Petition May Reshape Square

The City Council this week will begin a series of discussions that could shape the future of residential neighborhoods around the University when it reviews a zoning petition designed to halt two controversial developments near Harvard Square.

The petition, sponsored by the East Harvard Square Neighborhood Association, is aimed at preventing Harvard from building a five-story hotel on the former site of the Gulf station and developer Graham Gund from constructing a six-story shopping mall on Arrow St.

But the petition's author, community activist Terry Crystal, says yesterday that the debate was not simply about the fate of the two projects.

"We're concerned not just about the buildings themselves," says Crystal. "They're turning this into another Quincy market."

Although the city assumed a strong pro-development stance in the mid-1970s, the eastern end of Harvard Square has remained relatively free of the shops and hotels that have come to characterize the central portion of the Square.

But concern that development is making inroads into neighborhoods has been growing for several years. A 1984 study commissioned jointly by the University and the city's Community Development Department identified several sites in the Harvard Square area that were ripe for redevelopment.

The study broke up the region into several subdistricts, according to the Graduate School of Design's Norton Professor of Regional Planning Francois C.D. Vigier, one of the study's heads.

Vigier says that in many parts of the Square, buildings had been built at a much lower floor area ratio (FAR) than permitted by zoning laws. FAR is the ratio of the total floor space in a building to the size of its lot.

"The sensitive sites were those where there was an unrealized development potential--residual floor area ratio under the zoning laws."

Vigier says that many of the sites mentioned in his study--including the Gulf station site and the Gund project site--are now in the process of being developed. Other sites, such as the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, have remained untouched.

But Vigier says that the Community Development Department was not pleased with the study's results.

"I don't think the Community Development Department agreed with the need to come up with development guidelines which were not the same for the entire area."

The Crystal petition is seeking to do much the same thing as the Design School's study suggested. In effect, it proposes pulling the eastern end of the Square out of the overlay district that controls development in the area.

Crystal contends that the eastern end of the neighborhood is worthy of preservation. She and other neighborhood activists charge that Harvard's new Busch-Reisinger Museum behind the Fogg Art Museum and a complex of shops at 8-10 Mt. Auburn St. could irrevocably change the area's character.

Plans for a hotel on the Gulf station lot across from the Freshman Union and Gund's "Zero Arrow Street" complex can only make things worse, she adds.

"It's all going to go," says Crystal. "It's all going to be one big upscale shopping area.

Zoning changes require the votes of six of the nine city councillors to be put in effect--seven, if more than 20 percent of the property owners file an objection. Because the council is divided between members backed by the liberal Cambridge Civic Association and the more conservative Independents, controversial zoning changes are rarely approved.

As a result, several proposals to rezone parts of the Square have died on the council floor. The most recent example is the Conlan 2 petition, which the council rejected last month, despite approval from the city's Planning Board. That petition would also have downzoned a portion of the Square.

But Elizabeth J. Malenfant, an assistant planner for the city, says that the board had often pushed for similar changes to the Harvard Square Overlay District.

"I think we've spent a lot of time on it," says Malenfant.