges of creative writing.

“It was a kind of out-of-the-ordinary meeting with a thesis advisor,” High said. “It makes the whole senior thesis problem seem a little more light.”

The creative writers made a pact before leaving the scene. All of their revised theses will contain the words “flying glass” in the final draft. It will be “a code for each other,” Vaz said.

High likened the event to an “action movie.”

“You think that in such a nice hotel you are safe from the elements,” she said. “But apparently not.”

—Staff writer Shifra B. Mincer can be reached at smincer@fas.harvard.edu.