City Delays Choir School Demolition, Parish Plans Replacement Buildings

The Cambridge Historical Commission has imposed a six-month delay on a plan to demolish the Boston Archdiocesan choir school, a move which delays plans for a new Catholic student center on campus.

The commission voted after a hearing on October 2 to delay issuing a demolition permit. A city ordinance requires the historical commission to review any plans to destroy a building more than 50 years old. When the six months have expired, the parish will be free to demolish it, barring the unlikely possibility that the Historical Commission will declare it an historical landmark.

Designed by Paul W. Ford in 1889, the choir school is now unusable. However, the historical commission's executive director, Charles M. Sullivan, described Ford as "a significant 19th-century architect" and the building as worth saving.

Plans unveiled in September call for razing both this structure and the existing Catholic student center, replacing both with a single building. The student center, built some 50 years later, is 16 feet wide and about 50 feet long. The parish has not yet applied for a permit to destroy it.

The choir school building has been vacant for several years, and the 50 students, who are in the fifth through eighth grades, have been bused to their studies in Belmont.

The student center building, while sturdy, is too small, according to Richard J. Chavez '87, president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Student Organization. He said the 18 groups that meet in the narrow three-story building compete for space with the library, three chaplains' offices, and a large kitchen. Groundbreaking was tentatively scheduled for next September, he said.

The parish proposes to pay for the new building by selling its rectory and the large parking lot on DeWolfe St. between Quincy and Leverett Houses. The move has concerned neighbors, who fear that a large hotel or new Harvard housing could be built on the site, said Sullivan. "Harvard's been moving in that direction for 20 years," he said.

"They're very fine buildings and they fit in with that part of the neighborhood that's still on a human scale," attorney and community activist Robert LaTremouille said of the center and the school.