Library Offices To Replace Demolished Retail Stores

Almost a year after Harvard Planning and Real Estate (HPRE) evicted all retailers from the University-owned lot at 90 Mt. Auburn St., the two buildings that had stood there for more than a century were finally demolished last week.

An administrative nerve center for the Harvard University Library (HUL) will replace the three businesses that once filled the lot.

Until last spring, the University rented one building to the Harvard Provision Company, a popular campus winery, and Skewers, a Middle Eastern restaurant. The lot also housed a smaller, 1.5-story building that was rented to the Typewriter Store.

Construction on the building, which was designed by local architect Andrea Leers, will get underway this month. According to Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53, director of Harvard University Library, the new building should be completed by summer 2005.

The building will house the Weissman Preservation Center (WPC), which maintains and repairs the library’s collection of manuscripts and rare books. It will also hold the Office of Information Services (OIS), which is the main control base for the online HOLLIS catalogue, he said.

According to Verba, the purpose of the new building is to consolidate these two very different, but ultimately related departments.

“They were in two different places,” he said, “and it would be a great advantage to have them in the same place.”

The WPC will be moving from the Holyoke Center, while the OIS will be leaving what Verba said was an inconvenient commercial space on Massachusetts Avenue.

“It’s important for both of them to be near the operating libraries,” he added. “It was just an opportunity, and when the University decided to build on that spot, the Library was lucky to be selected as the unit to go in there.”

Members of community groups such as the Harvard Square Defense Fund (HSDF) and the Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC) said they disapproved of the University’s plan because it entailed destruction of the three stores.

“There was considerable discussion of various alternatives,” said Jinny Nathans, president of the HSDF. “And the [HSDF] has a policy to always hold out for street level retail.”

According to Nathans’ article for the February 2003 Association of Cambridge Neighborhoods newsletter, Harvard would be violating a “long-standing agreement with the HSDF that whenever it converts or tears down a building in Harvard Square that has retail on the ground floor, it will continue with retail use on the ground floor.”

The HSDF had agreed to waive the requirement if the University Library used the ground floor as a public gallery displaying the “rare books, maps and other treasures” in its collection.

That suggestion was abandoned, but Verba said that after about a year of further negotiations, the University agreed to rent out the ground floor to retailers, although the specifics of the decision have not been finalized.

Community members also objected initially to the architectural design of the proposed building.

The original plan, developed in spring 2001 by architect Hans Hollein, was rejected by the CHC, which objected to the proposed structure’s size, shape and what the CHC’s director said was its stylistic incongruence with nearby buildings.

Later that summer, the HUL hired the Leers-Weinzapfel firm to redesign the building, and the resulting plans were approved by the community.

According to Director of University and Commercial Real Estate Edward Reiss, the new building “will not be edgy, but very contemporary.”

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.