Neighbors Protest Arboretum Growth

In Roslindale, far from the protests of Cambridge residents opposing Harvard’s growth, another development controversy has blossomed.

Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum has just released preliminary plans for three new buildings, including a state-of-the-art molecular research lab, in what would be its largest construction project since the 1960s.

But while this project puts the arboretum in step with University President Lawrence H. Summers’ vision of a florescence of sciences at Harvard, many neighbors worry that with this construction, their beloved parkland will go to seed.

Arboretum officials presented plans this month to add more than 50,000 square feet of labs, offices and classroom space to Harvard’s botanical outpost in the Roslindale and Jamaica Plain neighborhoods of Boston.

Arboretum Director Robert E. Cook told neighbors at a pair of meetings in the last two weeks that the arboretum would have to expand to stay competitive.

“Modern research requires that you use modern techniques,” Cook said in an interview this weekend. “Without lab facilities to do the best work, certainly those who use molecular approaches would not consider coming here.”

The proposed labs would allow research in phylogenetic systematics, tropical forest ecology, woody plant physiology and whole plant development—all blooming areas of botanical exploration that cannot be done justice in the arboretum’s current facilities, Cook said.

But neighbors are planning to block the project, protesting that the expansion will ruin the natural beauty of their neighborhood park.

More than 150 people attended the two community meetings, where they aired concerns about destruction of natural landscape, increase in traffic, construction nuisances and the impact on neighboring ecosystems.

Lisa Evans, a neighbor who describes herself as “the most vocal” opponent to the plan, fears that the arboretum’s new building on Weld Hill will ruin her beautiful view.

“If Bob Cook gets his way I’m going to look across the street... at scraggly little baby trees, and a road with pockets of parking,” she said. “I wouldn’t have bought my house if I had know I was going to have to put up with this.”

The controversy is, at its core, a tug of war between researchers interested in pushing back the frontiers of scientific discovery, and neighbors who will see the project’s impact in their own back yards.

Recent scientific trends have shifted the role of arboretums from one of collecting to one of interdisciplinary research. The explosion of genetics research in the past decade forces the arboretum, like all things botanical, to evolve if it wants to stay relevant.

The arboretum now collaborates with professors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, especially those from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. But according to Cook, the planned facilities will lead to much fuller integration with the rest of the University, and probably to more undergraduate use.

“We’ve talked to President Summers about this,” said Cook, “It is certainly consistent with the larger emphasis of integration of the sciences.”

The problem is that as the arboretum puts up more buildings, the land devoted to woods, meadows and the public necessarily shrinks. Since its inception in 1872, the arboretum has always worked to balance the research and recreational uses of its property.

Harvard has a thousand-year, $1-per-year lease on some parts of the land that the City of Boston owns.

The arboretum is also a link in Frederick Law Olmsted’s “Emerald Necklace,” a string of public parks that wind their way around the city.

Many residents of Roslindale and Jamaica Plain see the arboretum’s 265 acres—one of the largest open spaces in Boston—as a natural resource for their community.

In addition to the three buildings, the arboretum’s plans call for fences around the nursery as well as an access road—both of which will cut into the public access to the park.

Evans, the neighbor, said she first heard rumors about the proposed expansion three days before she closed on her house this past August. She thought she was purchasing views of a rustic landscape, but if the arboretum’s plans go through she will be directly across from a fenced-off nursery.

Even more troubling to her, she said, is the location of the much-touted research facilities. Greenhouses, growth chambers and research laboratories will take up between 15,000 and 20,000 square feet on the crest of Weld hill, while administrative offices will occupy another 10,000 to 15,000 square feet.

The building will have expansive views of the woods below it, but Evans says she wishes it could be sited less conspicuously.

“Hundreds of people who come to the arboretum every day enjoy the park part of it and the beauty,” she said. “I wish the research side was more invisible.”

Some neighbors are worried less about aesthetics and more about the logistics of adding more activity to the arboretum’s grounds.

“Who is going to police it?” asked Walter Michalik, a Roslindale resident who professes “four decades of love” for the arboretum. “It was promised to be open ground for decades, but if they’re going to keep it open and increase the traffic there’s going to be a commensurate security risk.”

Michalik’s concerns range from the dangers of the access road, which will empty onto a portion of Walter Street frequented by “kamikaze drivers,” to the hazard posed by animals driven from their habitats.

Michalik said he has been attacked by rabid gray foxes on his own lawn, and that the construction threatens to exacerbate the animal menace.

“If you’ve ever spent any times in the woods, you know, they see you, they hear you, they smell you. I know there are animals in there. Where are they going to go?”

But the larger anxiety among neighbors like Evans and Michalik is that these expansion plans will not be the end.

“If credibility were unshakable, if I believed this was the final plan, that’s it,” Michalik said. “But...in ten years they’ll build a second building, a third, or a fourth.”

The neighbors are preparing to bargain with the arboretum, which still needs zoning approval before it undertakes its expansion.

Michalik listed construction and traffic mitigation, as well as more instruction for neighborhood children as gestures Harvard should make.

—Staff writer Jonathan P. Abel can be reached at abel@fas.harvard.edu.