Harvard Stops Huffing and Puffing

In this tale of a $25-million real estate development, Harvard is the big, bad wolf who has finally figured out how to walk through the piglets' front door. All he has to do is stop blowing hard and bring a housewarming present.

Because the University has decided to abandon its traditional belligerent stance toward city leaders and neighborhood residents, there may be a happy ending for a parcel of property located across from the Mt. Auburn St. post office.

Harvard will have a revenue-generating non-academic office and condominium complex, Cambridge will have additional tax revenue, and residents will have an addition to the Square that blends with existing structures.

Final blueprints for what Harvard has dubbed "University Place" are not yet complete, but community affairs officials are confidently predicting that there will be a groundbreaking ceremony early next year at the site, which is currently used as a parking lot.

The unusual part is that community leaders do not intend to dispute the University's plans, as they did with the Kennedy Library, with conversions of taxable property to Harvard's tax-exempt portfolio, with the Medical Area Total Energy Plant, and with numerous other projects Harvard has proposed in the last decade.

The main reason is that plans for University Place are not only Harvard's. From the start, neighborhood rerepresentatives sat in on design sessions, made suggestions, and watched happily--and often with disbelief--as the University responded to their concerns.

In the words of Charles Sage, president of the Harvard Square Business Association and a member of the Community Advisory Committee on University Place, Harvard has made a "180-degree turnaround. I would suspect it's probably due to the problems they've had in the past with similar developments," he said. "You know, among residents, there's still some controversy over Holyoke Center. People call it a monstrosity. But I think Harvard has really learned its lesson."

That lesson has prevented Harvard from proposing for Mt. Auburn St. another Holyoke Center, a building that residents consider far too tall and massive to co-exist peacefully with the rest of the Square. For the past five years, neighbors have fought developers who sought to construct a Holiday Inn and a high-rise apartment building on the edge of the Square.

City officials originally suggested that Harvard buy the Mt. Auburn St. property last year--at a final price tag of $4 million--in order to prevent one of the developments they deemed inappropriate.

"I was one of the people who in a conversation said [to Harvard administrators], 'Why don't you do something good for a change?'" Cambridge Mayor Francis H. Duehay '55, explained. Duehay added the previous proposals for the property were "like a series of bad dreams," and that Harvard was more likely to approach the project "somewhat more thoughtfully."

"They seem to have done especially well," Duehay also a member of the advisory committee, said of Harvard's attempts to cooperate with residents. "At other times they haven't done as well and have been less sensitive, but in this case they seem to have taken the community perspective into account."

Joe B. Wyatt, Harvard's vice president of administration since 1976, said that several years ago, the University decided to "try and work things out" with the community. "It wasn't clear we could always work together, but we thought it would be worth a try," Wyatt said.

"There's a lot of opinions that go back and forth" between residents and the University, Wyatt said, because "I don't know of any area that people feel so strongly about real estate. It's a tense kind of thing." He said that due to improved communications over University Place plans, the level of trust between Harvard and its neighbors has "improved dramatically."

The University will test that new trust in coming years, Wyatt indicated, as Harvard begins to play an increasingly dominant role in the development and maintenance of property in the Square. "Hopefully, this is a precursor of things to come," Wyatt said of the designreview process used with University Place. "This device is an example of a greater involvement by Harvard in the Square. We have no specific plans, but this is a matter I have discussed with the President and members of the Corporation several times. We do realize that based on what's happening [in University neighborhoods] throughout the country, we have a large stake in the area."

City officials recently invited the University to take part in a "discussion of where Cambridge is going and how it could be improved," and Harvard has accepted, Wyatt said. "We have to protect our interests and not depend on random developments to come up with what is best for the Square," he added.

The preliminary blueprints for University Place reflect the University's new concerns. David Vickery, director of the city's community development department, said the architects "have done a beautiful job of making a transition" between University Place and one- to three-family dwellings in the area. On Mt. Auburn St., about 85 condominiums are proposed in a group of low density buildings no more than 80 feet high. Three office buildings planned for University Rd. will have a total of 200,000 square feet of floor space, but will be no more than six stories tall. All of the buildings will be made of brick and limestone, materials used in many surrounding structures, and a landscape architect has been hired to provide visual buffers to the buildings.

