Stepping Out of the Bubble

In Jan. 1983, Harvard stood before the Rent Control Board, petitioning for the right to make a $2.5 million renovation at the Craigie Arms apartments on Mt. Auburn St. Just two blocks away at Grendel’s Den, Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 was cooking up a legal scheme to grant the restaurant owners the liquor license they had been denied.

While Harvard is often portrayed as a bubble isolated from its surroundings, one has only to step outside the wrought-iron gates to realize that the University is not an island, but rather a plot of land contiguous with the rest of Cambridge.

Though the University sailed through the turmoil of 1983 essentially unscathed, the decisions that were handed down that year had a lasting impact on the face of Harvard Square.

AN “AGGRAVATING FACTOR”

In 1981, Harvard Real Estate (HRE), known today as Harvard Real Estate Services, began its attempt to remove tenants from Craigie Arms, a 60-unit building at 122 Mt. Auburn St. that had deteriorated rapidly under rent control.

By 1983, the complex stood vacant, but Cambridge’s powerful Rent Control Board denied Harvard’s petition to remove the low- and moderate-income units from Cambridge’s tight rental market and make much-needed renovations.

Roger Mervis, the executive director of the Rent Control Board at the time, called the Craigie Arms dispute an “aggravating factor” in the town-gown relations of the early 1980s.

“Harvard was perceived by some as aggressive and sometimes overreaching,” Mervis said in an interview last week. “And sometimes Harvard took on a role that played that up.”

But according to Jacqueline O’Neill, the assistant to the vice president for government and community affairs in 1983, the University’s predicament came about not as a result of its policies, but rather the nature of the rent control administration in Cambridge.

“The rigidity of the Rent Control Board created an impasse that didn’t help tenants or landlords,” O’Neill said.

The eventual removal of Craigie Arms from the rent control roster did not have the feared negative impact on affordable housing in Cambridge, since the University invested much of the profit from the sale of the apartments in 1985 to the Harvard Emergency Loan Program (HELP) fund, a half million-dollar program designed to rehabilitate deteriorated low-income housing.

TOWN AND GOWN, CHURCH AND STATE

While the University was fighting the Rent Control Board, Grendel’s Den, the popular bar and restaurant located at 89 Winthrop St., was chafing under the Massachusetts law that allowed churches to deny establishments within 500 feet of their premises the right to serve alcohol.

Grendel’s, which sits 10 feet from the Holy Cross Armenian Catholic Parish, was not allowed to use the liquor license it had previously purchased.

Tribe said he first became aware of the situation when a law student raised his hand in class and asked a pertinent question.

“He said, ‘If government can’t delegate power to churches, then how come I can’t get a beer with my lunch at Grendel’s?’” Tribe recalled.

Thus began Larkin v. Grendel’s Den, a case that Tribe took to the U.S. Supreme Court in October 1982, arguing that the law violated the Establishment Clause of the First Ammendment, which guarantees the separation of Church and State. In December, the Court agreed with Tribe and ruled the law unconstitutional.

Kari M. Kuelzer, the current owner of Grendel’s and the daughter of its original owners, said that the Court victory saved the family business.

“Without the case we definitely wouldn’t be here,” she said.

Since Grendel’s was the only restaurant in the Square affected by the law, Tribe pointed out that the court victory didn’t necessarily turn on dozens of beer taps, although he insisted that it was nonetheless an important event.

“What occurred was an intangible change,” Tribe said. “It should be measured in the freedom from religion people enjoy, not the amount of liquor people consume.”

—Staff writer Nan Ni can be reached at nni@fas.harvard.edu.