City Residents Petition To Save Historic Site

The house at 95 Irving Street shares the character of its neighboring residences.

It is old, built in 1889. It has lots of windows, high ceilings and wood-paneled doors.

But it has something the other houses lack--the legacy of the famed Harvard psychologist William James, who lived there during the final years of his life.

Responding to the recent purchase of the home by a developer who hopes to turn it into two apartment-style dwellings, a group of residents has filed a petition with the Cambridge Historical Society and the Cambridge Planning and Zoning Board, asking them to designate the home as a landmark, thus putting a kink in the plans to remodel.

The new owner of the house, Jill Ruge, a 1989 graduate of the Kennedy School of Government, said she plans to convert the home into two separate apartments.

"We're trying to do a very thoughtful renovation of the house--three-quarters of the house will be restored to what it was like when James built it in the 1880's," Ruge said.

A sampling of neighbors' opinions this weekend found, however, that nearly all oppose the changes to the home Ruge proposes to make.

Charles Fried, a professor of law, lives two houses from the James home.

"What we really care about is that the exterior remains unchanged," he said. "We're afraid that the plans include having decks,...garages and such added on, and we hope that can be stopped."

Though Fried said he would welcome the new tenants to the neighborhood, he said he hoped they would recognize and preserve the historical character of the house.

"It's very nice when people move in, but we'd like no change on the exterior," he said.

New residents' impact in the community is a concern to others on Irving Street.

"It would be nicer if it had been bought by Harvard--this is a very old academic community, it has been for many decades, and it could have been used for academic purposes," said Marian C. Schlesinger, who lives a few houses down.

Under Cambridge city law, residents have several means to stop or delay construction or renovation of a home or commercial building.

In the case of the James house, residents hired a lawyer, Tom Bracken, to take their case to both the board of zoning and planning and the Cambridge Historical Commission.

According to Bracken, who has retained an architect to consult on the matter, the blueprints for the renovation show violations of the city's housing code.

"[The architect]found many zoning violations in them; we'd like to keep [the house] with consistent zoning rules....The main issues in this are keeping the historic integrity of the house and them complying with the zoning issues," Bracken said.

Ruge denied that the renovations would involve code violations.

Cambridge has tentatively scheduled a zoning hearing for April 27.

But residents have a fallback plan. Last week, they presented a petition to the Cambridge Historical Commission, asking that they designate the house a protected landmark.

The Commission has accepted the petition, and will hold a hearing of its own on April 6 to weigh its merits.

Ruge maintains that the renovations will restore most of the house to its original condition.

"We rebuilt the gables and dormer windows, we're taking up the linoleum, cleaning and restoring the brass plates," she said. "After James died in 1910, the house had 90 years of other occupants who added their own remodelings."

But neighbors are not satisfied.

"We are very disturbed by all this, emphatically disturbed," said Peg Brown, who lives next door. She said that when residents were given the opportunity to ask Ruge questions about the blueprints, they uniformly expressed their concern.

"We went to the site viewing and found the plans thoroughly appalling. I've been watching the construction since last summer, and now many neighbors are exercised and are writing letters to the Historical Commission," she said.

After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1890, William James, the brother of novelist Henry James, began first teaching at Harvard College as the first professor in relatively new field of psychology.

Though he was a pioneer in the field, his intense and varied interests shifted dramatically to the workings of human reasoning.

James became a highly influential 19th-century pragmatist philosopher. He coined the term "stream of consciousness" to refer to the sometimes disjointed narrative of thoughts and desires that form human cognition.

His many writings on psychology and philosophy influenced such literary giants as John Keats, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and D.H. Lawrence.