Stone Brings New Touch to Tough Job

When Alan J. Stone, a veteran of decades worth of Beltway battles, arrived at Mass. Hall as Harvard’s new Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs, he wasn’t exactly new to politics.

But the man who in the 1970s authored free-and-reduced lunch legislation and in the 1990s was a Clinton speechwriter faced a massive challenge at Harvard—forging a productive relationship with Harvard’s oldest adversary, the city of Cambridge.

The most pressing item on Stone’s list was getting final city approval for the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS)—a pair of buildings planned to unite the Department of Government and its related centers, a project that had topped the agenda of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) for a half a dozen years.

When Stone arrived, Harvard had received all the permissions for the CGIS except for the right to dig a tunnel underneath a busy city street, which would link the two buildings of the government center.

The only problem: the CGIS’s would-be neighbors had opposed the project for years—and took up a last stand against the tunnel, saying that its construction would be unnecessarily invasive.

To dig through public property beneath a city street, Harvard would need explicit permission from the Cambridge City Council, a group which tends to favor city residents—and which had often and publicly expressed their frustration with the University administration in general and for Stone’s predecessor in particular.

Neighbors and local politicians alike said that Harvard gave Cambridge short shrift under the watch of former Vice President Paul S. Grogan, whose major focus had been improving the University’s relationship with Boston.

But Stone personally took part in negotiations over the tunnel, spending dozens of hours talking with neighbors and trying to hammer out a compromise.

Stone took the negotiations seriously. He would not comment for this article, citing his objection to a Crimson staff editorial that criticized tunnel negotiations.

As Stone and other University officials haggled over the underground passageway with City Council members and neighborhood residents, at stake was whether the University and its neighbors could compromise even when the main players were not just on speaking terms but actively negotiating.

Proposals and counterproposals fell apart. Months went by.

In the end, negotiations failed. Stone sent a letter to neighbors in January to inform them that Harvard had decided to build a tunnel-free CGIS.

All sides—even neighborhood activists who opposed the tunnel—express dismay that no compromise was reached.

Although negotiations fell apart, many say that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.

City Council members say Stone’s direct involvement in the negotiations and Harvard’s willingness to change some of its plans represented progress in the rocky relationship between the University and the city.

Two Sides of the Tunnel

More than half a decade ago, FAS unveiled the new government center, a plan to bring together the government department and a dozen far-flung area studies centers under one roof.

The plan offered professors a long-awaited chance to get out of cramped Littauer Hall and into a modern space with new opportunities for cross-cultural studies.

But from day one, the neighbors were not happy.

Anticipating a constant stream of students passing through their neighborhood, and long dark shadows falling from the five-story building, Mid-Cambridge residents protested at a long series of meetings.

In response, Harvard made significant changes to the plans—dividing the center into two four-story buildings on either side of Cambridge Street, to be connected with a tunnel, which FAS administrators envisioned as a lynchpin of the project.

“It makes two separate and discrete buildings into a complex, which is really what we wanted to create by doing the CGIS,” says David A. Zewinski ’76, associate dean for physical resources and planning in FAS. “It’s tough to have a center that’s in two separate buildings, although not impossible.”

Several city planning boards were convinced, and signed off on the blueprints, tunnel and all.

But local activists continued to oppose the project, charging that the two smaller buildings with a tunnel represented significant University expansion into their neighborhood.

“There would be a campus type of feel,” says former president of the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association (MCNA) John R. Pitkin. “It would erode the residential character.”

Within weeks of Stone’s arrival last year, the University had permits for everything but the tunnel.

Pitkin says residents did not realistically think they could stop the entire project.

Nevertheless, when the MCNA met last January, the residents took a straw poll: not one member voted favor of the CGIS project.

In the next vote at the same meeting, only two members raised their hands in support of the tunnel.

Unable to stop Harvard from constructing the CGIS on its own property, neighbors zeroed in on the tunnel—the one piece of the project that could still be fought.

Not only was the tunnel the final piece that neighbors could control, but it was also seen as an additional, unnecessary imposition in its own right.

Constructing the tunnel would require 20 months of digging under busy Cambridge Street—a street that had recently been torn apart for sewer construction—and neighbors were imagining more equipment, noise and fumes, Pitkin says.

“It becomes a 24-hour disruption to your life,” Pitkin says.

And many of the tunnel’s would-be neighbors were not convinced that the two buildings merited an underground connection.

“I think there was a general lack of persuasiveness about the need for the link,” says MCNA member Laura B. Roberts ’74. “It’s bad public policy to segregate vehicles and pedestrians.”

A Fractious Past

Battles over buildings are a recurring phenomenon in the fractious Harvard-Cambridge relationship.

Many Cantabrigians remember previous battles with Harvard over a variety of projects—most notoriously Peabody Terrace and Mather Towers, which so infuriated neighborhood activists that they staged a takeover of commencement in 1970.

Stone’s predecessor, Grogan—who was brought in to mend Harvard’s ties to Boston and is currently president of the Boston Foundation—says he felt Cambridge activists and city councillors were “utterly unsympathetic” to Harvard’s needs during his tenure as vice president.

He says Cambridge activists often invoke the memory of previous disappointments to justify their opposition to new projects.

“They take Peabody and turn it into ‘Remember the Alamo,’” Grogan says.

According to Grogan, he tried to respond to residents’ concerns without giving into what he calls “an element of absurdity in Cambridge that is famous.”

“When you are at Harvard you develop a thick skin,” he says. “You sift out the wheat from the chaff and go forward.”

For their part, Cambridge officials say they could not get through to Grogan, and he neglected to take issues in Cambridge seriously.