It seems Harvard has spared no expense in retaining consultants who could find solutions to residents' grips. Traffic consultants, design specialists, and internationally known architects have been brought in to prevent University Place from becoming another MATEP.

Perhaps most importantly, the condos will be sold on the open market, and the offices will be rented to private companies unaffiliated with the University. Thus the city will gain new tax income, and residents will not fear continued consumption of the Square by Harvard-related activities.

Two weeks ago, the University mailed more than 6000 letters soliciting further suggestions from residents, and community leaders say the response so far has been almost totally positive. "Everyone on the advisory committee is pleased with the review process and the design without exception," said Thomas Anninger, president of the Neighborhood Ten Association, a community group that has opposed high-rise construction in the Square in the past. Anninger added that such a climate of cooperation is unprecedented. "It's probably never happened in the last 150 years, and they [Harvard] are pretty pleased with themselves," he said. "They honestly saw the opportunity to influence property close by and to get some public relations mileage out of it. There's nothing wrong with that. We wanted to help them with it, in fact, because in the end, we come out ahead."

Several community leaders have speculated that University administrators recently have been feeling pressure from a Board of Overseers committee studying relations between Harvard and Cambridge. Wyatt said he believed the overseers' study was nearing conclusion, but added that it has not affected his office's development strategy.

Other neighborhood spokesmen noted that Harvard is working under a February 1982 deadline for completion of the project design, because of a provision in the agreement between the University and the property's previous owner, Louis DiGiovanni, a Cambridge developer. Unless the advisory committee approves the design before that time, the parcel will revert to DiGiovanni.

Whatever Harvard's motivation has been for rehabilitating its community image, advisory committee members agree the University Place project seems headed for success. Of course, some problems remain--such as providing for parking that will be lost to the development--but the obstacles appear small when compared with the roadblocks that faced many past projects in the Square.

Anninger said it was one of those other projects, a residential, office and retail complex proposed for the property known as Parcel 1b, which provided the key to the University Place design process. Parcel 1b, which is bordered by Boylston St. and Memorial Drive and is next door to the University Place site, had originally been planned as the home of the John F. Kennedy Library until neighborhood opposition forced the memorial out of the city.

In the last year, however, community representatives worked closely with Carpenter and Co. of Boston to arrive at a design for Parcel 1b that would be economically viable for the developers and aesthetically acceptable to neighbors. "Parcel 1b started out with a very adversarial relationship between residents and developers," Anninger said, "but the design review process improved dramatically and was then used as a model for University Place. "If anything, Parcel 1b was the breakthrough for residents, because it gave Harvard and other developers an example showing that a project will come out better with a design review collaboration than any one party could have done on its own."

Harvard has hired a nationally respected development firm, Gerald Hines Interests of Houston, to coordinate and monitor the University Place construction. Richard Reynolds, who is supervising the project for Gerald Hines Interests, agreed with community organizers who say the design review process has helped reduce planning time that would have been required to overcome neighborhood opposition. "Compared to what we normally would have expected in Cambridge, it's gone superbly," Reynolds said.

Intensive design review "benefits everyone by exposing everyone's concerns as early as possible instead of waiting for public hearings, saying to residents, 'Here it is,' and then fighting tooth and nail until the last minute after they say, 'No, we don't like it,' "Reynolds explained.

There are still some residents who would prefer banning all further development in the Square, but many of them agree that Harvard's plans represent the best of an undesirable lot. "It that's the way the cookie was going to crumble, this plan probably will cause the least problems," Olive Holmes, president of the Harvard Square Defense Fund, said. "This project will serve as a buffer and feather out disturbances from Parcel 1b," which will be built at about the same time as University Place, Holmes added.

Other than completing details of the architects' proposal, little remains before Harvard breaks ground next year on Mt. Auburn St. The citizens' advisory committee appears ready to put its official stamp of approval on the plans, and because of minimal zoning requirements for the area, the city planning board will not be able to stall the project, as it did with proposals for Parcel 1b. All that Harvard needs now from the city is an ordinary building permit.

The essential imgredients of the project, cooperation from neighbors and city officials, has already been added because of the University's decision to at least partially open its policy making process to the concerns of the Cambridge community.

"After years of seeing the other process not working," Vickery said, "they've tried this way and seen that it does work. I find it astounding that Harvard has finally changed.