Harvard Fords the River

Getting to the Business School and the rest of Harvard’s undeveloped land from Cambridge might look like a short, if dangerous, walk across the ice-bound Charles.

Although they have ruled out walking on water, some Harvard officials have been considering even more farfetched proposals to span the gap between the river’s shores.

Ever since news of Harvard’s big land purchases across the river in Allston started swirling in the late 1990s, faculty, planners and professional consultants have been dreaming about everything from monorails to subways to Segways to connect the archipelagos that constitute the University’s sprawling empire.

“There are lots of things we could do,” says Kathy Spiegelman, director of the Allston Initiative and Harvard’s lead land planner. “While the Harvard population numbers probably don’t correspond to a need to build a subway, or other things like that, for Harvard the investment in major things might be worthwhile in the long-run.”

According to Vice President for Administration Sally Zeckhauser, the first question everyone asks about Allston is always what will move there—a controversial issue yet to be decided by the powers that be.

The two main options on the table involve moving a cluster of graduate schools, anchored by the law school, or creating a major science complex, with an emphasis on biotech research. But second question everyone asks, Zeckhauser says, is always how Harvard will get its people to Allston.

That is the question that everyone loves.

Oft-beleaguered Harvard planners, who regularly must deal with Byzantine restrictions on building in Cambridge, become animated and run for their maps when the conversation turns to transporting people to Allston.

Students at the design school have been raising high-powered eyebrows with their big ideas.

Even faculty members who are less-than-thrilled at the prospect of packing up and moving themselves to Allston are brimming over with ideas of what could bring them over the river.

Anyone who ever owned a Brio train set, Lincoln logs, or some Legos is now taking the opportunity to fantasize about the life-sized possibilities of spanning the river to Harvard new campus.

The Road to Allston…

Currently, the main way to get from Cambridge to Harvard’s future campus in Allston is a cracked, bottlenecked two-lane road that runs across the Lars Anderson Bridge from JFK St. to North Harvard St.

Flanked by the forbidding walls of the business school on one side and Harvard Stadium on the other, the old road to Allston is bumpy, uninviting, and something of a thorn in Harvard’s side.

The harsh realities of the transportation system currently in place—a cramped roadway, meager city bus service, and a still-growing shuttle system—have kept faculty and planners buzzing with ideas that range from the practical to the whimsical.

The promise of expanded shuttle service is not enough for professors on the serveral committees exploring Allston’s possibilities for everything from museums to science.

“As faculty on these committees, we were asked to think openly about Allston,” says Professor Professor of Chemistry Eric N. Jacobsen. “And when you ask a lot of professors to think openly about something, you inevitably get some pretty wild ideas.”

Winthrop House Master and Divinity School professor Paul D. Hanson, who is on the Advisory Group on Physical Planning for Graduate Schools, likes the thought of one day riding a monorail into an Allston campus.

“With a monorail, you could whip across the Charles without having to stop at any lights,” he says.

Others have considered the idea of students using hi-tech Segway scooters to zip cross the river—a notion already explored by University President Lawrence H. Summers.

“The president and one of the deans have ridden on them and thought they were kind of neat,” Zeckhauser says.

Another speedy alternative to walking is a moving sidewalk, like the kind found in airports, which would run from JFK St. to North Harvard St. across the Anderson Bridge.

“They’re expensive,” says Spiegelman of the machines known as people-movers, “but they’re certainly a possibility.”

People-movers are one option discussed by planners from a University-hired transportation firm called Arup, according to Dennis F. Thompson, the senior advisor to the president who heads the Allston planning committee.

Another plus for the moving sidewalks: planners say that, unlike waiting for a ride on a bus or a train, climbing onto a moving sidewalk could help people feel in control of their movement.

“The trouble with monorails and subways is that you have to walk to the station and wait, and there cannot be all that many stations on the campus,” Thompson says.

Thompson’s committee expects to hear final recommendations from Arup this May—and though the consultants have kept their proposals under wraps, veteran planner from the design school Alex Krieger expects them to come up with two proposals, one band-aid solution for the short term, and another larger project for the long term.

Overarching Solutions

Last year, Krieger led a seminar of 13 students on campus planning for Allston, the second design school class which dealt explicitly with Harvard’s plans for a new campus.

In a proposal that has made the rounds of Harvard’s senior administration, one of Krieger’s students proposed a radically Old World approach to the problem of connecting Cambridge and Allston.

The student, Eduardo Cadaval, proposed renovating and widening the Anderson bridge to incorporate shops and fountains and cafes into one, big, bustling streetscape, running into a bridge akin to Florence’s famous Ponte Vecchio, where art, gold, and silver have been bought and sold since the 16th century.

Cadaval says he envisions a wide range of transportation, ranging from walking to driving, as well as brand new electric “tram,” or streetcar, bringing people back and forth between Harvard’s campuses.

His prototypes show the currently drab North Harvard Street converted into a boulevard modeled on the Champs-Elysées that would run into a much-discussed “Allston Square”—currently the site of two gas stations and a convenience store, but one day, many hope, a lively rival to Harvard Square.

“This plaza would run from Harvard Square to the new proposed Allston Square, transforming the current streets into a public corridor that would integrate different activities and programs in a single space and that would help to change the perception and image of the Allston area,” Cadaval writes in an e-mail.

