University and the City: Talk, But Little Action

One of the common nights around Cambridge these days is a carload of Harvard city planners driving to testify as private citizens against some project that threatens the historic Square. By now they have almost developed their own stage routine.

But their unchanging histrionics belie a lack of genuine civic concern. Although the University has slowly carried out is own projects Iviz. Quincy House, the Towers, the (medical center), it has come to project a singular image on the community as a whole, an image indicating that Harvard is not really the driving force it considers itself in Cambridge city planning.

The Administration likes to picture itself as a parental, but dynamic expert showing the somewhat primitive citizenry the way to good giving through good design. In fact, however, it is a complacent senior citizen who articulates ideas for change only when change itself becomes imperative. And even then is ideas rarely take tangible form.

Because of the University's peculiar position in Cambridge, the butter posture is decidedly unfortunate. For Harvard could be a source of leadership, and is, by necessity, one of the city's major groups. McGeorge Bundy saw the point exactly: "I believe that universities can and should exert themselves energetically in helping to shape urban development in their neighborhoods and that those who do not act quickly and energetically before serious trouble occurs are likely to and themselves driven against their will into much more expensive action later on." In short, to protect its own interests, Harvard has to lead. This it has not done.

According to the University INVENTORY FOR PLANNING, according to officials and city planners, at the present time it is virtually impossible to initiate dynamic change throughout Cambridge -- or even in the area surrounding the Square. This attitude is wrong. Although it is true that development problems are increasingly complex, city planners and University officials tend to use them as rationalizations for inaction. Studies of traffic patterns, of parking, and of residential usage must be made, must be correlated with other studies which in turn derive from other studies. While everyone is studying, few are acting.

One of the most frequently cited arguments against immediate action is that very little land exists in Cambridge that does not contain at least a shack. Overdevelopment is particularly evident around the University itself, a district whose primarily residential character imposes decided restrictions on any construction that Harvard may anticipate. Because of those intrinisc limitations and because overdevelopment has caused land values to skyrocket, the University reasons that it must embark on a program aimed mainly at conversion of its own open land and out-dated facilities.

Along with overdevelopment goes overpopulation, traffic jams, (including picturesque MTA bus naris), and a very complex parking situation, all of which are quite as bad as the experts suggest. In fact, according to the INVENTORY, "unless some remedial measures can be taken, total and habitual paralysis of the major highways of Cambridge is in sight." Which would seem to imply that something should be done.

The city itself has a further rationalization for inertia. Cambridge planners say with a certain amount of truth that they cannot plan re-development in the area to the east of Central Sq. until they know exactly where the proposed Inner Belt highway will go. This is a reasonable enough moratorium, since it involves state as well as local lethargy. However, because of a system of priorities voted in the city council, almost no urban renewal can take place in the whole of Cambridge until the inner belt goes through. Thus, while people in the east of Cambridge neglect their homes (and have been doing so for more than two years because road graders and bulldosers tend to make extensive repairs appear slightly ludicrous), the other half of the city must also remain paralysed.

The arguments of the city planners and University officials, reinforced by red tape, appear to be fairly cogent. They depict the situation as an almost impossible labyrinth of physical and political problems. Their only hope seems to lie in a messianic revalation. Witness a line from the 1961 budget summary that city manager John J. Curry submitted to the Council: "All have confidence that new and modern construction is on the way, but until it appears, extreme caution is necessary." This sort of argument tumbles like a house of cards in the face of a singular refutation--John Briston Sullivan.

Sullivan's enemies have implied at various times that he is a wild man, a scalawag, or, perhaps merely a misguided materialist. He himself has come up with at least one scheme--the project on the Charles River--that taxed the credulity of many. But, strikingly if haphazardly he represents the one element that is missing in the Cambridge and Harvard approach to redevelopment: dynamism. He has shown that officials and city planners are wrong and that something concrete can be done, if someone is willing to try.

Sullivan is frankly out to make money, and the self-interest of this one man has been more potent than all of Harvard and Cambridge put together.

Only after Sullivan had obtained an option on the site where the Treadway Motel now stands did the University and the city even begin to discuss the possibility of building a joint parking garage there. While Harvard and Cambridge sat by and watched, Sullivan rounded up the $350,000 banknote that he needed to take up the option. The motel has been a financial success and has added quite a few parking spaces to the area. If University and city still sulk, they had better ask themselves why they did not get there first.

