At 3 pm on Sunday, February 12, 2006, The Tasty—a beloved diner from the heart of old Harvard Square—returned to its home after years of exile. A howling blizzard didn’t keep the Zeitgeist crew from carrying out their plan to occupy a bank office where the Tasty once did business. They described it as the beginning of a campaign to save the Brattle Theatre and ultimately, to "liberate" all of Harvard Square. Outside, MacKinnon preached to the storm. [photo: Georgia LeGros]

In November, Nidle signed over the Zeitgeist’s lease on Hampshire Street.

Zeitgeist—the German word means "Spirit of the Time"—was founded as a Gallery in 1994, operating at the corner of Broadway and Norfolk Streets until a fire forced it to move to Inman Square in 2001.

The Gallery was a non-profit, financially as well as legally. Yet in a way it was a spectacular success—famous, even. But famous as what? It wasn’t just an art gallery, because the same artists might be performers as well as painters. The poets might be political activists.

City Hall was chronically annoyed by this. The zoning and licensing bureaucracies had a rough time figuring out just what kind of beast the Zeitgeist was.

Zeitgeist took on electoral politics, too—in 1997, Ian MacKinnon was City Council candidate of the “Arts and Performance" (A&P) party, and Nidel ran a couple of times as “The Egg.”

(Running as the egg... oh! now I get it)

The free summer festivals in Central Square, projecting films against brick walls, and the “pirate radio station” broadcasting from the premises, were typical Zeitgeist probes along the border of legality.

Katt Hernandez, who worked with the Zeitgeist collective over the years, described it as a “project put together—in large part—by low-income activists, artists, and community builders.”

In the end, “Inman Square's community gathering point was destroyed by a trust fund baby named Gil Aharon,” she wrote in September. “He is the landlord of a club called the Lilypad.… created after he evicted the Zeitgeist gallery and opened a club up in its place. He wanted to call it Zeitgeist, too, but this at least we were able to stop.”

A year ago, Zeitgeist moved across Inman Square to Hampshire Street. Aharon evicted all the people living on the third floor of the former Zeitgeist building, raising rents by hundreds of dollars per month.

The Zeitgeist has been a unique spirit in our time and place. We will search the side streets and alleyways for its reincarnation.

You never know where it might pop up next.

To Karen and Alan, Godspeed.