The Kennedy Library: A Sad Story

FORCES VYING for and against the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library will rise or fall on their stamina. Questions of the propriety, usefulness and desirability of building the library near Harvard Square have been forgotten. Everyone has already decided. Either you are for the library or agin' it.

When the Library Corporation announced earlier this month that the monumental 85-foot-high glass pyramid would be replaced by a lower-slung brick museum, community groups attacked the move as a "cosmetic" change. They said the alteration in the museum was designed only to save money without cutting down the square footage--or the scale--of the museum itself. In addition, critics claimed architect I.M. Pei's separation of the library complex into two buildings was a small concession to professors who did not want tourists tramping down their ivy-covered hallways.

Ever since the Kennedy Corporation unveiled its library plans last May, community groups have been up in arms to stop the predicted influx of tourists and traffic. Perhaps the final blow to any possible community-library truce came in February when the General Services Administration hired C.E. Maguire Inc. to conduct the $184,000 consulting job which is supposed to finally evaluate the true merits of the library's placement on the 12-acre MBTA site.

Maguire is the consulting firm which supported the Inner Belt, a proposed traffic artery (later scrapped) hated by Cambridge residents, and the firm which allegedly bowed to political pressure in altering its findings about a new container port in Boston Harbor. Anti-library forces have objected so strenuously to the library and to Maguire that the firm's decision will be doubted no matter what the outcome.

Community groups are apparently setting up grounds for an appeal. A vote of confidence in the library from Maguire will bring cries of a buy-off, political dealings, hush money, or whatever else the post-Watergate mind can dream up. And if the firm goes against the library, the community will stay silent, perhaps coming to watch the burial. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), who calls the shots for the Library Corporation, is unlikely to risk any political gallywagging to extricate the library from that messy predicament.

THE KENNEDY LIBRARY got its starry-eyed start 12 years ago when President Kennedy was still in office. Since the 1965 invitation by City Council to build the library in Cambridge, many changes in the tenor of urban life have altered the city's priorities. These have been years of race problems, rent control, increased welfare demands, town-gown antagonism, urgent need for low-and medium-income housing, crime, dwindling tax rolls, congestion and pollution.

The question is not whether the city wants a Kennedy Library to be built somewhere in the country, for Cambridge residents have an absolute reverence for Jack Kennedy. The question must now be whether the city can afford another nontaxable development and its attendant costs like traffic, parking and police protection.

Furthermore, the city must ask itself if it can afford to go along with a plan that has been so mismanaged from the start. Granted, the Kennedy people ran into unforeseeable troubles with the MBTA, and only now are the subway cars ready to move off the site, but the planners clearly ignored the very practical political and environmental issues of construction.

Community groups constantly complain that the Kennedy Corporation has treated them as pawns to be pushed around, and complain about the secrecy in all library preparations. Library officials, they owned the land and had zoning to build almost anything they wanted.

The library planners failed also because they had no acceptable overall goal for the property except that it should have "life" and be a fitting memorial. Plans for a related facilities building consisting of a shopping mall, luxury apartments, and a shopping mall, luxury apartments, and a hotel have all gone out the window for various financial reasons. Now the related facilities site will temporarily house an above ground parking lot which does not bode too well for a permanent parking solution when something else is built on that three-acre slice of land.

An organization that can not get a workable parking plan together is not one to plan a whole academic-tourist complex. A plan for shuttlebuses from the other side of the river was little more than an idea pulled out of the air. The library people are likewise foolish to hope for peripheral parking near future MTA stations when extension of the Red Line is certainly years away.

THE KENNEDY LIBRARY has been a sad effort. The obstinacy of both sides just convolutes the whole issue, everyone gets heated, a lot happens, and nothing ever gets done. During the first week in April, Pei cut out the glass pyramid, the City Council by a 5-4 vote reaffirmed its desire to see the library constructed in Cambridge, and an advisory committee of Harvard and MIT professors met with representatives of Maguire. The same week Maguire requested a two-week extension on its contract and students in the Graduate School of Design announced they would take a poll to see what Cantabrigians really think of the library. Everyone is working but to no avail.

The coup de grace of lousy organization came that same week when Pei reportedly eliminated the two 350-seat movie theaters from the library complex. Now library director Dan H. Fenn Jr. '44 has nowhere to put school groups who will constitute the bulk of visitors during the winter months. Out go the educational programs and out goes the concept of the library as a community center at night as well as during visiting hours.

All in all, the Kennedy Library has become simply boring. The City Council and the Library Corporation had better decide what they want--most likely a compromise of just a library without the tourist-generating museum--and pull us out of the 12-year miasma before August 1 when the MBTA vacates the land.