All Quiet on the Cambridge Front

Last November, activists from five Cambridge neighborhoods came together to air their gripes about the world-famous institution in their midst—an institution many at the meeting described as a land-hungry behemoth pursuing excessive building projects in each of the neighborhoods.

“If we let the next dozen projects follow in these projects’ footsteps, Harvard will indeed remain a great University, but the city [will be] without a soul,” meeting organizer John Pitkin, a Mid-Cambridge resident, told the assembly.

The meeting underscored the long-standing tensions between Harvard and its neighbors, who have clashed over the years as the University’s need to develop has conflicted with local residents’ desires to protect their already-cramped space.

Cambridge activists know how to work the city’s political system—including a Cambridge City Council that’s had historically antagonistic relations with the University—and they have not been shy about expressing their resentment of Harvard’s growth.

Within the last year, Harvard gave up on two controversial projects after facing uphill battles against local residents who were backed by city politicians. Over the summer Harvard scrapped plans for an art museum overlooking the river, and last winter the University gave up a year-long battle for a tunnel underneath a busy city street that would have connected the two parts of the government department’s future home.

But now, at least in one neighborhood, a new way of doing business seems to be emerging—a fact which city leaders, neighbors and Harvard officials point to as a sign that town-gown relations may be on an upswing.

The Impossible Dream

Residents of the Agassiz area, just north of the Yard, are facing development from all sides. Harvard Law School (HLS) and the science facilities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)—both natives of the neighborhood—are each planning major new buildings to solve pressing short-term space crunches.

As University officials plan to build a new Harvard campus across the river in Allston, both HLS and FAS sciences are considered the top candidates for a move—and both are striving to dig in their heels in Cambridge.

But rather than fighting the expansion, the Agassiz residents chose to negotiate, saying they know they can get some benefits from Harvard in return for their cooperation.

Now, Agassiz representatives are engaged in regular discussions with several Harvard officials, including Vice President of Government, Community and Public Affairs Alan J. Stone, who pledged upon his arrival about a year and a half ago to establish more open communication with residents.

Both sides say the process has been positive, and they are optimistic about reaching an agreement, possibly in the next several months.

And city politicians praise the efforts of the University—which in the past was often criticized as haughty and aloof—to create goodwill in the Agassiz neighborhood.

“They’ve had an ongoing dialogue that they may not have had with other neighborhoods,” says Mayor Michael A. Sullivan. “The University has been much better, in my perspective, at coming to the table and being part of the community.”

Choosing to Talk

At a December meeting of the Agassiz Neighborhood Council (ANC), activist William Bloomstein acknowledged that the neighborhood was in a historic position.

“This is the largest construction Harvard’s ever going to do in the City of Cambridge,” he said. “They’re going to basically take this entire area and blow it up.”

Bloomstein is a member of ACID—the Agassiz Committee on the Impacts of Development—which residents formed last year, according to the group’s mission statement, in the face of “2, 5, 10, 15 years of relentless excavation, construction and vibrations.”

Bloomstein told residents they could seek a building moratorium from the City Council, which would effectively halt development projects in the area—a tactic the Riverside neighbors had successfully used to block the building of the art museum. Last June, in an informal straw poll, ANC members voted 24-1, with two abstentions, in favor of seeking a moratorium.

But rather than fight the traditional street-by-street battle, residents and Harvard officials took to the negotiating table.

University representatives, city officials and neighborhood activists formed a working group to hash out a compromise. And at the December ANC meeting, the residents voted unanimously, with Bloomstein’s encouragement, to support negotiations.

ACID conducted a survey to gauge Agassiz’s priorities, and used it to create a “wish list” of concessions they hoped to receive from the University, including over a million dollars to support neighborhood programs and a cap on building heights.

Joel Bard, a member of ACID, says the group recognized that Harvard could legally build on its own property within the campus, but saw an opportunity to work with the University and get some benefits out of the deal.

“It’s been clear that Harvard was going to build something and had the right,” Bard says. “What we’re negotiating about is what they’re going to build and under what circumstances.”

In March, ANC members voted to take two items off the wish list that they considered the most difficult to obtain, saying they hoped to speed the negotiations along. They agreed not to place a limit on the size and density of building projects.

They also removed the demand that the popular Peabody Museum remain in the neighborhood, since University officials had indicated that they wanted flexibility to consider moving the museum to Allston in the future.

The discussions have been productive, Harvard officials and ACID members say, although neither side is offering any promises.

“I think everyone agrees it’s amicable,” Stone says. “They have been thoughtful about engaging in things that are possible. We have as well.”

Bard says the neighbors feel they have been treated fairly, and calls the dialogue “frank and open.” But he emphasizes that he hopes Harvard will realize the concerns about development are “issues of survival.”

“We’re hoping they’re going to take the neighborhood’s good faith bargaining position to heart and really meet us more than partway on a lot of very reasonable requests,” he says.

Looking Ahead

Bard says what he wants most from Harvard is a sense of the master plan—what the end result of a decade of development will be.

“I think Harvard’s finding it difficult to give us a commitment on the long-term,” he says. “A lot of people in the neighborhood want to have a sense that were not going to be going through this again in 10 or 15 years.”

Harvard’s vision for the future of the North Yard hinges on the coordination between HLS and FAS, two schools that both want to expand in Agassiz, their current home. The University’s top administrators expect to make a decision in the coming months on which of the two will be the linchpin of a campus across the river in Allston.

One of Cambridge activists’ traditional complaints about Harvard is that it is not one University with one unified plan, but rather a vast conglomeration of independent fiefdoms, each of which wants a piece of the neighborhood.

But Stone says that Agassiz’s desire for long-term guarantees puts pressure on Harvard to use a more centralized planning process.

“One of the interesting things about community relations is it puts a responsibility on the internal parts of Harvard to talk to each other,” he says.

Both FAS and HLS have been unrolling plans for the neighborhood in the past few months.

In the next few months, FAS will break ground on the Biological Research Infrastructure (BRI), a two-level, 75,000-square foot underground facility to be located below the courtyard of the Biological Laboratories off Divinity Avenue.

The BRI will include 16,000 cages for laboratory mice—less-than-appealing neighbors which early in negotiations prompted several Agassiz residents to ask that the so-called “vivarium” be the first thing moved to Allston.

But in an April meeting, after Bloomstein expressed satisfaction with the way the negotiations with Harvard were going, the ANC agreed to support the BRI.

“This is one small scurry for mice, and one giant step forward for the Agassiz neighborhood,” said City Councillor Brian Murphy after the meeting.

Also in April, the Harvard Corporation approved $100 million in funding to build a cutting-edge engineering and physical sciences building, the Lab for Interface Science and Engineering (LISE). Community discussion about this building has not yet begun, says Senior Director of Community Relations Mary H. Power.

Meanwhile, just next door, HLS has hired consultants to help plan its expansion, and several ACID representatives are on that study committee.

Law School Dean Elena Kagan says the goal is to involve residents early in the process, before any building starts.

“So far everything has gone very well,” she says. “We are making extensive efforts that engage them in our planning processes.”

University President Lawrence H. Summers says representatives from HLS and FAS meet frequently to set a common strategy for the North Yard.

“One of the things I’ve tried to do since I became president is establish a principle that in terms of its external interface with the community, the University speaks with a single voice, a single message,” he says.

Down By The River

While negotiations progress in Agassiz, across town in the Riverside neighborhood, a prolonged, traditional town-gown battle over how Harvard uses its land will continue at least into next fall.

Last summer, Harvard gave up a two-year-old fight to build a modern art museum along Memorial Drive in the working class neighborhood.

From the moment Harvard announced the plan to build a museum, the neighbors opposed it—and in the fall of 2000 got the city council to issue a moratorium, that prevented any building in their neighborhood.

While the moratorium was in effect, Harvard and the neighbors met for more than a year to plan new zoning for the entire area, with a specific focus on the site of the proposed museum, currently home to Mahoney’s Garden Center.

But the negotiations ended in stalemate last spring, with community activists wanting to take the site for a park—and many urging the city to seize the plot with its powers of eminent domain—and Harvard wanting to build on it.

The neighbors settled on a plan that would cut the height of buildings allowed on the site from 120 feet to 24 feet.

Over last summer, the Planning Board reviewed the neighbor’s zoning recommendations and decided they were too “punitive,” according to planning board member Hugh Russell ’64. The planning board moved to amend the neighborhood zoning, to allow Harvard to build up to 45 feet on the Mahoney’s site—and leaving room for negotiations over taller buildings.

With the controversial museum proposal scrapped, Harvard officials announced the plan to build graduate student housing on the site instead.

Last fall, a group of Riverside activists, led by Cob Carlson, took their case directly to the city council, submitting their original zoning petition for the council to consider side-by-side with the one amended by the planning board.

Now both sides await a city council decision on the two petitions, which will both expire in June. Sullivan says the council will re-file the petitions and expects they will vote on them by this fall.

Carlson says he believes four councillors are supportive of the neighborhood petition, although he declined to say which ones.

As they lobby the councillors, Carlson says he and the other activists hope to take advantage of the timing of the upcoming November election.

He also says he feels the University has learned from their mistakes in Riverside and tried to involve the Agassiz residents more and earlier in the planning process. But he stressed that the two communities are very different.

“We care about the riverfront, and Harvard just wants to take it over and make it a little stream that goes through campus,” he says. “That is what makes the battle so different from any other one. It makes it more of a citywide issue.”

Sullivan says the Riverside neighborhood’s resistance to Harvard expansion comes from a history of unpopular construction in the area—including Peabody Terrace and Mather House—but that Harvard’s current plans will not be as invasive.

“No one wants to replicate Peabody Terrace. It was a mistake when it was built in the sixties,” says Sullivan, a third-generation city politician who says he grew up in Cambridge “in the shadows of Mather being constructed.”

Moving On

In other parts of the city, one high-profile conflict came to an end this year, while another faded into the past.

In January, Stone announced that the University would go forward with plans to build the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) in Mid-Cambridge, one of FAS’s top priorities—without the tunnel connecting the two buildings, the lone part of the project that required city council approval.

From the time the project was announced over five years ago, residents objected to the buildings’ size and height, but they could not stop Harvard from building on its own property.

Instead, they lobbied local politicians to block Harvard from digging a tunnel under busy Cambridge Street, a construction project that they said would disrupt the entire neighborhood.

In the spring of 2002, the city council voted to create a committee made up of local activists, Harvard officials and city representatives to try to hammer out a compromise.

Stone personally attended the negotiating sessions and offered unprecedented concessions to the neighborhood, including a $1 million parcel of land to be used for a park, $300,000 for neighborhood projects and a five-year moratorium on local construction.

But Harvard would not discuss the size and use of the buildings, which was the neighborhood’s main concern, and the compromise fell apart over the summer.

The city council put forth its own proposal in October, which doubled the amount of money and the length of the moratorium and included a provision that the University would need neighborhood approval for any future development.

By January, though, Harvard officials decided they could not meet these terms.

“This doesn’t seem to me to be within reason, so with regret, I have written to the council to inform them that we will move forward without the tunnel,” Stone wrote in a letter to Mid-Cambridge residents.

Activists said they did not see the outcome as a victory because the two sides were unable to reach an agreement. But city officials said they appreciated Harvard’s willingness to come to the table.

“One of the very heartening things about this process was that Alan Stone came,” Sullivan said at the time. “He didn’t miss any meetings. We felt that someone with a real voice was coming forward.”

In Cambridgeport, meanwhile, earlier this month Harvard opened a new faculty housing complex on the former Polaroid company site—which the University purchased a year and a half ago over the protest of residents.

