Crowding in On Allston

The stately homes on Gordon Street in South Allston—on the other side of the I-90 turnpike—have seen better days.

There are scruffy sofas on front porches and peeling paint on some facades. The streets nearby—the heart of Allston’s business district—are filled with laundromats, liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, and night spots.

The neighborhood did not always look this way.

“When I was growing up around here, that area provided basic services to the community,” says Paul Berkeley, the president of the Allston Civic Association, who has lived in the neighborhood his entire life. “Today it is all bars and night clubs.”

Locals like William Marchione, the curator of the Brighton-Allston Historical Society, say that the expansion of Boston University (BU)’s undergraduate population in the 1960s doomed the area. As the number of undergraduates grew, homes were subdivided and owners moved out, and businesses catering to the student population began to dot the landscape.

“Prior to the 1960s, it was a very nice upscale residential neighborhood,” Marchione says. “The area deteriorated remarkably. I think the impact of Boston University on South Allston could serve as an example of the worst kind of impact of an institutional expansion.”

As plans for new undergraduate Houses in Allston become more concrete, the memory of BU’s expansion and the ongoing tensions over college students’ drinking and rowdy behavior in the area have left some residents wary.

Last week, a preliminary report released by Harvard planners showed that the University is considering four different configurations for new undergraduate houses along the Charles River in Allston. Among the possible sites are the current location of the College’s athletic facilities, the Harvard Business School (HBS) dorms, and a third area that includes parts of the One Western Ave. graduate housing complex and the HBS campus.

It is unclear when the new Houses would be built, although the report labels them as part of a potential “first phase” of Allston construction.

But some local residents say they might already have enough undergraduates in their community.

“This is a small working-class neighborhood and we have examples of what happens in our area when you have student housing,” says Berkeley, who is also a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force, a community group that reviews all of Harvard’s large-scale projects in the area and will provide feedback on the preliminary report.

Harvard students would not be interspersed in the neighborhood like students from BU, but residents still worry about the effect that a projected 1,500 new college students would have in Allston.

BRUSHES WITH THE LAW

For years, Allston residents have had little negative contact with Harvard students and, they say, too much contact with students at BU and Boston College (BC).

“Harvard has traditionally controlled [their] undergraduates better than other universities in the neighborhood,” says Ellin Flood-Murphy, a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force.

While Harvard undergraduates trek over to the athletics facilities in Allston every day, their housing has been confined to the Cambridge side of the Charles River.

Graduate students, meanwhile, have lived in Allston for years—in the HBS dorms, at the Soldiers Field housing complex, and now at the new building at One Western Ave.—without any notable incidents.

But with BU’s campus in the heart of South Allston and BC’s campus bordering nearby Brighton, the area has an especially high concentration of college students—and it is the undergraduates at these two colleges that have been the most frequent target of residents’ complaints.

About six years ago the Boston Police Department (BPD) instituted a new zero-tolerance policy in order to quell unruly behavior at BU’s and BC’s off-campus housing.

Police officers talk to all incoming freshmen at the schools about respecting the communities they live in, and they have no qualms about arresting students when they misbehave.

BPD Captain William B. Evans says that fewer residents have complained about disruptive student neighbors since police implemented a stricter approach to house parties.

“We don’t hear from the house [again] if we lead four [students] out of there,” says Evans, who is responsible for District 14, which includes Allston and Brighton. “Unfortunately that seems to be the only thing students seem to understand.”

In November, Evans and North Allston residents had their first highly-publicized confrontation with Harvard undergraduates when students descended en masse on Ohiri Field for the Harvard-Yale tailgate.

The students did not make a good impression.

Michael Hanlon ’69, whose family has lived in Allston since 1955, estimates that on his way to the Harvard-Yale game he saw 3,000 students drinking outside the stadium. When he left, nearly three hours later, Hanlon says that the students were still there.

Ninety-seven IDs were confiscated, 29 students were ejected from the tailgate for underage drinking, and two students were arrested.

“Harvard-Yale was out of control,” Evans says. “That’s the stuff we don’t want to see in the neighborhood.”

The totals included students from Yale as well as Harvard, and Evans says that the behavior was confined to a limited area. But he adds that he is concerned about what would happen if Harvard undergraduates lived in his district.

Hanlon, who is also a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force, agrees that residents’ interactions with college students have not left them enthusiastic about the prospect of more undergraduates in the area.

“Look at what those BC students and BU students are doing in the lower part of Allston,” says Hanlon. “I don’t think Harvard undergraduates have that reputation, although they are as human as those people are.”

“That’s why I think people take the attitude, ‘no more undergrad housing,’” he adds.

‘INS AND OUTS’

If Harvard undergraduates do move across the river, it is unlikely that they will transform North Allston in same way that residents have complained BU undergraduates changed South Allston.

