Catching Up With Cambridge

For a few months every two years, everyone in the city--especially reporters--turn their attention to politics. The municipal elections are over and done with now, though, and there's time to catch up with what else has been going on in Cambridge. What follows are short updates on a variety of issues.

Developers went to court this summer seeking to overturn the city's controversial restrictions on condominiums; when their request for a preliminary injunction was denied, the case drifted out of the headlines.

No trial date has yet been set in the dispute, thanks to a series of pre-trial motions that have bogged down the case, proponents of the law said yesterday. The developers who brought the suit want the case tried in federal court, but city attorneys have argued that the case is really on an issue of state law.

"It will be months before it ever comes to trial," one party in the case, who asked not to be identified, said yesterday.

A smaller, but equally long-running, housing controversy continues to simmer at 7 Sumner Rd., where Harvard evicted all the remaining tenants about 10 months ago after a two-year battle.

In the course of its bid to evict tenants, Graduate School of Design officials said they desperately needed the building for new office space. A visitor to the building yesterday, though, would have seen several apartments still vacant.

Plans to renovate the building to make it useful for the GSD are "just going into the working drawings stage," Edie Groden, director of building services for the school, said yesterday. She said work was "pretty much on schedule" and might begin near the first of next year; when it does, the few offices that are in the building will have to "squish" back inside Gund Hall, Groden said.

Harvard's relations with the tenants it still has were tense through the spring and summer but seemed to quiet down this fall. Michael Turk, an officer of the Harvard Tenants Union, said much of the lull was due to tenant participation in the city council campaign.

An HTU meeting December 10 will kick off the next tenant drive--to force Harvard to bear some of the costs for deferred maintenance it is only now performing. In the last year Harvard Real Estate has asked for many rent increases from the city's rent control board based on repair and improvement work it has performed.

Such expenses should not be passed on to tenants, Turk says, if they were caused by neglect in past years. "I think we may be on a collision course with Harvard's 'five-year-plan'" for improvements, Turk said, adding that the HTU drive would center on an effort to force the Rent Board to reinterpret its own guidelines.

Another HTU campaign that has been on the back burner for several months--a suit against the University to recover money from tax abatements that tenants charge Harvard never passed on to them--may be rekindled in the weeks to come.

The suit will require an attorney, and Turk says money shortages have prevented the HTU from retaining a lawyer. A fundraising event will be held in the next few weeks, and if it is successful, the case will be reactivated. "In the meantime, nothing's been filed, not much has happened," Turk said.

An HTU meeting less than a year ago was attended by a University lawyer who apparently gave an altered name and address to meeting organizers. Sources in the state say the complaint brought against the lawyer, Kenneth Erickson, has pretty much been dropped.

Erickson was unavailable for comment; sources say, however, that he wrote an indirect apology to the state board of bar overseers about the incident. The board apparently also scolded the tenants union for publicizing the case in local newspapers.

Across Cambridge a spate of large development projects are quietly nearing the start of construction, assistant city manager for community development David Vickery said yesterday. "You'll see a lot going on in the next year," he promised.

At the Lechmere Canal site in East Cambridge, where an enormous hotel-office-condominium-park development is planned, bids will be opened later this week on the first phase of construction.

The bids--which should hit about $2 million--are from contractors who want to dredge out the old Lechmere Canal and do other basic work for the park development; landscaping and other finishing touches will be put out to bid in the spring.

As many as 20 contractors may bid, Vickery said. "Apparently it's an excellent time to do this sort of work because contractors are hungry," he added. Other parts of the development package, including a 104-room expansion of the Sonesta Hotel, will begin in the spring, Vickery said.

Across the city, near Alewife Brook and the Fresh Pond parkway, city developers are watching construction on the Red Line extension proceed so they can set a timetable for work on another major office development.

Road improvement work will begin in the fairly near future, and some agreements for leases with major companies have already been signed, Vickery said. Any major effort is not likely to "come on line" before subway construction is completed in 1984, however, he added.

In Cambridgeport--where city planners have had enormous trouble trying to lure private investment--a compromise zoning package may be in the works. The Planning Board is expected to recommend tonight that portions of two competing proposals--one from MIT, the other from local residents--be adopted by the city council, Vickery said.

The MIT proposal would allow more large scale development on the Mass Ave and MIT edges of Cambridgeport; the community proposal would focus more on housing in the lower two-thirds of the neighborhood. A lengthy council battle is expected.

The project that may interest more Cambridge residents than any other--the development of cable television--may also be ready for city council consideration this winter.

An advisory committee recommended a year ago that the city own and operate its own cable system, a fairly novel approach. That committee also recommended construction and economic feasibility studies. The first report, which will outline construction problems and present a preliminary design, should be ready by the end of the week; the second, which will address alternative ownership and financing schemes, may be done by early January, Joseph Sakey, who chaired the advisory committee, said yesterday.

"The council will have all the data it needs by February or March" and could make a decision by early spring if it wished to, Sakey said.