“Mr. Grogan came to us with different marching orders. His primary objective was to mend his wounds in Boston,” Sullivan says. “He did the job he was hired to do.”

“I think with Mr. Grogan, relations hit a new low because his perspective was just too ‘Harvard has to do what Harvard has to do,’’ says Councilor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72.

MCNA member Roberts said that Grogan was not present at enough neighborhood meetings to give residents the sense that Harvard was hearing their concerns.

“There was bitterness from the period of not having a senior decision-maker at the table,” she says.

Coming to the Table

In Harvard’s long history of wrangling for building rights, the negotiations Harvard did for the tunnel were unprecedented.

Last April, the City Council had a meeting to decide whether to approve the tunnel.

But after hearing lengthy testimony on both sides, City Councillors put off a vote, instead proposing a that a city-Harvard committee negotiate the issue.

Stone and neighborhood leaders agreed on the spot to join a committee comprised of three city officials, three Harvard representatives and three neighborhood residents.

Pitkin says some neighborhood residents had hoped the City Council would vote down the tunnel at the April meeting but that they hoped to get a win-win out of negotiations.

The neighbors went to the table hoping to convince Harvard to change the size and use of the CGIS’s south building—which directly abutts apartment buildings.

But Harvard officials were adamant that major changes to the buildings themselves would not be on the table.

“There is a very real possibility that we could have reached an agreement on that,” says Pitkin, who served as one of the neighborhood negotiators. “By January 2002 it became clear that the University negotiators were not able to offer any adjustments to the building, which is what we needed.”

“Their position was, we won’t give you what you want, we’ll offer you some other things,” he says. “We made it clear this was not a problem money could solve.  Harvard persisted in offering money.”

In early July, after over a dozen closed sessions, the committee reached a tentative agreement: Harvard would provide a $1 million parcel of land to be used for a park, $300,000 for neighborhood projects and a five-year moratorium on local construction, among other concessions.

Pitkin says the neighborhood representatives on the committee were asked to sign onto the agreement without consulting the MCNA, although he had understood that they would be able to bring it to the neighborhood for review.

According to Pitkin, the University gave the neighborhood representatives only three days over a holiday weekend to make their decision, giving them a deadline he describes as: “Sign tonight or it’s gone tomorrow.”

Although Pitkin—along with two other neighborhood representatives—signed on to a “statement of intent” on July 3, he says after a night of thinking about the agreement, he told Stone he could not sign the final document.

An MCNA meeting that month sealed the deal’s death. The residents voted that they were opposed to the tunnel on any terms.

City Councillor David P. Maher, who also sat on the committee, says that it was difficult to negotiate an agreement on the project’s final piece so late in the planning process.

“My own feeling was that the agreement was a very positive one for the city. I was disappointed that things fell apart.,” Maher said.

A Last-Ditch Effort

Even though the committee came up empty, Harvard and the council kept talking.

In executive session meetings, which are closed to the public, Maher says the council came up with the idea of offering Harvard a counter-proposal.

Sullivan and Healy suggested a new plan to Harvard in October, calling for a ten-year moratorium on construction, doubling the amount of money Harvard would give, and requiring that the University take any future development projects directly to the MCNA for approval.

Maher says the Council never held an official vote on this proposal, but that it represented their general feeling that Harvard would have to “sweeten the deal” in order to get approval for the tunnel.

Councillors say their intent was not to kill the tunnel project, but to raise the stakes of the negotiations.

“If Harvard could have continued to be in a good negotiating frame of mind even after the seeming impasse, I think they could have gotten a tunnel,” Reeves says.

Stone kept talking to the Council—in November, he said he was spending significant portions of his day talking to councillors about the deal.

But in the end, the two sides couldn’t talk it out.

In late January, Stone sent a letter to neighborhood residents, announcing that the University had rejected the council’s proposal—saying their terms were not “within reason”—and saying that Harvard would construct a tunnel-free CGIS.

Mary Power, Harvard’s senior director of community relations, who reports directly to Stone, says the neighborhood residents lost out in the end.

“Through this recent rejection of an unprecedented offer, they have not altered the project, they have succeeded in losing important community benefits,” Power says. “My concern is that the precedent that the neighborhood has created is one of missed opportunity.”

No Tunnel, Now What?

The failed tunnel negotiations have significant aftermath.

Zewinski says that the concourse levels of both CGIS buildings had to be reconfigured.

But more importantly, the negotiations likely set a precedent for the future of Harvard’s community relations.

Some see the negotiations’ failure as a total loss.

“Neither the project nor the relations between the residents and the university were satisfactory,” says Pitkin. “We’re in a period of just letting the disappointments fade a little bit.”

But city councillors praise Stone, saying he showed commitment and great care in personally negotiating for the tunnel.

Maher praises Stone’s “extraordinary commitment” to the negotiations and says it was “a good-faith effort” from Harvard, and says that the process started the relationship off on the right foot.

“There will be plenty of opportunities to sit down again and begin a process that, with more effort and more time, will benefit the parties in future planning,” Maher says.

Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan says he agrees that the best thing to come out of the process is the city’s better relationship with Stone.

“One of the very heartening things about this process was that Alan Stone came,” says Sullivan. “He didn’t miss any meetings. We felt that someone with a real voice was coming forward.”

While University President Lawrence H. Summers has expressed frustration at the negotiations’ downfall, in a recent interview he says he has hope for the future.

“I think it’s disappointing,” Summers said. “I think there’s a sense of regret on both sides…We were not able to come to a satisfactory agreement and we hope the next time it will be possible to come to an agreement.”

—Staff writer Alexandra N. Atiya can be reached at atiya@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu.