Harvardevens, Livable but Expensive, Shapes Up as Real Community

Harvardevens Village, the spanking new home for 400 students and their families, isn't an overstuffed cherry bowl. Nor is, it for that matter, a thorny crown which the University is pressing on the brows of its married veterans. Being no exception to the rule on contentious subjects, the truth about. Harvard's newest project is someplace in between.

First off, the Village still looks immensely like the Army hospital it once was. Thirty-three miles lie between it and Cambridge, which means almost three hours of commuting each day and $17.95 out of the family exchequer each month. And the rents are thought by everyone to be too high.

But up till yesterday not one of the 80-odd husbands had picked up his wife, worldly goods, and children to walk out of the Village, and more home-seekers come in every day. To many couples the Village meant the first sembance of privacy in their married lives previous experience with one-room apartments, kitchens and bathrooms shared with four or five other husbands and wives have sent some Villagers into mild rhapsodies on the new adequate facilities they now have.

Back in the days when citizens of the Eastern seaboard were stocking their atties with sand pails and water buckets, the U. S. Army was determinedly erecting a long, low, narrow group of buildings adjacent to their expanding Fort Devens. This clump was imaginatively tagged "Lovell General Hospital, North"--the "North" to distinguish it conveniently from a neighboring clump, Lovell General Hospital, South." Beyond a fresh coat of paint and a new, if inexplicable, numbering system, the exteriors of the erst-while hospital buildings haven't changed a whit since 1942.

Technically speaking, there is only one building in the Village, since over 2 1-2 miles of corridor connects one extremity with another and a determined sort of person could get to every building without going outside save to cross the three streets that slash the development from north to south. Possibly to give the Villagers a sense of "belonging" the three streets are named Eliot, Dunster, and Lowell. The whole of the Village is contained within a looping road that is at once the perimeter and the only means of getting in or out; a gate, guarded by a man with a gun, stands athwart the neck of this loop.

Being populated for the most part by people who have long since overthrown the Army way of thinking, comparisons with the khaki way of life stop short at the exterior of the one-time hospital wards. The cavernous buildings have been segmented crosswise into five or six sections apiece, each unit varying from one to three bedrooms--the number of bedrooms determining the cost. Each home has, besides, a living room, a kitchen a bathroom, plenty of closet space, and two radiators in every room. Until you figure that the rooms are, on the average, somewhat smaller than the college single bedroom, and that the radiators are easily twice the size of the ordinary bedroom variety, the more fact of two radiators doesn't sound at all frightening, and almost comforting. It isn't though. The gross disproportion of the heating mechanism and the space to be heated has the Villagers a little worried.

Besides doing the carpentry, the wiring, the painting, the plumbing, and the heating work on the units, the Federal Public Housing Authority throws in with each home a jade-green plastic shower curtain, an ice-box, a porcellain towel rack, an aluminum mailbox, and a two-plate electric stove complete with oven. Everything else is up to the individual, but the University has a limited amount of furniture available for rental.

The Town Father

Sitting stop the rather alarming pile of red tape connected with the handing over of a piece of government property to a private concern is a small, graying man named Fletcher W. Taft. Mr. Taft graduated from Harvard in 1907, and has since been in a flock of professions, from that of a newspaper man to heading the administrative side of the Radio Research Laboratory here during the war.

"People," he says. "I like to work with people." Enough people with something to do or say about the Village shoot in and out of his office in the administration building (which still looks exactly like an Army administration building) every day to make happy the most gregarious person this side of a subway crush. To Mr. Taft belong all the problems of the Village. He is, if not the mayor, most certainly the town father.

A great many of Mr. Taft's worries at the moment center around the status of his new Village, particularly the question of finding its next higher political center. To whom, if anyone, do the Villagers pay taxes? Who is the law in Harvardevens?

The possibilities of these questions occurred to Mr. Taft, who hadn't previously done much thinking along such lines, when the Chief of Police of Shirley dropped in and made tentative motions towards including the new settlement within his pale. Two jumps ahead of the law, Mr. Taft calculated the implications of a possible acceptance-- first police, then fire protection, but inevitably taxes. So, arguing that the Village was a government reservation, not subject to the town of Shirley or any other town, for that matter, he carried his point through three meetings with town officials. He came out knowing that there would be no large out-flow of money for taxes, but uncertain of his next step. If the town of Shirley wasn't going to say what was what in the Village, then who was? The U. S. Government, perhaps. So Mr. Taft began to think vaguely of having the FBI police the place. Pinning his hopes on the good character of the Villagers, Mr. Taft is praying that no felonies occur at Harvardevens until this knotty legal problem is worked out, since it is reasonably certain that neither Shirley, nor the Common-wealth of Massachusetts, nor the U.S. Army (which surrendered its rights to the site originally) has any power to arrest anyone in the Village. In an emergency Mr. Taft is prepared. He plans to pin on a shiny badge which declares him to be an officer of the law in Shirley, and inveigle the offender outside the limits of the Village. "Then," says Mr. Taft, "I can make an arrest."

Assisting Mr. Taft are his son Ted (who is also a special member of the Shirley Police Department) and his wife. A veteran who picked up a crippling case of malaria on Guadalcanal, Ted is the doer, the finder, and the fixer for his father--a thousand details devolve on him as he operates a sort of liaison service between the front office, the Villagers, and the contractors. Mrs. Taft, also greying but slightly larger than her husband, concentrates on the wives of the Village and assists such projects as a day nursery for the babies.

The People

But the heart of the Village is the people who live there. All are married, most have at least one child, and to these people getting in on the ground floor of a newborn community is quite an experience.

So a community has to emerge. After watching things develop from the hub of the Village, the administration building, Mrs. Joseph Stano, one-half of the first couple to arrive, was enthusiastic about the way things had gone. "Cooperation has been absolutely wonderful," she said. "There's been no end of willingness to get together and exchange ideas."

The first exchange of ideas on any large scale came last Saturday night, when--in the best New England tradition--the first Town Meeting was held. Rents held the center of interest, and fact finding committees were set up to look into the whys and wherefores of rents, transportation. FPHA projects, and the organization of recreation. Mr. Taft, who spent the evening trying to find suitable answers, was optimistic. "It was a corker," he said.

But if the meeting was a "corker," it didn't solve the riddle of the rents.

Pegged at three levels, the rents run from $41 to $55, stopping for the two-bedroom units at $48; all utilities are included. Rents on the Jarvis and Divinity School fields FPHA units start at $30 and quit when they get to $35, although heat is not included in this figure. How come, the Villagers want to know, are our rents so much higher?

The answer apparently lies someplace in the toils of the FPHA, who juggle various factors and arrive at a "fair rent value" for all their units.

Taken in combination with the $18 monthly for a commuting ticket the rents are forcing students to live partly on capital. Fred Kinsman, '49 expressed the problem, "We can stay here only as long as our savings hold out."

Other gripes are smaller: the bother of having to spend three hours a day commuting: the fact that taking books out overnight is next to impossible, since the train gets them in barely in time for a 9 o'clock; the small stoves which take intricate handling to get all parts of a meal ready at the same time.

If the rents are lowered (and there is a good chance that they may be) the new Villager at Harvardevens Village will count himself reasonably well off.