The Desirable, Impossible 02138

Cantabrigians take pride in their city’s multicultural and intellectual feel—the souvenir hats say 02138 is “world’s most opinionated zip code”—and they love the wide variety of bookstores, coffeeshops and ethnic restaurants that can be found on its historic, brick-lined streets.

Since they are an essential part of the 02138 mystique, Cambridge residents love the universities that have put their city on the world map.

It’s not exactly an unconditional love.

Emphatically, Cambridge residents do not want Harvard to keep growing—they do not want to live in any more Harvard shadows and they reliably oppose every building project the University proposes.

Although town-gown relationships are often touted as symbiotic, in that Harvard’s existence makes Cambridge a better and more interesting place and vice versa, Harvard’s neighbors are constantly on the defensive when it comes to University construction plans.

In a 1990 pamphlet on “Harvard Expansion and the Future of Cambridge,” Gladys Gifford, then-president of the Harvard Square Defense Fund, wrote that the “symbiotic relationship has deteriorated into a parasitic relationship.”

As each Harvard-abutting neighborhood—tony Agassiz, working-class Riverside and middle-class mid-Cambridge—struggles to preserve its current character and stave off the hungry university next door, the Cambridge City Council pays close attention and does whatever it can to keep its constituents happy.

All the while, Harvard is bursting at the seams and has taken off from 02138, purchasing land in nearby Allston and Watertown in order to accommodate its space needs.

But by all accounts, it will take decades for Harvard to build up another campus and city as desirable as the physical plant in Cambridge.

There are limited opportunities for Harvard to grow in Cambridge—and the few building opportunities that exist take years to get approved through the Byzantine approval process in Cambridge.

For now, Cambridge holds Harvard back. But one day, new frontiers will allow Harvard to fulfill pent-up building needs.

The Allston Escape Valve

When Robert Silverman arrived at Harvard as director of planning in 1984, he read a study from the mid-1970s on how much room the University had to grow.

The report wasn’t encouraging.

He remembers that, while the report indicated several million feet could theoretically be built in Cambridge, regulations on building left only a few hundred thousand square feet for Harvard to build.

“Looking at the square footage the University had added each decade, going back about 200 years, it was obvious that a few hundred thousand feet would not meet Harvard’s need for additional space for long,” Silverman writes in an e-mail message.

During his four years at Harvard, he developed a plan to buy industrial parcels of land across the river in Allston, which Harvard subsequently did.

Harvard found what Associate Vice President for Planning and Real Estate Kathy Spiegelman calls an “escape valve” in Allston—a mainly industrial area across the Charles River—where the University has since purchased 271 acres.

In Allston, University President Lawrence H. Summers told the crowd at Tercentenary Theatre during his installation last fall, Harvard has the “opportunity to create a campus that is several times as large as this whole yard.”

The opportunity to build on land with relatively few restrictions, in a city represented by one strong and central leader, will one day allow Harvard to stay at the fore of academic development.

But for now, Harvard must find ways to grow in a cramped Cambridge splintered by factional leadership and vocal anti-Harvard residents.

I Get Elected With a Little Help From My Friends

Harvard is famous for its decentralized nature—but in this area Cambridge might actually out-do its most famous institution.

Cambridge has a “weak mayor” system of government, under which all nine elected city councillors pick a mayor from among themselves every two years, while a hired city manager conducts most of the city’s day-to-day business.

The authority is so diffuse that at a recent University-city meeting, a consultant diagrammed the city’s structure as a giant circle containing several arrows pointing in and then out again.

And those arrows rarely come to easy agreements about what direction the city should take, since each councillor represents about one-tenth of the city’s voters.

“The mayor can’t tell the president of Harvard or the president of MIT that this can or can’t happen,” says City Manager Robert W. Healy.

Due to Cambridge’s unusual proportional representation voting system—which mandates that each candidate must receive only one-tenth of the “number one” votes in order to nab a seat on the city council—each city councillor has only a “narrow” political constituency to look out for, Healy says.

