The question is simple: why would one dedicate an entire webpage to a local store? The simple answer is that it no longer exists. Call it takover by the powers-that-be, call it gentrification, call it whatever, I just think that the demise of Calumet Market over the Summer of 2001 represented the continued strive by those in charge in Boston to make it a more corporate, less homely city and in essence knaw away at what little sense of originality remains. For, as the story starts, the land on which Calumet Market sat, like 99.99999% of the city of the rest of Boston and Cambridge, is owned by Harvard, which decreed that it no longer wanted friendly, local stores on its land and, beginning with Fermoyles Drug Store across the street from Calumet Market a few years earlier, weeded it out. A 7-Eleven stand took over that location (former Store-24). Anyway, there was little sign of the end for Calumet Market, a defining icon of the Brigham Circle section of Mission Hill for years and one of a chain of only two stores, the other located in Dudley Square, which I never had the opportunity to visit. The Summer of 2001 changed that and we locals could tell from the first massive sell-offs and non-shipments of new items that the store was soon to fall. By Winter 2002, the store was as bare as winter itself.The Osco Drug and adjoining dry cleaners and laundromat behind survived a few more years before they too were hit by Harvard's wrecking ball. Now, the Walmart of grocery shopping, Stop 'N Shop, covers much of the square footage of the new complex. The entire store is on the second floor , with entrances on the second floor from its parking lot, a redesigned version of the one Calumet and the Osco Drug complex used to share on the second floor, and on the ground floor, set back from where the customer entrance to Calumet Market used to be. Harvard-owned and other private offices as well as a Walgreens sandwich the S & S from below and to the side. On the upside, Sparr's Drugs down the street at the corner of Longwood Avenue and Huntington Avenue, a similar beacon for the Longwoood Medical Area section of Mission Hill, was ousted in between the demise of Fermoyles and Calumet. Sparr's with it's olden-days-style soda fountain style was not only a favorite after school and after-class hangout by many students of Boston Latin and the Mass. College of Art nearby, but also a popular stop for Longwood Medical Area employees as well as area politicians. So what's the upside--after years of closure and nothingness, Sparr's is back in the fall of 2002 as "Sparific," bringing back the old-old-old-school soda fountain shop feel, although the title is a little fruity to be honest. The old "Sparr's" stencil/outline, used to create the original "Sparr's" sign, remains on the building.
