When did gentrification happen?

[bobobb.livejournal.com]

After reading some of the recent posts here, I wanted to ask...

I moved to Davis Square area in 2005. It seemed to me that gentrification had already happened. Is that people's sense? Was I a gentrifier? Did it happen since then and I wasn't paying attention? I'm sort of perplexed it is coming up in discussions in the recent election because it seems like this happened a long time ago.

Appreciate you being patient with my ignorance. Welcome people's thought though.

Comments

[ron_newman]

Link to Utne Reader article. The part on Davis is short so I'll quote it in full here:

Out in Somerville, a blue-collar suburb of Boston awash in artistic-energy spillover from Cambridge, something is happening. Two of the 20 young writers in Granta’s fiction issue last year hail from here, and a lively cultural milieu has popped up around Davis Square. With its bookstores, Irish pubs, and adventuresome Somerville Theater, it's an alternative to franchise-filled Harvard Square.

[ifotismeni]

back when Harvard Square still had a few things to recommend itself that weren't all chains and banks. To me, Davis started really becoming "the place" when Harvard sq became incredibly lame (IMO), around the late 90s.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Bookstores, remember those? Not to mention record stores (Disc Diggers and CD Spins) and the game store (Your Move). These were all shopping/hangout destinations for me when I lived in Boston proper in 1995-1997.

[ron_newman]

The funny thing is, when that article was published, all we had was Buck-A-Book. Boston Book & Record Warehouse (aka Barillari's) had decamped for Harvard Square, Zembla had closed and moved to some western suburb, and McIntyre & Moore hadn't yet arrived.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Huh, what was there before McIntyre & Moore? I had remembered it as another bookstore.

Also, was there a comic book store in the square before Comicazi? Or am I misremembering that too?

[ron_newman]

Going far enough back, the Gorin building had Gorin's department store, later renamed Almy's. I don't remember what might have been there in between but I don't think it was any other bookstore.

I don't remember another comic book store but there may have been one.

Edit: I think the immediate predecessor to Mac & Moore was a high-end clothing store that only lasted a year or two, as it aimed much too high for the square's then-current demographic. I don't remember what it was called anymore.

There was briefly another bookstore, I think named "Chapter Two", in part of what's now an expanded Mike's Restaurant.