In the case of the 15 story building on stilts, the promoter has once again crept up behind the sleeping University and almost stolen the bacon. However, to Harvard this project represents a problem slightly different from that of the motel.

In the motel caper, the University was directly concerned as an interest group and slightly less as a civic leader. It would have been decidedly beneficial to both city and University to have a large parking garage in Brattle Square. As an investment, particularly, it would not have hurt Harvard.

It is another story with the office building on stilts. Although Harvard has no overt interests, no designs on the strip of land that Sullivan has chosen for his brainchild, it does and should have a strong, civic interest. What problems the building will or will not pose is irrelevant here. It is significant only that the project will alter the face of the Square considerably, and that Sullivan's suggestion came first.

The University's unwillingness to dabble in local affairs is more than evident in the list of signatures attached to the letter of protest published after the Sullivan bill passed the state Senate for the first time. Asterisks marked several of the 24 names to indicate that those persons did not speak for their institutions or organizations. One such asterisk marked President Pusey's name. Could not Harvard and the man who stood up to McCarthy stand up to a local real estate operator? The fact that Harvard did not take the lead when the battle began, the fact that Harvard was, in a sense, afraid to enter the fray because it might become a target for derision in the even that Cambridge supported the project--these facts serve to indict Harvard strongly for its lethargy.

Behind Dunster House the Cambridge slum unrolls its several miles of quiet grandeur. Even to the most casual observer, this area should suggest that Harvard is not the came when the battle began, the fact that itself. While the University has been sleeping and so fancying, the adjacent area has been deteriorating, has become in many places a breeding ground for squalor and its concomitant juvenile delinquency. Such conditions (among others) must have a decided effect on a university that also has a critical housing problem for its married and graduate students and instructors. And the slum problem is only one of the many that can have a decisive effect on Harvard in the near future.

There are two questions to be asked, What is to be done? How and Why should Harvard do it?

If it is to protect its own, if it is to keep its own house and doorstep clean, (if for no other reasons), the University must take the lead in developing not only the area surrounding it but also other parts of Cambridge. In civic affairs Harvard might take a good example from M.I.T. The new Technology Square development, covering about eight acres, represents a joint effort by MIT, an investment company (Cabot, Cabot, and Forbes) and Lever Brothers to develop an area primarily for industrial purposes. MIT went into the project as an investor, not as an academic institution.

One project that Harvard might undertake, for example, is the construction of cooperative apartment houses in its adjacent run-down areas. Such a project would not only improve living conditions in those areas, but might also prove a solution to the proverbial housing problem.

Of course, such an undertaking would be by no means easy. Apart from problems of land acquisition and construction, it would not be easy to handle the relocation of present residents until such time as they might move back into the area. The University would have to have a care for neighborhood groupings, would have to ensure a finance plan to allow present residents to return and to accommodate students, and would undoubtedly have to carry on a publicity campaign to combat the political stir that always crops up in the face of radical change.

The answer to part of the 'Why" question lies back in Dean Bundy's statement. If Harvard does not take an active interest along planned lines. If Harvard lets things drift and faces problems only when they become full-scale crises then Harvard will have to pay, in terms of money and of future expansion and certainly in terms of that beloved of the city planners, aesthetics. If the University does not take up the torch soon the Sullivans will be there first every time.

The second part of the "Why" has to do with Harvard as an academic institution. There is a probably more expertise per square foot in Cambridge than anywhere else in the United States, a fact which Harvard is always careful to advertise in its attempts to appease the local population (along with the other facts about the high number of Cambridge people it employs, the business it brings to the Square, and the money it pays the city in lies of taxes.) It is about time that Harvard stopped bringing out its experts like a traveling vaudeville team to speak as private citizens against detrimental projects. It is about time that these men stopped preaching doom and started practicing in Cambridge affairs. This town has much more machinery for reform than New Haven even had What it needs is leadership.

In the INVENTORY FOR PLANNING, there is a map showing a number of brown circles, each of which represents a prospective site for a parking garage. One such circle rests solidly on the western end of Cambridge Common, where an underground parking garage, such as the one under construction at Boston Common, might be built. John Briston Sullivan has designs for a similar project on the same spot. It will be interesting to see who gets there first. Frankly, my bet is on Sullivan.JOHN BRISTON SULLIVAN