Virtually every longterm project still in the works began under the tenure of former city manager James L. Sullivan, who left in mid-summer after nine years on the job to take over as director of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.

Sullivan said yesterday he misses Cambridge, but added that his new role has "plenty of excitement." A top priority at the moment is helping the Hub find its way out of a pressing financial crisis, he says, adding that most attention is focused on Beacon Hill, where state legislators are considering the "Tregor Plan" to authorize new city borrowing and bail Boston out.

Legislature attempts to tamper with the Tregor bill are counterproductive, he says; if it emerges from the State House open to legal challenge, then investors won't go near the plan. The "chamber is trying to help out the relationship between private and public sectors," he said.

Perhaps Sullivan would have stayed in Cambridge if he had made use of the services of the Unidentified Flying Idea, a massage collective. For the last few weeks, the group has offered city workers a free massage on their lunch breaks in an attempt to counter "anxiety neurosis." So far the plan has drawn a lot of stares, more press coverage, and even a few compliments.

Since 1979, when construction on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's (MBTA) Red Line extension began in Harvard Square, students have been bothered by early morning noise and residents have complained of continual disruption of pedestrian and motor traffic.

MBTA officials said yesterday, however, that there is good news for those who have been annoyed by the work: construction above ground in the Square is nearly completed and future work in building a new Harvard subway station will occur predominantly underground, reducing commotion generated by the work.

The Red Line extension project, which will add three new stations to the subway system in Porter Square, Davis Square, and Alewife, is expected to be completed on schedule in late 1984. That's about the same time that work in the Square will be finished, MBTA spokesmen said.

There may soon be less disruption from the MBTA, but area residents won't be through watching heavy construction--whether they like it or not--for some time to come. Two housing and office complexes that, when they are completed, will be the biggest developments in the Square, are scheduled to get underway this winter.

Harvard's $25 million University Place project is moving full speed ahead, and a February or March ground-breaking is planned for the non-academic office and luxury condominium complex, which will be built on what is now a parking lot across from the Mt. Auburn St. post office.

From its inception the University Place project has been unique because of cooperation between Harvard and local residents, who served on a citizens' advisory committee that approved the design.

Jacqueline O'Neill, assistant to the vice-president for government and community affairs, said yesterday the spirit of cooperation has been continuing. O'Neill added that the University will ask the city council in late December to approve plans for a set of street improvements designed to ease anticipated traffic congestion around University Place. The improvements may also ease congestion from construction on Parcel 1B, which is located next door, behind the Kennedy School of Government.

The excavation work on Parcel 1b, at one time slated to be the site of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, may also begin this winter, after years of delay caused by neighborhood protest of proposals for construction on the state-owned land.

A $60 million design for the hotel-condominium-office-and-retail complex was approved by the planning board this summer, and has been accepted by neighborhood groups which had in the past successfully stalled construction.

Between Parcel 1b and University Place is located a comparatively small rent-controlled apartment building whose future continues to trouble its owner. Harvard University, and its tenants.

After months of uncertainty over what to do with the Craigie Arms apartments, located on Mt. Auburn St. across from the post office, Harvard decided to hire an outside developer, who would acquire ownership of the building once massive renovations were complete.

But tenants in the building, who have charged the University with illegally removing some of the Craigie Arms apartments from the rental market, have so far refused University offers of compensation for moving out of their apartments.

Two weeks ago tenants tried negotiating a settlement of their rent control board complaint, this time with representatives of the developer, Housing Associates of Cambridge, rather than with University officials.

But the tenants and developer have so far, after several meetings, been unable to reach an agreement. No new bargaining sessions were held last week, and the tenants' case against Harvard in the rent control board hearing is scheduled to resume December 15. An attorney for the developer Harvard has chosen to renovate Craigie Arms said yesterday he plans to meet the tenants for another round of talks sometime this week.

Harvard and Craigie Arms tenants are not the only groups in the city having trouble resolving complex issues. Negotiations between Cambridge school officials and the city teachers' union over the union's court suit challenging the city's minority teacher lay-off policy are also continuing.

But Cambridge Superintendent of Schools William Lannon said yesterday that an out-of-court settlement is unlikely until the new school committee takes office. Roland Lachance, president of the Cambridge Teachers' Association (CTA), said the new school committee, which will include more conservative Independents and fewer liberal members of the Cambridge Civic Association, may provide a "better forum" for the union's complaint: that minority teachers should not be spared from lay-offs while teachers with greater seniority are fired due to Proposition 2 1/2.

Proposition 2 1/2 pressures are not only affecting the schools. City Councilor David Wylie said yesterday he would like to see a third printing of the city's popular civil defense booklet, which advocates nuclear disarmament as the best way to maintaining public safety. But Wylie adds that budget considerations may keep the city from adding to the 40,000 booklets which have already been printed.

Only about 1000 of the pamphlets are left now. Wylie said, but the requests for copies from around the country keep coming in.