Cambridge Is More Than a College Town

You probably have your own image of Cambridge, the city you'll live in for the next four years, already worked out. It's a quiet college town, right, with lots of bookstores and movie theaters and shady streets, near to Boston but far from the hectic pace of city life. The whole town is an extension of Harvard, right? Wrong.

Bounded by Harvard and MIT is a community with all the problems of urban living. It is a city of over 100,000 people, many of them poor, without jobs and living in inadequate housing. Cambridge is no sleepy college town.

It is a city split between its almost self-contained educational institutions, middle-income technocrats who work at prospering local research firms, and perhaps 50,000 low-income families who face shrinking job opportunities.

Shopping in the Harvard Square area and taking occasional trips to the Central Square Cinema can be a student's only contact with Cambridge. But for those who are interested, its form of government permits an outsider (and you will always be an outsider) to observe firsthand the complexities of conflict politics.

The chief political unit of Cambridge is the City Council, which meets every Monday evening at City Hall, just ten blocks from the Yard down Mass Ave. The debates among its nine councilors are often lively; community groups fighting a proposed action by the business community may turn out 100 supporters, carrying the appropriate signs.

The council is split between five conservative independents who generally back business and real estate and three Cambridge Civic Association councilors who take a middle of the road, protect-the-environment approach. Saundra Graham, a continually militant councilor, has formed her own political base, the Grass Roots Organization.

Graham represents the Riverside community, which borders on the University. She is perennially fighting for more low-income housing in Cambridge, the renewal of rent controls and increased contributions by Harvard to the city's tax revenues.

Graham's most effective weapon is the press conference, usually someone else's. No matter how small the gathering, Graham shows up, lures the press into a corner and delivers a devastating critique of whatever glittering new project has been proposed for Cambridge.

The loyal opposition's most effective spokesman is independent (that is, usually conservative) councilor Alfred E. Vellucci. He is an effective politician, and is as adept at pre-meeting bargaining as he is at stump speaking. Vellucci's uncanny knowledge of Cambridge's affairs, combined with his flair for rhetoric and constant well-aimed barbs at Harvard, has turned him into the most popular councilman.

The mayor, Walter Sullivan is in no sense the town's leading citizen. In Cambridge, the mayor has little more administrative responsibility than his weekly chairing of the city council meetings. The mayoralty usually rotates among the councilors, who elect the mayor from their own ranks every two years.

The real administrative power lies with James Leo Sullivan (no relation to the mayor), the city manager. The council appoints the manager who, according to the city charter, has complete control over the heirarchy of commissioners and departments within the city's government. The council, the charter says, cannot order the manager to take any specific action; it can only "request" that he comply with its resolutions. In reality, of course, when the City Council says "jump," the city manager responds, "How high?"

Rent control is a prime bread and butter issue in Cambridge. The city's landlords are in a bind: The University and white-collar research and development firms are bringing in a lot of middle-and upper-middle-income families. If rent control were removed, these newcomers could bid up the price of housing and force out the lower-income groups. It is this kind of change in Cambridge's neighborhoods that Councilor Graham is fighting with all the supporters she can turn out at protest meetings.

When the Council suspended rent control last December, Graham turned out 250 Riverside residents on the steps of City Hall. The council reversed itself within the week.

Cambridge has also joined the mass of communities across the nation who are fighting the expansion of the McDonald's quickie-hamburger chain. The Douglass Street Tenants' Association, a local civic group, asked the State Landmarks Commission to declare the pre-Civil War Greek revival building McDonald's planned to raze an official landmark. The city council temporarily held up the necessary building permits.

Saving the building, which was being used as a furniture warehouse, was not really the issue. Instead, with 32 fast-food eating places already along Mass Ave between Harvard and MIT, the community was simply saying it was fed up and wanted to avoid the humiliation of living next door to those too-familiar yellow arches.

The State Landmarks Comission refused the group's request, and the McDonald's is already under construction.

Although it is the largest single landowner and the richest locally-based corporation in town, Harvard tries for the most part to keep out of Cambridge's official affairs. All the University's land is, under state law, tax-exempt, but to keep town-gown relations smooth Harvard pays the city about $500,000 a year in in-lieu-of-tax payments. And whenever and wherever the name of Harvard is likely to be mentioned in public, the University sends a representative from its Office of Government and Community Affairs to sit quietly in the back of the room and take notes.

But with the controversy over the construction of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library coming to a head this fall, the University will find itself in the middle of Cambridge's most highly charged project.

Construction of a $27 million memorial complex, including a library, a museum and facilities for several Harvard departments, has been in the works since 1964. In early September the federal General Services Administration will release the draft environmental impact statement on the project, planned for the site of the subway yards across from Eliot House. The public hearings that will follow hold the promise of Graham mobilizing her troops, business and labor counter-attacking, and Harvard once again remaining silent publicly while privately hoping the Kennedys can clear the way for construction of the University's new buildings.

A group of about 40 Harvard professors who recently complained to President Bok about the effect the legions of tourists the library will attract will have on Cambridge may upset the careful balance of forces. Their voices may not be enough to stop the project, but they may force the University to take a public stand on the Kennedy Library. Continued University silence will permit the splinter group of professors to substitute its views for University policy.

A columnist for The New York Times recently observed that New Yorkers are the only people in the world who cheer when you tell them of the city's horrors. People live in New York even though they know it is crimeridden, overcrowded and over-rated; having to struggle with New York is the sadistic pleasure that lures people to the city.

Judging from its problems and controversies, only a New Yorker could love Cambridge.