Neighborhood Activist Vies For Council Seat

One of the most politically active residents in Cambridge, City Council candidate John Pitkin is out to protect the city’s neighborhoods.

“City government is, regrettably, out of touch with a lot of residents,” Pitkin says. “Cambridge is changing rapidly, and I’m concerned that it could become a city that is no longer a city of neighborhoods.”

Pitkin’s ties to neighborhood issues are strong, as he has organized and led neighborhood and citywide efforts for the last three decades. He has been both an active participant in discussions with city and University officials, and sometimes a thorn in their side as he has worked to protect neighborhood interests.

Most recently, he has led residents against Harvard’s attempts to build the proposed Center for Government and International Studies, formerly known as the Knafel Center, right next to his Mid-Cambridge neighborhood. The project has undergone numerous redesigns, and still needs City Council appoval.

And so after holding numerous non-elected positions, Pitkin is now a serious contender in a field of 19 candidates vying for nine City Council seats.

Born in New York, Pitkin graduated from Columbia University with a degree in economics, and then briefly studied and lived in Europe during the 1960s. He currently works as a demographer out of an office in Harvard Square.

Unlike many of his generation who were moved to political activism by the turbulent events in the United States in the ’60s, Pitkin found a different inspiration: the Soviet takeover of the former Czeckoslovakia in 1968, which he witnessed while living in Prague.

“That gave me a very deep appreciation for how important democracy is,” Pitkin says. “Not just in the sense of there being a system of elections, but it [being] a way of life.”

So when Pitkin and his wife settled in Cambridge in the early 1970s, he immediately became active in his community.

He helped co-found the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association (MCNA) in 1975, and has been president of the association, which is made up of 600 households, since 1986.

“He’s in touch with everything that’s going on and affecting the neighborhood,” says Keren Schlomy, acting president of the MCNA while Pitkin is running for a council seat.

On a citywide level, Pitkin has served on the Democratic City Committee, the Cambridge Board of Traffic and Parking and the Cambridge Transportation Forum, which included public participation in the planning and design of the extension of the Red Line to Alewife in the mid-1970s.

Zoning has been a key focus for Pitkin, who brought forth the Pitkin Petition in 1997, initiating a citywide rezoning process that is just now nearing completion.

Pitkin says his involvement on different levels is a product of a desire to improve and protect his surroundings.

“I’ve always seen it as something that I was personally committed to,” he says.

On the Agenda

Pitkin says he would have three main focuses if he were elected to the City Council next month: following through on citywide rezoning, developing a closer working relationship between city government and neighborhood groups and putting town-gown relations on a better footing.

Pitkin said he sees protecting changing neighborhoods as his most important goal.

“It’s critically important for the government to be working more closely with residents who are advocating for their neighborhoods,” Pitkin says.

And as the home of two of the country’s most well-known universities, a major concern for many Cambridge residents is managing the growth of both Harvard and MIT.

Pitkin says that while many disputes between residents and universities are caused by a fear of expansion encroaching on their residential neighborhoods, respect is often a main issue.

“It’s about development, but it’s also about more than that,” Pitkin says. “It has to do with the universities’ obligations to their neighbors.”

Pitkin says as a councillor he would push for a more “systematic and sustained effort” to better work with Cambridge’s universities.

For the last 10 years, he has served as the co-chair of the University’s Joint Committee on Neighborhood/Harvard Consultation, which holds monthly meetings with Harvard community relations officials.

“There has to be more of a continued ongoing development of priorities and expectations,” Pitkin says. “I don’t think this can be done on an issue by issue basis.”

He hopes to use a council seat to make Harvard take more of a “planning approach instead of a project approach” to future development and community initatives.

“These questions are too important for the city and for the University to do on what I’m afraid is a somewhat ad hoc basis,” Pitkin says.

Harvard’s Director of Community Relations for Cambridge Travis McCready says that while he and Pitkin are often on “opposite sides of the fence” regarding University development, he says Pitkin is for the most part reasonable in his dealings with Harvard.

“He understands by experience the complexities of not only the University, but also the city of Cambridge,” McCready says.

Pitkin hopes to bring his work with the University, the city and its neighborhoods to a position on the council.

With incumbent Councillors Jim Braude and Kathleen L. Born not running for reelection, Pitkin—who finished 12th out of more than 25 candidates in an unsuccessful run eight years ago—is trying to seize his best chance of gaining a seat.

He has gained the endorsements of the Cambridge Civic Association and the Cambridge Lavender Alliance, as well as the support of former Cambridge Mayor Francis H. Duehay ’55 and the outgoing Braude, who says Pitkin would be “a welcome addition to the council.”

Pitkin’s active community involvement as well as his citywide name recognition through the Pitkin Petition place him near the top of a field of 12 challengers hoping to gain a seat.

And Pitkin hopes to use his connections at the grassroots level to gain more support, with Mid-Cambridge as his strongest base.

“This is very much a people to people campaign,” Pitkin says.

—Staff writer Imtiyaz H. Delawala can be reached at delawala@fas.harvard.edu.