ELIZABETH WARREN
Liberal Cambridge, Mass., embodies the wealth gap she fights
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Three days into her term as mayor, Sumbul Siddiqui sat behind an empty desk facing a full plate of challenges. She was tired.
Her small city, a mash-up of Colonial-era buildings and cutting-edge enterprises, would be the envy of just about anywhere.
Crime is low, riches spill from the treasury, businesses clamor to move in, and workers are handsomely paid to help cure disease and invent the future. The population, which peaked in 1950, is rapidly growing again.
But amid all the prosperity something feels amiss. There is a gnawing sense that Cambridge is steadily gaining stature but slowly losing its soul.
More than half of its roughly 120,000 residents struggle to find affordable housing. The middle class is
shrinking, along with the black and Asian populations. Local landmarks are being torn down or snapped up by wealthy investors with an eye on more lucrative use.
Elizabeth Warren, the ex-Harvard law professor and current Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential hopeful, needn’t venture far from her white-trimmed 1890 Victorian to see the economic struggles and income inequality at the core of her White House bid.
Cambridge, home to some of the most educated and opinionated people on Earth, is where the former Republican became a leftleaning Democrat, believing an activist government has a role to play as life’s leveler, smoothing the ruts and deciding what is fair and just. It could be the unofficial motto of her hometown.
Provide legal aid to immigrants facing deportation? Deploy social workers instead of cops to fight homelessness? Build zero-carbon schools to fight global warming?
City Hall has a plan for that.
Much tougher is finding a way to balance Cambridge’s growing good fortune with the disruption and displacement unleashed by so much success.
Back in the mayor’s office, unadorned save for a spray of flowers, Siddiqui reflected on the tension between what had been and what had come to pass.
She arrived in Cambridge with her parents, Pakistani immigrants, when she was 2. She was raised in public housing and, for a time after college, moved back in with her folks, a shipping clerk and a supermarket checker, so she could save for law school. At age 31, she is Massachusetts’ first Muslim mayor.
Siddiqui reflected on her journey to City Hall, the kind of inspirational arc celebrated when we speak of this land as one of opportunity. It’s become far less attainable, the mayor believes, for someone growing up without privilege in today’s Cambridge.
“I think it’s a great city,” she said on a cold January morning, to the accompaniment of birdsong outside her third-floor window. “But it has changed tremendously. It’s become very hard to live here.”
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Cambridge inhabits just seven square miles outside Boston, angling like a backslash into the Charles River.
Like many small, selfpossessed communities, it is an island unto itself; the city has its own water supply and a feast of amenities that, residents say, make it unnecessary to cross a bridge to the metropolis next door.
A onetime resident, reminiscing back in 1956, described Cambridge in Holiday magazine as a place “where a high-school youth had his choice on a Friday night between the movies and a free public lecture by T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost.” Over 60 years later that intellectual and cultural buffet continues.
The first outside settlers arrived in 1630, religious reformers from England who sought to “purify” the Anglican Church and carve a livelihood amid the salt marshes and tidal streams abutting gently rolling hillsides.
Harvard, the oldest university in America, was founded in 1636. George Washington took command of the Continental Army on the city common and, for a time, operated his Revolutionary War headquarters from a mansion on Brattle
Street. The sewing machine was invented here in the 1840s.
For much of its existence, the city has consisted of two contrasting sides: a hive of the mind and a hub of manufacturing.
With Harvard at its heart, and later MIT, Cambridge became a world-renowned center of innovation, home to medical and scientific breakthroughs. With a large immigrant population — waves of Irish followed by refugees fleeing poverty in Eastern and southern Europe — the city also grew into a major industrial center.
The New England Glass Co. was at one time the largest and most modern glassmaker in the world. Later, Cambridge was home to some of the world’s biggest candy factories, producing Tootsie Rolls, Sugar Daddys and Necco Wafers among the sweet bounty. (The last vestige of the industry is a plant near City Hall that produces Junior Mints.)
The past is a constant presence in Cambridge, one of the oldest cities in America; historic markers in more than half a dozen styles dot the landscape like pinpoints on a map of centuries gone by. It is not unusual for Cantabrigians — as locals call themselves, with the faint whiff of nobility — to introduce themselves by recounting their ancestral roots.
“People say you have to be at least four generations to be a true Cantabrigian,” Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Assn., said good-naturedly. (She goes back 11 generations and boasts of a distant relation jailed for witchcraft.)
By that standard, the 70year-old Warren is a newcomer, having just arrived in 1995 to join the Harvard Law School faculty after stints in
New Jersey, Texas and Pennsylvania. (Her campaign declined to make her available for this story.)
Unlike some presidential rivals who rose through local politics, among them former mayors Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, Warren never served in public office before her election to the U.S. Senate in 2012. She was neither well-known at City Hall nor active on local issues, of which there has never been a lack.
“Boycotts du jour,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist, describing Cambridge’s hyperactive political scene. “There’s always a cause to carry and a protest to march in.”
There is not, however, much in the way of two-party competition. Hillary Clinton received 89% of the vote against Donald Trump in 2016. Warren won her second term in the Senate in 2018 with 91% support.
Despite her lack of local political involvement, Warren was and remains a friendly and familiar face around town: strolling with her husband, Harvard law professor Bruce Mann, and their golden retriever, Bailey, around Fresh Pond reservoir; sitting in a booth at Summer Shack, a cavernous seafood restaurant where the lobsters weigh up to 3 pounds; drinking beer, eating Doritos and cheering the Red Sox at Paddy’s, a corner saloon not far from her upscale neighborhood.
For all its sophistication, Cambridge in some ways remains a village, where longtimers can recite the names and histories of the panhandlers begging for spare change in Harvard Square, where the Brattle Square Florist remembers birthdays and anniversaries, and Warren earned the appreciation of the man who fixed her shoes by always making