The End of the Battle

"They have staying power. They can wait. They just grind you down, chew you up, and when the time comes they spit you out."

That's how one tenant of 7 Summer Rd. described her battle with Harvard. And that tenant only saw the first half of the 27-month imbroglio before she packed and left.

The University last week finally won a complete victory in the protracted, bitter fight when the two tenants remaining in the building--Sherwin Cooper and Carol Nelson--both decided to move out voluntarily.

Their exit leaves the way clear for the Graduate School of Design to take over the entire four-story brick building for office space.

A city hearing examiner's recommendation that eviction permits be granted was the "straw that broke the camel's back," Cooper said. That verdict was forecast, though, in December when the battle finally climaxed with a Rent Board decision that Harvard should be allowed to convert the building.

Soon only memories of the two-year-plus battle will remain. Tenants gathered upstairs in the Faculty Club listening to University promises of relocation aid. Tenants gathered--opposite a phalanx of Harvard lawyers--in the chambers of the Rent Control Board to argue their case. Tenants, remaining and departed, gathered in the small yard beside their home a year ago for volleyball and a party.

And one final image--the green displays and low hum of digital computer terminals, hooked up in a computer graphics laboratory that once was a bedroom.