The election system, often a source of hope for fringe candidates, further complicates negotiation with Harvard because councillors have to guard the interests of one particular voting bloc.

Harvard administrators have long been confounded by the system.

As Vice President for Administration Sally Zeckhauser says of the city council, “That’s a tough organization to deal with and strike deals with—who do you strike deals with?”

(Not) A Home for Modern Art

The only crowd in town tougher than the city council might be the city’s residents themselves. Countless times over the last decades Harvard has gone head-to-head with residents in planning and development meetings.

The University Art Museums have no space to exhibit much of Harvard’s modern art collection.

Harvard has owned a site by the Charles, currently home to Mahoney’s Garden Center, for decades.

On paper, the site and the project must have looked like a match made in heaven.

But Riverside—the working-class neighborhood that is home to many of Harvard’s tallest and most-hated buildings, including Peabody Terrace and the Mather House tower—was livid at the idea of one more Harvard building blocking their view of the river.

At one early meeting of Harvard and the community, Riverside resident Cob Carlson remembers, one resident stood up and told Harvard’s representatives, “if you build it, we’re going to bomb it.”

The residents took their case to the city council, which imposed a year-and-a-half-long moratorium on building in Riverside, which the council later extended through December 2002.

They also set up a study committee, comprised of residents and a Harvard representative, and charged it with recommending new zoning for the site. At the time, zoning for Mahoney’s permitted buildings up to 85 feet tall.

Last December, Harvard offered a second alternative for its use for the site—a 120-unit housing complex—an option that went over about as well as the original museum.

In May, the Riverside Study Committee came up with tentative recommendations for the site that would cut the maximum height to 24 feet.

Harvard’s representative at the May meeting, Senior Director of Community Relations Mary H. Power, said that zoning proposal would “shut out” a museum or housing and that the University would have to “actively oppose” such a recommendation.

For their part, the neighbors on the committee were extremely displeased with the recommendation—they had wanted to prevent any building on the site at all. However, they had discovered that 24 feet was the absolute lowest limit the committee could recommend.

The committee members urged their neighbors to lobby the council to take the site from Harvard by “eminent domain”—a rarely-used but potent law that permits municipalities to take land and pay market rate for it.

“Given the limitations of zoning, we cannot zone this into public space,” study committee member Phyllis Baumann told the crowd.

And last week, the committee members tentatively embraced a few extra restrictions—most importantly, zoning the site “residential” instead of “institutional”—in a last-ditch attempt to turn Harvard away from its parcel by the Charles.

Since Harvard has no interest in selling or donating the site—and Riverside has no interest in seeing a museum or housing there—for now Mahoney’s Garden Center will continue to sell plants and Harvard’s modern art collection will remain in its cramped quarters.

A Center for Government

Some of Harvard’s building projects do get off the ground—but its latest project has spent half a decade in planning and consultation.

Tomorrow morning, representatives from Harvard, from the city and from the Mid-Cambridge neighborhood will get together to negotiate the final piece of Harvard’s planned government center—possibly ending five years of negotiations over the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS).

The new pair of buildings planned has been designed as a hub for the government department and a dozen related centers. And, as debate has gone on, the government and economics departments are forced to share Littauer, a building that either one could easily grow large enough to fill.

After five years of rancorous debate, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) needs just one more approval for its number one project: city council approval for Harvard to build a tunnel under a city street which would connect CGIS’ two buildings.

The project has twice been completely redesigned, once in response to residents’ complaints. The current design, Harvard representatives are quick to point out, has received approval from several city boards.

When the tunnel proposal first came before the city council two months ago, several councillors expressed their doubts about the tunnel—but they deferred rendering a decision until an independent consultant gave an assessment of the tunnel and a committee met to discuss all of the options.

Fed up with yet another delay, University officials started an e-mail campaign to garner support from Harvard employees who live in Cambridge in hopes that it would counter the renewed resident objections.

Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol, who started the petition drive, says she hopes the University’s petition will encourage the city council to avoid “foot-dragging and decision by delay.”

“These buildings need to move ahead,” she says.

