Across The River, Allston Beckons

On one side of a busy intersection—where Western Avenue meets North Harvard Street—sits the Bus Stop Pub and a small, crowded lot of cars at Herb Goodman’s Auto Sales, where a yellow smiley face forms the “o” in “Auto.”

Next door, rising above these local establishments and a trio of nearby gas stations, stands the light brown tile and curved glass facade of Harvard Business School’s Teele Hall.

Across the street is the municipal William F. Smith Playground, where two parents push strollers past a play structure with red slides. An older woman sits on a bench overlooking the community basketball courts and baseball diamond, with her back turned toward the Harvard building across the street.

This is 02134—the zip-code of Allston—that will define Harvard’s future as much as Cambridge 02138 defined its past.

Allston is Harvard’s new frontier across the Charles River, a diverse Boston neighborhood of busy streets, industrial buildings and mom-and-pop businesses where the University now owns 271 acres of land and is poised to shape a campus even larger than the one in Cambridge.

The University has owned and used land in Allston for more than a century—first the Soldiers Field athletic complex and later Harvard Business School.

But these self-contained parcels mark only the beginning of expansion into Allston. Deeper in the neighborhood, the University’s inroads are marked just by two thoroughfares bearing its name: North Harvard Street and Harvard Avenue.

The border between Harvard’s Allston and the old neighborhood is about to shift, and the contrast of Teele Hall and Herb Goodman’s is a sign of what is to come.

From Mass. Hall, where University President Lawrence H. Summers and his top deputies will decide the fate of Harvard’s Allston property, the land across the river is just a bus ride away. The number 66 bus departs from the island between Johnston Gate and the Cambridge Common and continues down JFK St., past the Kennedy School of Government and Eliot House and over the Anderson Bridge.

The bus makes its way across the river into Allston, once the site of a cattle market that supplied the Continental Army when it was based in Harvard Square during the Revolutionary War.

During this era, Allston was actually part of the City of Cambridge, as a neighborhood called Little Cambridge, but it seceded from the city in 1807 and later became part of Boston in 1874.

Now Cambridge’s most famous institution is considering further expansion into this former Cambridge neighborhood.

Rolling past Soldiers Field, past the red brick buildings of the Business School and towards Harvard’s prospects for the future, the number 66 bus reaches the corner of Western Ave. and North Harvard.

Looking east from there, industrial parks, warehouses, the major pharmaceutical firm Genzyme and railroad tracks sprawl toward the Charles River. Most of these buildings belong to Harvard, and they sit on one of the University’s largest single parcels of property in Allston.

In the other direction, a string of commercial developments—mainly car dealers and auto repair shops—stretches toward a shopping center with K-Mart, Star Market and other chain retailers. The shopping center is also on Harvard-owned land.

Looking south away from Cambridge reveals a small residential community within a bustling city. Residential side streets cut across the commercial main drags. Three-family homes—painted white, yellow, mint green—line the streets and many have children’s toys in their postage-stamp lawns. Birds chirp above the ever-present sounds of the Mass. Turnpike, which was cut through Allston in the early 1960s.

Three television stations are headquartered in Allston, including WGBH, which sits partially on Harvard-owned land and has worked out a deal to relocate and sell the rest of its property to the University.

Right now, Allston is very flat, with no hills and few buildings that exceed three stories in height. This is the neighborhood of old warehouses, chain-link fences and rail yards where—within a decade—Harvard could begin to build its new campus of taller and more distinctive academic, administrative and dorm buildings.

For the time being, the University’s plans remain unclear.

Initially, as Harvard began secretly buying up more property in Allston in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, land across the river had been considered a place where overflow dorms and relocated museums could ease the space crunch on the Cambridge campus. These initial dealings were conducted in secret and when the news broke, there was an uproar in the community.

Lately plans for Allston have taken a different turn. Devising a use for the land is currently in the hands of Harvard’s two top-ranking officials—Summers and his provost, Steven E. Hyman—as well as a select group of officials on the University-wide Physical Planning Committee.

Recently planners have focused on two more ambitious visions for the property. One would create a high-tech science campus that they say could rival the Silicon Valley in innovation but with a focus on biomedical and biotech research. The other would move as many as several of Harvard’s professional schools across the river in their entirety.

One day, planners say, they hope graduate schools will be competing with each other for the chance to move across the river, rather than holding out to be able to stay in Cambridge.

All this would occur on land that currently looks nothing like the Ivy-clad image of the Cambridge campus.

Allston is a diverse neighborhood of about 70,000 residents with a significant immigrant population.

An Allston business organization welcomes visitors to its website in ten different languages. Some businesses and homes display flags of Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, Colombia, and El Salvador—often alongside the American flag.

Stickers on the sidewalk and lampposts advertise obscure bands of the Boston music scene—Zippergirl, Soltero, Mori Stylez. Some of these groups play at O’Brien’s, an Allston neighborhood bar on Harvard Ave.

Graffiti adorns cement walls of some industrial buildings and grassy alleys between apartment complexes. Laundry hangs on fire escape balconies overlooking the parking lot of a mom-and-pop grocery store.

Orange and green banners hang from lampposts along Cambridge Street, proclaiming “Allston-Brighton Now.” They are sponsored by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), which will play a major role in whatever plans Harvard devises for its Allston land.

When the University revealed its secret Allston land purchases in the spring of 1997, the announcement was a public relations disaster. In its wake, Harvard donated a 57,000-square-foot property on North Harvard Street for the building of a new public library.

Harvard’s expansion into Allston still incites uncertainty and opposition among many residents.

The community has been meeting at the library with Boston-based planners and BRA representatives since June of last year, and anticipate a “Community Master Plan”—which will determine all the zoning for North Allston—sometime this summer.

The monthly meetings routinely address fears of skyrocketing housing prices, anticipated traffic woes that will likely accompany development, and general distrust of Harvard after their secret dealings.

When it's not hosting community meetings, the Allston branch of the Boston Public Library functions like any neighborhood library. Small kids play in the children’s section while their mothers talk with the librarian. The far wall is lined with computers and their middle-aged and elderly users.

And running past the library, the number 66 bus passes by on its route, which leads—like Harvard’s future development—further into Allston.

—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.

BUILDING A NEW HARVARD

This is the first article in a series on Harvard’s plans for development across the Charles River in Allston. Today’s story introduces the sights and sounds of Allston. Installments over the rest of the week will look at how Harvard is deciding what to do with its properties, how much Allston would cost and how a group of Design School students is envisioning the campus of the future.