Residents Clash With Businesses, M.I.T. on 'Belt'

The Cambridge City Council faced a divided community yesterday as a variety of interests--residents, business, and M.I.T.--pleaded that they be spared from the path of the Inner Belt.

Meeting as a special committee on the Inner Belt, the Council took no official position on an alternate route for the Brookline-Elm St. location, which would uproot between 3000 and 5000 people and pass within several blocks of Central Square. However, the Cambridge Committee on the Inner Belt, a private group of planners, strongly urged that the City recommend a path along Albany and Portland Streets in East Cambridge.

Polaroid Objects

This route, located several blocks west of the fringe of the M.I.T. campus, was attacked earlier in the day by the Polaroid Corporation. Polaroid claimed that selecting this path would destroy such a large portion of the company's physical plant that it might be forced to move all its operations outside the City. The company employs 2600 people.

In its presentation, however, the Committee for the Inner Belt claimed that it had designed the Portland-Albany St. route so as not to take more than one part of one Polaroid building. The Committee plans to show its revised design of the route to the company.

Earlier in yesterday's meeting, Councillor Edward A. Crane '35 argued that the City should pressure either the state or national government to restudy the need for the Inner Belt.