Council Tables Ruling On Harvard Motor Inn

The City Council Monday night put off discussion of two major controversies: an extension for City Manager Robert W. Healy's contract and a decision to let the developer of the Harvard Motor Inn site knock down the current Inn and replace it with shops and offices.

The Council set a special meeting Friday to consider Healy's contract, but the Motor Inn will not come up until the next regular meeting, on January 23. Both items had been postponed once and were due to come up Monday night, but the Council endorsed by voice vote Councillor Walter J. Sullivan Jr.'s motion to table all previously postponed items.

Carpenter and Co., the Motor Inn site's developer, cannot proceed with its plans unless the Council lets City Manager Robert W. Healy transfer the city's right to operate a municipal parking lot on the ground floor of the Inn--legally known as an easement--to an indoor garage in another part of the new building.

Carpenter, which leases the site from Harvard, wants to convert the ground floor to retail shops.

The postponement of the measure, which originally came before the council on December 19, surprised the approximately 30 citizens who came to the meeting to speak on the proposal.

Peter D. Kinder, vice president of the Harvard Square Defense Fund, which opposes the project, said Walter Sullivan and other project backers probably stalled because they saw a lack of support on the council.

"My guess is that they counted noses, and they didn't have enough noses," Kinder said.

Councillor Francis H. Duehay '55, who blocked consideration of the measure at the December 19 meeting, yesterday echoed Kinder's analysis of the meeting.

"That situation is always fluid--it can change from week to week and time to time," Duehay said. "All I know is that if you have the votes you do it and if you don't, you wait."

But Sullivan, who, along with the council's four other Independents, is expected to support the easement's transfer, said yesterday he simply meant to shorten the meeting for the benefit of a visiting delegation from Armenia.

"We had the votes there, but everyone was in a hurry to get out," Sullivan said. "They were entertaining the Armenians."

Two weeks ago, Sullivan and three other Independents joined liberal Councillor Saundra Graham in the highly unusual move to calling for a special meeting to discuss the easement.

The meeting was cancelled when Graham's sister became ill.

Other Business

In other business, the council:

--Passed a resolution asking the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to investigate the deaths of four squirrel monkeys from intense heat in laboratories last summer.

Gul Agha, who heads the Cambridge Committee for Responsible Research, said the measure was an attempt to "open places to public scrutiny."

--Received a downzoning petition from the East Harvard Square Neighborhood Association that would halt the University's plan to build a five-story hotel on the former site of the Quincy Square Gulf Station.

The petition calls for the Council to take the eastern end of Harvard Square out of the Square's special zoning overlay district, said Robert J. LaTremouille, the attorney who drafted the petition. The area would be rezoned to exclude commercial structures, including hotels, he said.

"We feel that [mid-Cambridge] is a largely residential area, with some office and retail space," said Mass. Ave. resident Terry Crystal. "The zoning that's in there presently does not protect that atmosphere."

"We don't want our neighborhood to become a shopping mall," she added.

LaTremouille said that under the proposed changes, Harvard could still use the Gulf station site for a noncommercial purpose, such as a library or office building.