While Cadaval’s plan for Allston might sound so ambitious that only an optimistic student could dream it up, Harvard administrators, too, have been known to encourage big, sweeping thinking for Allston.

In 1999, Harvard even brought in famously zany Dutch architect and GSD professor Rem Koolhaas to come up with radical ideas for Harvard’s new Allston acreage.

He decided Harvard didn’t need the bridge at all—they needed to literally make Allston and Cambridge one by diverting the course of the Charles River.

According to the Boston Globe, Koolhaas dubbed his plan “the Moses project” in homage to both the legendarily powerful urban planner Robert D. Moses and the biblical prophet who parted the Red Sea and led the Israelites to the Promised Land.

Harvard tried to avoid controversy by keeping the proposal under wraps. “He was intentionally hired to get University planners to think outside the box,” explains Spiegelman of Koolhaas. “But he did it in a way that we felt might be misunderstood by the public, especially because we were so anxious to establish a credible relationship with the community.”

Even though the Koolhaas dream might have gone a little too far, other University architects are still hoping that Harvard will seize the opportunity to dramatically revitalize local landscape and transit systems.

For his part, Chair of GSD Planning and Design Krieger, who is on the faculty committee for housing, hopes that Harvard officials will push for the oft-mentioned dream of an “urban ring” subway or light rail line around Boston.

Such a line would link the red line to a station across the river, connecting Harvard Square to Allston, Boston University, and the Longwood Medical Center, and would connect the outer fingers of all the other T lines so that travellers would no longer have to go into the center of Boston in order to switch T lines.

“Harvard’s plan, properly considered, might shorten the time we have to wait for urban ring,” Krieger says.

Familiar with the already-weak connection between Cambridge and the Longwood, campus several professors in Cambridge say they worry they will face a similar fate if moved to Allston.

“Longwood provides a high number of jobs to people all over the city, but they are lacking a good transportation link,” Krieger says.

Because one of the two major options for the Allston acreage involves creating a major science research park—meaning some Faculty of Arts and Sciences science departments would be on different sides of the river—science faculty members are particularly concerned about having good transportation options.

“For us, transportation in Allston is less a fear of convenience and more a fear of being separated from the students,” Jacobsen says. “It would be a shame if our undergraduates were sequestered from the research activity, because it is one of the most outstanding parts of Harvard.”

Having logged many hours and many miles riding shuttles to the medical school in Boston, many Harvard scientists are wary of more time-consuming commutes.

“We have shuttle buses to the medical school, but they are slow and generally unpleasant,” Jacobsen says. “And with only a few tiny bridges connecting Cambridge to Allston that already have bottleneck traffic, we are looking for better solutions [than] shuttle buses for Allston.” For the Moment

Even if the shuttle service is not the most efficient way to go, most everyone agrees that more—and better—shuttle bus service would be a good thing thing for the short term.

At the moment, the University’s transportation team is working to improve shuttle routes between Cambridge and the satellite campuses, according to Director of Transportation John Nolan.

Every 15 minutes, the MBTA’s number 66 bus leaves Harvard Square and heads into Allston—a the only mass-transit option that leads into the new campus.

If not ideal, with long waits and large rush-hour crowds, the bus at least pre-existing and cheap, with a 75-cent fare.

Harvard is currently trying to make public transit like the number 66 bus more accessible to faculty, staff and students—including investigating a program that would allow University commuters to use their ID cards to pay for subway and bus fares, Nolan says.

“There are a lot of colleges across the country that have this type of program,” Nolan says. “Once the technology is available with the MBTA, this is something we would like to talk to them about.”

Amid all of the ambitious and costly options dreamed up by faculty and architects, Spiegelman says that for now the cheapest and potentially fastest way to travel between campuses may be good old fashioned walking.

To get people on their feet, the University will need to spruce up the route between and Cambridge and Allston, Spiegelman says. “We’re trying to improve the experience of travel,” she adds.

“JFK street is OK, but once you hit the bridge, its not very accommodating, there’s nothing very interesting or inviting or nurturing about it,” she says waving to a colorful cartoonish oversized map of Allston that sits in her Holoyoke Center office.

“It feels like you’re walking in Neverneverland,” she says describing the unappealing walk past the athletics fields and the Business School.

Looking to brighten the walk into Allston, Spiegelman points to landscaping and street repairs along North Harvard Street.

“[These improvements] don’t necessarily get you from the John Harvard statue to Allston in six minutes,” says Spiegelman. “But they begin to make people feel like the campus is a place you want to walk to.”

While the fantasies of professors and planners have fueled much discussion in recent committee meetings, concrete plans and pragmatic approaches have so far proved elusive.

In a Cambridge where Harvard fought a year, and lost, its struggle for permission to dig a tunnel under a single city street, a subway line, monorail, or moving sidewalk might not be an easy sell.

And the actual cost of a dreamline to Allston—adding to the untold billions that will build a campus from scratch—might give pause to any planner or president.

“We weren’t ask to think through these ideas—just to think of them,” Jacobsen says. “I have no sense of how any of these options will work logistically.”

But for now, anything is possible.

—Staff writer Alex L. Pasternack can be reached at apastern@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Lauren A.E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.