Almost all undergraduates at Harvard live and will continue to live in a handful of concentrated Houses, while about a quarter of BU students live off campus.

Unlike South Allston, much of the land that Harvard will develop in North Allston is currently dedicated to industrial, not residential use. Thus there are fewer streets like Gordon Street that would be directly affected by the presence of undergraduates.

Nevertheless, the construction of undergraduate Houses in Allston would create an influx of temporary residents—a population many in the community want to avoid.

“We don’t want the neighborhood to lose all its families and long-term residents and to be a stopping point for people who are there for a short time, because that is already affecting the quality of the community,” says Bob Van Meter, the executive director of the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation.

“We have enough ins and outs as it is,” says Rita DiGesse, a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force.

Hanlon says that North Allston currently has a high rate of homeowners who live in their own homes—a statistic that he does not want to see change.

“People have an appreciation for their investment,” he says. “People have a regard for their neighbors and [an interest] not to allow people to have parties to three in the morning.”

Similar concerns have stalled Harvard’s development of prime plots of land in the Riverside neighborhood in Cambridge.

Residents who live adjacent to Dunster, Mather, and Leverett Houses frequently complain about loud parties and disruptive student behavior.

“Students congregate on the streets—you can hear the conversation perfectly,” Michael Brennan, who lives across the street from Leverett House, told The Crimson in March. “These students think I’m a mean guy. I understand they want to have fun, but this is where I live.”

Living in such close proximity to undergraduates has strained residents’ relationship with the University, and they have historically opposed any further encroachment of college students into their neighborhood.

When the University constructed the DeWolfe Street apartments in the early 1990s, officials told residents the buildings would be for graduate students and junior faculty, sparking resentment in the neighborhood after the buildings were devoted to overflow housing for undergraduates instead.

In 2003, when Harvard negotiated with the city to construct new buildings in the Riverside area, the University pledged in its written agreement that undergraduates would not be living in them.

“In general community members in Cambridge and in Allston are concerned that undergraduate [housing] may not be compatible with neighborhood activities,” says Mary H. Power, Harvard’s senior director of community relations.

In Allston as well as in Cambridge, residents tend to identify graduate students as more studious and also as longer-term residents.

“The general view in the neighborhood is that undergraduates very often don’t think about their neighbors very much and they tend to be less considerate than students who are a little bit older,” Van Meter says.

‘MERELY A CONCEPT’

Allston residents contacted for this article say that during years of discussions with Harvard, the concept of undergraduate housing in their neighborhood never came up.

The North Allston Strategic Framework for Planning—a document released earlier this year which outlines both the University’s and the community’s priorities for a new campus—made only brief mention of undergraduate housing, citing the work of Harvard’s Allston Life Task Force.

“The highest university housing priority is for graduate students, but housing for postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and undergraduates are also possible,” the report noted.

In contrast, the document repeatedly mentions the University’s need for graduate student housing in the new campus and even suggests possible sites.

Kathy Spiegelman, Harvard’s top planner and the director of the Allston Initiative, says that the possibility of undergraduate housing did not come up with residents earlier because “there was no discussion internally in Harvard” about it.

In October 2003, University President Lawrence H. Summers wrote in an open letter that, while the idea of putting undergraduates in Allston was “more speculative,” it could help to “strengthen the bonds between the Cambridge and Allston parts of our extended campus.”

“That was the first time when the prospect of undergrads in Allston was highlighted,” says Van Meter. “It certainly wasn’t something discussed [before].”

Indeed, two weeks ago, Ray Mellone, the chair of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force, said that undergraduate housing in Allston was “merely a concept.”

“It’s just conjecture,” he said. “Harvard hasn’t come through with the plan. It will have to be reviewed by the community before anything happens. We’re not going to react to anything that hasn’t been put forward as development.”

A DISTANCE AWAY

Now that the preliminary report has been released, residents will have a chance to vet the proposals at several community meetings.

The University will have to gather resident input before it files an institutional master plan with the city sometime next year. If the institutional master plan is approved—a process that can take up to three years—Harvard will be given the green light to begin construction in Allston.

All of the scenarios laid out in the report place undergraduate Houses along the river—blocks away from the North Allston residential community. Riverfront sites are advantageous to the University, which wants to keep new Houses as close as possible to the ones on the other side of the Charles.

And Spiegelman and Kevin McCluskey ’76, Harvard’s director of community relations for Boston, both say that they would expect more opposition from residents if the Houses were built farther south.

Indeed, Berkeley says locating undergraduates along the river would be more palatable because there would be a buffer between the Houses and the Allston neighborhood.

But after experiencing firsthand how college students can change a community, residents maintain that placing undergraduates anywhere closer to the heart of their neighborhood would be unacceptable.

—Brendan R. Linn contributed to the

reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Joseph M. Tartakoff can be reached at tartakof@fas.harvard.edu.