Poplar Street closed to traffic at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon this past September 12, and by five it looked the way it looks maybe six times a year: string lights on, a band setting up outside RAR Brewing, and flamingos hidden in shop windows for a scavenger hunt with a prize at the end. Cambridge Main Street had built the whole afternoon around a theme, a cocktail and cheesecake crawl, a costume contest for "MOST GOLDEN," and a name for the day borrowed straight from a title card: Thank You for Being a Friend.
The premise was that Cambridge has a genuine claim on The Golden Girls, because Bea Arthur, who played Dorothy Zbornak for seven seasons, spent part of her childhood here. Her family moved to town during the Great Depression when she was eleven, and her parents ran a women's clothing store downtown. She went to Cambridge High School. Decades later, in a 1991 interview, she described what that stretch of her life actually felt like to her. "That town was stifling. Three of us got out," she said, naming herself, novelist John Barth, and the songwriter behind "You Are My Sunshine" as the ones who managed to leave.
That is the detail worth sitting with, because it complicates the party a little. Main Street wasn't just claiming a celebrity. It was throwing a block party for someone who, by her own account, couldn't wait to leave. And that contrast points to something true about who is actually running downtown Cambridge right now, because the two most visible forces reshaping Poplar and High Street didn't get out. They stayed, or they came home, and they built.
The Pool Hall That Wouldn't Let Go
Before it was RAR Brewing, 504 Poplar Street was a pool hall and bowling alley that had been open, by most accounts, every single day for decades. It was the kind of place where the mayor and the plumbers and the kids all showed up, a genuine anchor in a downtown that was otherwise losing ground. When it closed in 2013, foot traffic on Poplar had thinned out enough that you could reportedly nap in the middle of the street and not get hit by a car.
Chris Brohawn and J.T. Merryweather, two Cambridge natives, moved into that same 4,300 square foot building that same year and started ReAle Revival Brewing, later shortened to RAR. Brohawn was an electrician who wrote a business plan, found a family friend willing to put up seed capital, and used it to secure a small business loan from Dorchester County. When people ask him about scaling up and expanding into bigger markets, he tends to shut the question down fast. "You couldn't drag me out of Cambridge," he told an interviewer this past August.
What RAR built instead of leaving is now the entire block. The original taproom sits at 504 Poplar. Next door is Chessie Burger, a smaller "baby taproom" with a food truck style menu. Across the street is The Dive Club, a tiki lounge. A few doors down is the LabRARtory, their cocktail bar. RAR has since opened locations in Annapolis and Salisbury, but the next expansion is happening right where it started. The company has confirmed plans to open a RAR branded crab house at the old Snappers Waterfront Cafe site on Cambridge Creek, a waterfront property the brewery has been publicly hinting at since a New Year's social media post showing the view from the old Snappers deck. That project is expected to open in 2027.
None of this reads like a company chasing bigger markets. It reads like two guys who grew up here deciding the town deserved a reason to stay open past dark, and then building that reason themselves, one storefront at a time.
A New Storefront on High Street
A few blocks over, a newer story is playing out with the same shape, if you look at who is behind it rather than what it serves. In late August, Bevelyn Cephas-Quidas celebrated the grand opening of Martha's Table, a carryout restaurant at 748 High Street serving traditional soul food: fried chicken, crab cakes, fresh seafood, homemade sides, and dessert. Cephas-Quidas is a recent graduate of Dorchester County's BEAMS Academy, an eight-week program the county's economic development office runs specifically to help residents turn a business idea into an actual storefront.
That detail matters more than it might seem to at first glance. It means Cambridge's small business pipeline isn't only running on outside investment or transplants with capital. There is an active, local mechanism, run by the county itself, that is turning Cambridge residents into Cambridge business owners. Martha's Table is what that mechanism produces when it works.
What the Cook-Off Actually Tests
The clearest annual proof of that local density shows up on September 26, when Cambridge Main Street runs the 18th Taste of Cambridge. Poplar Street, part of Race Street, and a portion of Gay Street will close from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with the festival itself running noon to 6 p.m.
A few things to know if you're planning around it:
- General admission is $55 in advance or $65 the day of, and that ticket is what gets you into the cook-off sampling.
- The cook-off runs five categories this year: crab cake, seafood soup or stew, crab specialty, Maryland classic, and a dessert category that's new for 2026.
- The event is organized by Cambridge Main Street, the same nonprofit behind the Second Saturday series, the Fall Festival, the Classic Cruise-In and Car Show, and the Christmas Parade.
Every entry in that cook-off comes from a restaurant that already operates in town. There is no traveling festival circuit dropping into Cambridge for a weekend. The event is a direct measure of what the town's own kitchens can put on a plate, judged by residents holding a ballot alongside a panel of invited judges. It is Main Street testing itself in public, once a year, and inviting everyone to watch.
The Town Bea Arthur Left Is Still Deciding Who Gets to Stay
Put those three threads next to each other and a pattern comes into focus that the Golden Girls party accidentally set up. Arthur's Cambridge was a town with a fashion show at the general store and not much room for a shy eleven-year-old with a flair for dramatics. She got out at the first real opportunity and never looked back publicly, except to note, decades later, exactly how stifling it had felt.
Ninety years on, the same downtown blocks are being reshaped by people who had every reason to leave and chose the opposite. Brohawn and Merryweather could have opened a brewery anywhere. They opened it in the one building on Poplar Street everyone already trusted, and they've spent over a decade proving that trust was worth rebuilding around. Cephas-Quidas didn't need Cambridge's economic development office to teach her to cook. She needed it to teach her how to open a storefront in the town she already knew, and now High Street has one more reason for people to walk past instead of drive by.
None of this erases what Arthur said about growing up here, and it shouldn't. Her account of a segregated, insular small town in the 1930s was true to her experience and worth taking seriously on its own terms. But it also isn't the whole story of what this particular stretch of Poplar and High Street has become. A downtown that could put someone to sleep in the middle of the street in 2013 now closes that same street on purpose, several times a year, because there's finally enough happening on it to be worth blocking off.
That's the Cambridge that's actually here right now for the people who live here. Not a nostalgia act built around a sitcom anniversary, but a downtown being rebuilt in real time by the people who never needed a reason to stay in the first place.
If you're already living in or around Cambridge and want a read on how any of this, from the RAR expansion to the town's ongoing Main Street investment, might affect a future move or a property decision, Chesapeake Bay Properties is happy to talk it through. Schedule a call whenever it's useful.
