SHADY HILL: FOR SENTIMENT'S SAKE

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I read with considerable interest your lead article, this morning, about the University's plan to develop medium cost housing on the Shady Hill Estate. I am in sympathy with the argument against the proposal; but I feel the sentimental aspects of the situation have not been emphasized sufficiently.

Certain houses in Cambridge have great physical beauty, as well as considerable historical interest. "Ellmwood," where James Russell Lowell lived, the Longfellow House, on Brattle Street, Apthorp House, which is the Master's House of Adams, and not the least, Shady Hill, where Charles Eliot Norton lived, and after him Professor Paul Saches. One might suggest that much of Harvard's modern eminence was first devised, shaped and plotted at Shady Hill. One may remark that the legendary figures of half a century ago gathered there. Perhaps sentiment is of little value where measured against dollars and cents; I am inclined to disagree. . .

I regret the necessity to criticize the University's present scheme; it is probably futile to suggest that there are both sentimental and aesthetic arguments of validity against the destruction of "Shady Hill." Nevertheless, where an accident of Taste and Time creates something of beauty in a city's midst, it should be jealously guarded. C. Shiverick.