The effort is meant to show Cambridge that Harvard affiliates are city residents, too, says Williams Professor of History and Political Science Roderick MacFarquhar, who chairs the government department and signed onto the petition.

“It’s ‘citizens of the government department who live in Cambridge unite,’” he quips.

After a meeting last week, FAS Associate Dean for Physical Resources and Planning David A. Zewinski ’76 said the tunnel “looks more promising today than it did yesterday.”

And with or without a tunnel plan, University officials insist CGIS construction is slated to start just after Commencement.

Growing Pains in Agassiz

Outgoing FAS Dean Jeremy R. Knowles, who has made CGIS and its tunnel a top priority, has joked with donors about the anti-building atmosphere in Cambridge—a philosophy he has dubbed BANANA: “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

But CGIS is small potatoes compared to what Harvard will be building. The rapid advances in science over recent years are necessitating a building boom unlike anything Harvard has seen in decades.

According to Zewinski, new science professors typically require about twice the space for research that their predecessors needed.

And Harvard is working to accommodate those needs.

This spring, Harvard dedicated the Bauer Laboratory, a building in which scientists will work on sequencing DNA. Meanwhile, a natural science building is in the planning stages.

Harvard has been working to consolidate its holdings in the North Yard science precinct to make way for more buildings.

In community meetings, Harvard has introduced tentative plans for new, green academic quads and for gaining space by replacing an above-ground parking lot and storage facility for test animals with underground facilities—plans that have many approvals to go before they can get underway.

But Spiegelman says that “incremental growth in the North Yard for FAS sciences is not likely to be sufficient for the science programs of this century.”

Next door to FAS’ science complex, Harvard Law School (HLS) is struggling to get past its impersonal, competitive image—but has very little space in which it can grow.

As Story Professor of Law Dan Meltzer tells residents of Agassiz at community meetings, student groups at HLS are forced to meet in “pretty substandard space,” often in hallways, because there simply are no rooms for them.

HLS is also working to establish a more student-friendly “college system” for first-year law students—a system which will require much more space.

Already three times the size of its competitor schools, HLS hopes to improve its image by adding about 15 faculty members and constructing more mid-sized classrooms, Meltzer says.

“We’re operating already well beyond our capacity,” he says.

But HLS simply has no place to put many new buildings—especially since the prime pieces of North Yard real estate adjacent to HLS are also coveted by FAS for science.

Something is going to have to go. HLS, FAS and Agassiz cannot all exist in the same space for much longer.

Specifically, some major piece of Harvard is going to have to move across the river to Harvard’s acreage in Allston.

High-level committees are currently investigating scenarios for Harvard’s 271 acres in Allston, and the top options include making a science complex across the river or moving HLS.

Two years ago, the HLS faculty voted near-unanimously against moving to Allston, but now, under the direction of University President Lawrence H. Summers, they are at least considering a cross-river move.

For now, at least, HLS hopes to build a quad to take care of its most pressing needs.

The Allston planning process “is going to take so long. We simply cannot wait to take care of our pressing and immediate space needs,” Meltzer said when he told the Agassiz community about HLS’ tentative plans for a new quad.

Agassiz residents have formed a committee, ACID—or the Agassiz Committee on the Impacts of Development—to work with the University on various development plans.

“The Agassiz community faces 15 years of massive development by our institutional neighbor,” Agassiz resident William Bloomstein wrote in the ACID Statement of Purpose. “We have no choice but to be active partners in the development process otherwise we will lose control of our neighborhood’s future.”

Many say that they don’t want their neighborhood to become a “science city,” and they aim to keep development at a minimum in their neck of the woods—and they, like many other Cambridge activists, often ask why Harvard doesn’t just put its projects in Allston.

For now, the eyes of the University are looking longingly across the River, with the ample space in Allston and the local citizens genuinely interested in seeing the University improve what for so long has been an industrial wasteland.

But Allston is far from reality—at best it’s “10 to 20 years away and even then it’s going to be phased,” Spiegelman says.

And whether Allston will ever achieve that 02138 mystique remains to be seen.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.