While the ribbon-cutting ceremony was congenial, according to a University press release a high school vocal ensemble sang and many toured the new facility, some are still angry about the purchase.

At a contentious meeting in December 2001, University officials told neighbors that they would use the complex for faculty housing, but neighbors said that they had fought developers to win a housing project on that site for local residents—not for Harvard.

Cambridgeport resident Elie Yarden says the neighborhood’s main concern now is that Harvard will only allow faculty to live in the building while they remain at the University, which, he says, will prevent them from forming long-lasting ties with the community.

“All we know is that we’ve received 102 units of institutional housing,” he says. “The first time an owner of one of these units is forced to leave because they’ve accepted a position elsewhere, and wish to remain in the neighborhood and in their unit, we will go to court and support them to the hilt. We will conduct a campaign to prevent any eviction of someone who has been part of the neighborhood.”

PILOTing a New Course

Besides battles over buildings, a frequent charge city residents make against Harvard is that the tax-exempt University doesn’t contribute its fair share to Cambridge’s coffers.

But in the past year, Harvard has expressed a willingness to offer more. Harvard pays $4.3 million each year for its taxable land—sites where Harvard owns commercial businesses—and also makes a voluntary payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) of $1.7 million for the 189 acres of land it owns but uses for institutional, tax-exempt purposes.

In April, City Councillors Marjorie C. Decker, Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 and Timothy J. Toomey co-sponsored an order asking city manager Robert W. Healy to report on how much tax-exempt property the local universities own and how much money the city would receive if the land were taxed.

“Especially with the fiscal situation of the city and state, Harvard should step up to the plate,” Toomey said after the meeting.

Sullivan says Harvard has recently agreed to more lucrative deals with its other host cities, Watertown and Boston, and contends that the University’s original home should receive compensation in line with those newer deals.

“Some part of it has to be retroactive,” he says. “Its not what we lose [from tax-exempt properties]. It is what is one’s fair share to pay.”

The city’s current 20-year PILOT agreement was negotiated in 1990, but for the last several months, Harvard has been in talks with the city manager to strike a new deal. Both Stone and Sullivan say they expect an agreement to come soon, Sullivan predicting it will be in five or six months. The city is also negotiating a similar agreement with MIT.

Although they express willingness to renegotiate the PILOT agreement, Harvard officials say that the University also contributes to the area’s economy by attracting high-tech companies and research grants—funding that is often overlooked.

Power cites a study released in March, which showed that the area’s research universities contribute $7.4 billion to the regional economy.

“The study shows the collective strength of the eight research institutions in the area is unmatched,” Power says.

A New Deal?

With encouraging signs in the Agassiz neighborhood and a new PILOT agreement in the works, city officials are optimistic about their current relationship with Harvard.

“I think that were seeing a new level of involvement and participation by the University,” says Councillor David P. Maher.

Maher is chair of the council’s University Relations Committee, which Sullivan appointed in January 2002 to forge better ties between the city and its universities.

The mayor says he is starting to see Stone and other University administrators focus more on Cambridge. Stone’s predecessor, Paul S. Grogan, worked to build bridges to Boston, but many Cambridge residents and officials say they felt ignored under his tenure.

“In the not-so-distant past, much of the relationship building has been on the other side of the river,” Sullivan says.

He also praised Summers for attending community events and having a more visible presence.

Stone says he encourages Summers to attend local activities.

“It’s where communication takes place,” Stone says. “The frequency of those kinds of things are increasing because we [the University and the city] have gotten to know each other better.”

Stone says improved ties between the University and the city are crucial as Harvard looks ahead to major development projects on both sides of the Charles River.

“We have a general feeling in the center with all the projects that are underway in Cambridge and in Boston that we have to focus on collaborative relations with the community,” he says. “It’s not really a choice.”

—Staff writers Alexandra N. Atiya, Lauren A. E. Schuker, Jenifer L. Steinhardt, and Elisabeth S. Theodore contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu.