The Solution to the KiOSK Is Obvious: Turn It Back Into a Newsstand.

When I arrived at Harvard in 2014, the most cosmopolitan and glamorous place on campus was Out of Town News. Longtime denizens of the Square remember Julia Child sourcing German and Italian cooking magazines or Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen thumbing through issues of Popular Electronics at the famed newsstand.

In the 2010s, I often stopped by to grab a chocolate bar and the latest copy of the New Yorker, and I’d spot Cornel R. West ’74 buying a copy of the New York Times or a chic Graduate School of Design student grabbing the latest Architectural Digest. I never took the newsstand for granted. I grew up in a small town in Florida where one had to travel twenty miles to a Barnes & Noble to buy a magazine or newspaper, and unlike Out of Town News, they didn’t carry Le Monde or Die Zeit.

The newsstand offered Cantabrigians a vital connection with the wider world and reflected our community’s curiosity about other people and places. As commuters, students, and tourists emerged from the T station, Out of Town News was one of the first businesses they saw. Its absence since its closure in 2019 has left a newsstand-shaped hole in the Harvard Square community.

City efforts to revitalize the space have failed to deliver the kind of connection Out of Town News provided. The best replacement would be another newsstand.

Recent op-eds in The Crimson have rightly decried the building’s transformation into an underused space that has not delivered on its promise to be “vibrant” nor “dynamic.” Kate E. Ravenscroft ’26 had the most clear-eyed diagnosis of the problem, writing that the city’s $12.6 million investment in the Plaza resulted in “an empty establishment that appears to serve no one and fuels Harvard Square’s increasingly grotesque tourism industry.”

But recent op-eds calling for monuments or a greater variety of workshops miss the mark. Monuments alone won’t invite passersby to linger, and a calendar of workshops will have an uphill battle competing with the already vibrant programming offered by the University and the Square’s bookstores. Instead, the (bafflingly named) KiOSK should be restored to its original form: a newsstand.

I understand that we live in a digital world and print periodicals don’t sell at the same volume as in the newsstand’s heyday. But does that necessarily mean a newsstand isn’t viable? Casa Magazines in New York’s West Village has not only been in operation since the 1970s, but has thrived in recent years as a mecca for print culture. Like the old Out of Town News, it has a reputation for carrying hard-to-get magazines and newspapers from around the world. (I recently had a friend swing by to buy me the Cardi B issue of Vogue Arabia.)

A restored newsstand could not only reinstate Cambridge’s access to global journalism, it would also support the flourishing local print magazine scene that has erupted in the Boston area over the past few years.

It would be powerful to see Boston Art Review, House House Magazine (founded by Harvard undergrad Hengzhi Huang Yang ’27), Elastic (launched with Harvard’s support), and Duck (led by James Fraser of the Square’s Grolier Poetry Book Shop and his wife Bella Bennet) all in one place.

It would also link Harvard’s publications to the wider world of journalism — The Crimson and Cambridge Day could be offered alongside the Boston Globe and the New York Times, and the Harvard Review could sit alongside n+1 and The Drift (founded by Harvard graduates).

I find it hard to believe that Cambridge is less capable of supporting an international newsstand than the West Village. Harvard is home to over 10,000 international students, faculty, and researchers, providing a built-in audience for many foreign language publications. We are also a community of readers so devoted to print that we support five book stores, including ones that offer almost exclusively poetry and romance publications.

If there are no entrepreneurs brave enough to open a newsstand, the city should subsidize one instead of sinking further funds into the lackluster KiOSK. Taking a page out of Casa Magazines, the newsstand could also generate revenue by offering an affordable cup of coffee. Coffee and print media could offer passers-by a reason to linger at the Harvard Square Plaza post-construction.

A convivial, accessible, and intellectual hub at the center of the Square would restore the connection and curiosity that Out of Town News represented while meaningfully fostering community. Cambridge once let us pick up the world on our way out of the T, whether we were a professor seeking a magazine, a tourist needing a map, or a student craving a chocolate bar. It could do so again.

Christine E. Jacobson is Associate Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library.