Rezoning Stymies Museum Plans

After a year’s worth of mostly calm meetings, Harvard and the Riverside neighborhood are at loggerheads again over the University’s development plans.

The main point of contention—raised last night as a key committee presented tentative rezoning recommendations—is Mahoney’s Garden Center, a Harvard-owned site near Dunster House.

The University wants to build either housing or a modern art museum on the site, while Riverside residents are pushing for a public park.

The Cambridge City Council created the Riverside Study Committee—a group of city officials, University representatives and community residents—last April to work out the problem, but both sides are now talking about how to circumvent the likely results of the committee’s recommendations.

Neighbors said last night that they want no Harvard buildings at all on the site, while Harvard’s Senior Director of Community Relations Mary H. Power said the rezoning under discussion calls for buildings so short—no higher than 24 feet—that it “shuts out” the possibility for the either housing or a museum.

Power said the University would have to “actively oppose” a 24-foot maximum zoning recommendation if it went to the city’s planning board.

Meanwhile, community representatives urged their neighbors to go to city meetings and push the city to take the Mahoney’s property with “eminent domain.”

By claiming eminent domain, the city could seize the property—but would have to pay the University market value for it, which would be a major strain on a city facing a tight budget.

Last night, study committee members—many of whom have long been activists working against Harvard development—told their neighbors that even if the city makes as many restrictions on the site as possible, the space will probably not become a park. “Given the limitations of zoning, we cannot zone this into public space,” study committee member Phyllis Baumann told the crowd.

“We are not going to get what we are all just dreaming about, which is some open space. It does not look like Harvard is going to donate this site,” Baumann said.

“A political peace needs to happen,” study committee member and Riverside Neighborhood Association President Lawrence Atkins said to the crowd of about 100 neighbors. “Get moving, sit down with each other. I know we’re fighting a large enemy—Harvard University.”

Activists predicted it will be hard to convince the city council—which will ultimately decide the issue—to listen to the neighborhoods demands.

“The city council has to have enough guts to say to the University, ‘Enough is enough,’” said study committee co-chair Saundra Graham.

But study committee member Cob Carlson, who had a green file folder labelled “eminent domain” poking out of his bag last night, said that so far the city has been less than receptive to the neighborhood’s wishes.

“We’ve gotten a cold shoulder from our city,” Carlson said.

While Power said she hopes to resolve the issue within the committee, she said Harvard currently has no interest in selling or donating the site to the community.

But Harvard is not particularly pleased with the study committee’s recommendations so far either.

The currently discussed zoning would only allow for one story of a high-ceilinged modern art museum and not the three-story building Harvard wanted to build, Power said, nor could the University put up housing.

The study committee’s recommendations also included a plan to rezone the adjacent NStar site in Riverside, so that all the buildings currently on the site will be residential. Harvard will likely purchase the NStar site, since it contains several unused buildings as well as the University’s lone steam source.

The recommendations presented last night will likely change only slightly between now and June, when they are slated to be presented to the city’s Planning Board, according to study committee co-chair Stuart Dash of the Cambridge Development Department.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.