Harvard Planners Present Options at Allston Community Meeting

University planners presented a series of images depicting Harvard’s future campus in Allston to community residents at the Honan Allston Public Library on Monday evening.

Chief University Planner Kathy Spiegelman flicked through slides showing possible locations for Harvard construction projects on the new campus. None of the options were new, and all of the images have been on display for the last month at the “Harvard in Allston” exhibit room in the Holyoke Center.

Nevertheless, Spiegelman did comment on the viability of some of the plans.

For example, Spiegelman said a proposal to construct a new tunnel under the Charles River, extending an abandoned T tunnel from the Square to the Harvard athletic facilities, was “most challenging.”

“It’s not so appealing for bicyclists and pedestrians,” she said.

In contrast, planners said last spring that constructing the tunnel might be less controversial than other proposals to build a new bridge or expand the Larz Anderson bridge, because a tunnel would not change the aesthetics of the Charles River.

Spiegelman also said at Monday’s meeting that if new undergraduate Houses are constructed on the south bank of the Charles, a portion of Soldiers Field Road will almost certainly be decked over to create an esplanade.

“It’s important not to have Houses facing cars,” she said.

The plans had already been presented to residents when Harvard planners released an interim report last June, and there were few questions on Monday. Indeed, the scheduled one-and-a-half- hour meeting ended 10 minutes early.

Bob Van Meter, the executive director of the Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation, said in an interview yesterday that the meeting was the “clearest presentation I’ve seen so far” of Harvard’s plans for its new campus in the next 10 years.