The Library Comes to Town

THE VIEW westward from Eliot House is not lovely. Across Boylston St. sprawls the MBTA fortifications, the subway yards. Sometime next year, those Red Line subway cars will move out for the last time, and instead of screeching wheels at 1:20 in the morning, jackhammers at 7 a.m will awaken Eliot House residents. And in a few years -- three to the optimist, five or more to the pessimist -- the scenery should be a little better, when the John F. Kennedy Library graces the Charles River's banks.

The Kennedy Complex being planned for the 12-acre site will include a museum, archives, the Kennedy Institute of Politics, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. For the present, all the memorabilia, books and papers are stored in the Federal Records Center in Waltham, one of a dozen depositories for bureaucratic red tape dotting the United States. There, in a temperature and humidity controlled cavern which makes the Widener stacks look like a tot lot, the government has stored about 10 million pages of Kennedy's papers, along with 2 million pages from the Democratic National Committee. There are 30,000 books, 62,000 photographs, 2 million feet of motion picture film, and 1000 oral histories, transcribed from interviews with people who dealt with Kennedy in the White House.

All those papers -- including things like the Secret Service log book of everything the President did while in office -- are mindboggling. But they are nothing compared to the museum pieces stacked in not much order in another huge room. The collection includes Kennedy's personal possessions -- from scrimshaws to Gov 7 notebook -- plus scores of gifts from heads of state and unknowns around the world. There are 1245 paintings of Kennedy, 280 busts, and one Harvard chair, a gift from the Class of 1964, presumptuously inscribed: "The only proper seat of government is a Harvard chair."

MANY CAMBRIDGE residents are justifiably worried that the library-museum will draw hordes of tourists to Cambridge -- 1 million per year is a fair estimate -- bringing with them traffic and parking problems and possibly the unwanted intrusion of fast food chains.

Looking back over delay the Library has encountered mainly because of the choice of an urban location, it is easy to speculate that the Library would have been better off in a suburban setting, with plenty of parking and picnic grounds. Yet somehow, isolating Kennedy away from people's lives, making the Library a day-trip into the country, would be a less fitting memorial than a complex situated in Cambridge.

Daniel H. Fenn Jr. '46, director of the Library, wants to make the Kennedy Library an integral part of the Cambridge community. He is working to develop a government curriculum with the Cambridge schools and setting up conferences on political topics. He plans to use the Library's two 400-seat theaters for lectures and films and is consulting with Campus Free College of Boston about using the Library as a learning center.

THE PROJECT REVIEW committee now studying I.M. Pei's Library plans should consider the benefits the Kennedy Library will bring to Cambridge residents as well as the very real problems in the plans. Parking must be provided either on-site or off-site if Cambridge is to avoid becoming an impenetrable morass of cars; adequate commercial frontage must be provided for visitor services. Inclusion of some taxable property, such as apartments, is desirable; proper pedestrian access to Brattle Square is a must; and some way (such as an overpass) for visitors to get to the Charles without being run down on Mem Drive would certainly be nice. All these objectives are within the realm of possibility if the City doesn't play politics and if the Kennedy Corporation doesn't arrogantly ignore the needs of the City.

With so little time remaining before the scheduled unveiling date of May 29, speedy coordination between the City and the Kennedy Corporation over the design is necessary. Without this planning, the Kennedy Library will be just a collection of fond trivia -- a valentine from Caroline, a coconut shell from PT 109, an ivory model boat from Nikita Khrushchev -- within a Harvard Square disrupted by tourists clicking their Instamatics.