Avoiding Mistakes in Allston

This Thanksgiving, future generations of Harvard students—many of them still unborn—can add one more thing to be thankful for: Allston.

Last week’s Faculty meeting, at which professors involved in Allston planning gave a presentation to their colleagues, provides some encouraging evidence that those Faculty members doing the planning are moving in the right direction and asking the right questions, and for that we are thankful. If making Allston vibrant and better integrated into the larger Harvard community necessitates a substantial undergraduate presence, the University is no doubt obliged to consider relocating some Houses.

The hope is, however, that this relocation does not come at the expense of an already disjointed and divided undergraduate community. And while there are still too many outstanding concerns to know whether Allston will truly solve the perennial problems of student life or will only compound them, we are indisputably pleased with the progress.

Building on the report released in May, the Faculty presentation last week confirmed that many of our primary concerns about Allston planning are at least being addressed. Harvard has an opportunity to reinvent its modern undergraduate life with a contiguous and balanced campus; within reach is the elimination of weepy, freshly assigned first-year blocking groups sulking their way to Annenberg to grudgingly claim their Quad House t-shirts. Accordingly, we’re glad to see that plans currently include a minimum of two to three Houses built across the river—a replacement for the Quad Houses—with a potential five more to be built in the distant future.

An Allston campus with anything less than a commanding undergraduate presence would be an insufferable, excruciating exile to those placed there, and an Allston campus that does not replace the Quad but amounts to a third severed satellite community would be equally disastrous. So the decision to have a substantial number Houses across the river is welcome news—and helpful in banishing the bogeyman of being “Allstonned.” As we have stated in the past, if Allston is going to be inhabited by undergraduates, a “critical mass” of students are needed at a minimum—an idea the committee on Allston has thankfully embraced.

Fitting with this philosophy of the undergraduate’s vital role, the presenters also reiterated that proposals for an undergraduate student center in Allston are under serious consideration. Such a building has the potential to fuse together the broken shards of a fractured student population that yearns for unity, conviviality and common spaces for extracurricular pursuits. This page has called for the University to construct a student center since time immemorial. There is a desperate need for performance, practice and meeting space on campus, and a student center—if properly planned—will solve that problem while also bringing together the disparate groups in the Harvard community.

But in order for such a building to be more than a glorified Loker Commons, it must be situated as centrally as possible—not on the other side of the athletic fields, but as close to the river as space will allow. A student center that is far from the center is fundamentally flawed—one of the many reasons why the newly freed up space in Hilles Library will never fulfill that purpose. A “Ponte Vecchio”-style student center, as mentioned in last spring’s report, would meet that need exceptionally well and provide the new campus with the architectural landmark it needs to announce the College’s reinvention to the world. Short of that visionary idea, the College should attempt to situate the student center as the gateway to Allston’s undergraduate presence—a place students pass by daily en route from one side of the river to the other.

Yet even with such a centrally-located structure bridging the divide between Old Harvard and New Harvard, the issue of Allston’s distance to Harvard proper is still a cause for concern. Thankfully, Allston committee members are cognizant of the concern; Professor of Economics Edward L. Glaeser, a member of the Allston Life Task Force, identified the issue of transportation as “absolutely critical.” But as it stands, the official plan for Allston transportation is a mix between improving pedestrian corridors and an improved shuttle service. These ideas are seriously lacking. As any Quadling might tell you, the expansion of the oft-unreliable and infrequent shuttle service to a new locale is hardly an improvement at all. The University needs to take a more innovative approach to solving the same old transportation problems in its brand new campus. Indeed, it is facing substantially more difficult obstacles—namely the river and a series of high traffic throughways. It would be a shame to build incredible new facilities for learning only to allow an inadequate shuttle system stand in the way.

It would be premature to turn pessimistic about the promise of Allston, and despite our myriad concerns, the future across the river is bright. More living space to alleviate overcrowding in the existing Houses, a student center, new recreational athletic facilities, and the promise of a large scale urban revitalization to boot—tomorrow’s College will potentially alleviate, in some dramatic ways, the most pressing problems of today’s. To be sure, the hardest work remains ahead; realizing those goals given the various competing interests at stake—not to mention the physical restraints of the Allston campus—will not be easy. But then again, people are rarely thankful for things that are.