Car Crunch

Most Harvard students nowadays only think about parking in Harvard Square when their parents come to visit. Questions of traffic flow barely register in most undergraduates’ minds, and congestion affects only that small group of early risers from the Quad who endure a sluggish shuttle ride down a jam-packed Garden Street.

As Harvard enrolled increasing numbers of students during the fifties, the need for space was not limited to additional dorm rooms. About one in 20 students brought a car to campus, aggravating already-worsening traffic problems in the Square. Furthermore, as the influx of cars increased, Cambridge struggled to accommodate parked cars, with frequent clashes between students and Cambridge authorities. This issue of parking in Harvard Square affected hundreds of students and faculty, strained town-gown relations, and was debated endlessly in City Hall and University Hall.

On foot or on wheels, Harvard men had to traverse an area that already sported one of the highest traffic densities in the nation. With approximately one car for every three people, Cambridge’s car to person ratio was significantly higher than the national average—approximately one for every four people. This easily outstripped second-place Canada’s 1:20 ratio and China’s 1:8,000. In addition, a daily influx of almost 250,000 non-resident vehicles crowded the historic and historically narrow streets of Cambridge, some of which had not been widened—or changed much at all—for hundreds of years.

Most Harvard students in the fifties experienced the traffic snarls as pedestrians, dodging speeding cars on crowded Cambridge streets. Chapman Professor of Business Administration Emeritus Stephen A. Greyser ’56 said that “it took all my training in jaywalking as someone who grew up in Boston to be able to navigate Harvard Square on foot for four years.” But according to Henry H. Gaffney Jr. ’56, he never had trouble taming the traffic: “We all followed the example of [Frothingham Professor of History of Religion] Arthur Darby Nock, who resided at Eliot House when I was there: he mythically brandished his umbrella in a threatening way at approaching vehicles when crossing Mass. Ave. or Cambridge Street.”

But at the start of Fall 1955, the number of student-owned cars, though small compared with the total car population in Cambridge, rose sharply. According to University Police Captain Matthew F. Toohy, over 5,000 members of the University operated automobiles. But there was no place to put them: as the number of cars in the Square expanded, parking facilities barely grew at all, and congestion in Harvard Square began to reach epic proportions. Most Harvard motorists had to navigate a series of hurdles as they tried to park their cars, including the ever-present threats of tickets and towings, and a 1930 city ordinance that prohibited overnight parking on public roads.

HELL ON WHEELS

The students who had cars found resourceful ways to deal with Cambridge authorities. In December 1955, City Councillor Marcus Morton called for what The Crimson labeled a “full-scale attack” against violators, and in July 1956, Cambridge police officers in Harvard Square wrote 5,000 parking tickets in two weeks, issuing so many that their press ran dry and additional orders of tickets had to be placed.

Some cars were even hit twice—once by the Cambridge authorities, and then again by Harvard University Police. In addition to threats of ticketing, towing, and even court action by the Cambridge Police, Harvard students had to deal with disciplinary action by the College. In March 1955, seven undergraduates received a month’s probation for “flagrant violations of University and Cambridge parking regulations,” and for what Dean of Students Delmar Leighton referred to as a “failure to behave with the maturity and responsibility expected” of Harvard students.

Not all students felt pressure from the law—many who used their cars infrequently left their autos across the river at the Business School. And the system could be circumvented, with some students increasingly adept at finding spots near the Houses. “I learned which streets near my house (Lowell) or near the Crimson got ‘loose’ at what hours on what days,” David Royce ’56, who is a former Crimson editor, writes in an e-mail, “and I seldom had to hunt more than one loop around the block to find a spot.”

“I don’t think I ever got a Harvard ticket,” Royce writes, “and what Cambridge tickets I got I didn’t pay.”

Still, some undergraduates complained that the enforcement amounted to a vendetta against student motorists, driven by angry Cantabrigian natives and a hostile local police force. Louis Altman, then a student at Harvard Law School, sent a letter to the Cambridge Police Chief detailing his claims of police discrimination.

Only cars belonging to students or those with out-of-state plates were ticketed, he claimed, which violated “a clause in the Constitution of the United States which requires equal protection of the laws.”

And in a letter to The Crimson, William R. Elder ’58 asked, “Is this an attempt to tax the ‘Harvard car’ out of existence by the imposing of heavy fines?” He pointed out that formerly legal parking was outlawed, while Harvard had not stepped up to provide alternate facilities. Elder implored the administration to help “keep wheels under the Harvard man.”

Relations between town and gown grew increasingly chilly, and in late 1956, Councillor Al Velucci threatened to run a highway through the middle of Harvard Yard if the University didn’t solve the parking problem.

NO ONE IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT

While a number of authorities proposed solutions to the space crunch, no one seemed willing to lead the charge, and a consensus was hard to come by. Patrick F. Ready, the chief of police for Cambridge, wanted to ban all cars in the College except those belonging to seniors and faculty. Others, including mayor John J. Foley, looked to alternate side of the street parking as the solution. Only City Manager John J. Curry ’19 knew exactly what to do: “Tear down the Fly Club’s back yard,” he thundered at a Crimson reporter in 1955, “and build a parking lot...I’m not concerned with whether the Fly Club is willing.”

Given the confusion, it comes as no surprise that no solution emerged, and the University remained relatively aloof from the situation. Although it stepped up efforts to improve and centralize registration of cars in 1955 and 1956, the University annually reminded students that it did not feel responsible for providing parking facilities, and many students continued to ignore the car registration rules.

In 1958, the University forbid students to park on the streets at night altogether, effectively limiting students to the recently expanded facilities at the Business School across the river. The city and University discussed building a multi-story parking lot, and other city officials supported constructing a parking garage under Cambridge Common. But discussions stalled, and it wasn’t until 1970 that the University took steps to dramatically increase the amount of parking for Harvard students and faculty. The plan, which aimed to add about 2,000 spaces in the form of garages at places like Everett Street, the Business School, and the Kennedy School of Government, also raised the annual fee for a parking space from $40 to $245.

NO MORE ‘WHEELS UNDER THE HARVARD MAN’

Today, while parking and congestion in the Square is still a problem, it is no longer a concern for most Harvard students. The inconvenience and expense of owning a car at Harvard—$1,585 per year to park in various out-of-the-way University lots—discourage almost everyone from bringing a car to campus.

According to Jeff Parenti, a senior traffic engineer for the city of Cambridge, traffic congestion stems from a simple problem: there are simply “too many cars and not enough streets on which to put them.” But addressing this problem can be extremely complicated. For the last two decades, Cambridge “has aggressively sought to reduce the number of cars by encouraging cycling, walking, and [public] transit,” Parenti writes in an e-mail. “One way this department...does that is through good planning and design.” Even with the latest in computerized traffic signals and urban planning technology, engineering “good planning and design” is no simple task.

Today, Cambridge is still fighting to reduce traffic congestion in the Square. The Harvard Square Improvement Project, which began this May, will transform many Square-area streets and hopes to improve pedestrian and bicycle traffic. And it is as pedestrians and cyclists that most Harvard students will benefit from these developments.

There are more garages serving Harvard Square now than in the 1950s, but the problem was never really “solved.” A combination of factors—including the rising costs of car ownership, improved public transportation, and a student body drawn increasingly from all over the country and all over the world—combined to make Elder’s fear a reality, and finally took the wheels out from under the Harvard man.

—Staff writer M. Aidan Kelly can be reached at makelly@fas.harvard.edu.