Vappi Is Booked; Car Owners Rooked

Residents of Vappi Village, the heavily subsidized Married Student Housing Complex, were up in arms this week over an unexpected warning that they would have to find off-street parking in the fall.

The additional expense does not seem to have driven anyone out, however: all 490 apartments are booked solid for the opening of the entire village in September.

The 45 present residents are incensed because few were aware when they signed their leases that they could not park on the street. The Village garage, when complete, will hold 70 per cent of the cars, as required by Cambridge ordinance. Spaces will rent for ten and fifteen dollars a month. Graduate students who live off-campus may normally park on Cambridge streets.

Car-owners without garage space will have to seek private lots or park in the Business School lot, a brisk twelve minutes away via the Weeks Bridge. "No one is happy with the solution," Jay Gubser of Hunneman and Co., the renting agent, said. "But five hundred cars would make on-street parking impossible."

The misunderstanding seems to have occured because the apartments now occupied were completed nine months ahead of schedule, and the rental bureaucracy was not ready with regulations in detail. Consequently, students who moved in were not informed of parking regulations until May 1. There had never been a plan to allow street parking for Villagers, University officials said.

In September a University patrolman will be stationed at the Complex to keep residents from displacing the cars of local Cantabridgians in the area.

Big Bad Bed

Another inconvenience, residents complain, is that king-sized double beds will neither fit in the elevator or up the stairs. David D. Grossman, a graduate student in physics who lives on the third floor, pulled his purchase up the side of the building with ropes and maneuvered it in the window. "This could turn out to be a problem," Grossman said. "It wasn't too hard for me, but think what installing a big bed will mean for the people assigned to the eighteenth floor."

Lots of Babies

Despite the difficulties, prospects for the Village are rosy, according to Charles P. Whitlock, Assistant to the President for Civic Affairs. Planners are expecting the new residents to arrive with three hundred babies, for which two nursery schools, a pediatric clinic with staff pediatricians, and seminars on child care are being prepared.

The University invested ten million dollars in the Complex; it expects to recover half. "But when the bridge clubs get going and Dr. Spock starts coming to lecture, this project will really start paying off with a decent social life for married students," Whitlock said "This will be a great deal more than simply an apartment house."