Move Over, Murr

On Monday, a report in The Crimson described the three sites under consideration for the up to eight undergraduate Houses to be built across the Charles, in Allston. Five members of the Universitys Allston Master Planning Advisory Committee (MPAC), speaking on a condition of anonymity, said that the three leading options for the Houses location are the site of current College athletic facilities (between Soldiers Field Road and the Harvard Stadium), the Harvard Business Schools (HBS) Georgian-style riverfront housing, and the area between the existing graduate housing at 1 Western Ave. and HBS.

We are glad that the University is continuing its deliberative, measured approach to planning its expansion into Allston. Though all of the proposed sites are very attractive, locating the Allston campus on College athletics land will yield the best results. This site is the only one of the three suited to hosting a contiguous campus anchored by a new student center.

As this page has argued, the construction of a new student center in Allston is crucial if the new housing is to become more than just another Quad. In deciding the location of its new Allston houses, the University must bear this student center in mind. Without it, Allston housing, regardless of its precise location or configuration, will simply be another satellite student community. A student center will help incorporate the Allston Houses into the Colleges campus. Harvard planners are already justifying the addition of student group offices to Hilles Library as an attempt to draw more students to the Quad. While we have our doubts about this strategy in this particular instance, the logic of the idea is soundit must be applied to the Allston campus as well.

Also crucial to the Universitys Allston planning is the provision of effective, sustainable transportation infrastructure between the new campus and Cambridge. Involved will likely be the complete revamping of the intersections on either side of the Anderson Bridge, which connects John F. Kennedy St. and North Harvard St. across the Charles. Some students who live in Allston will need to take a shuttle to get to classes (the construction of a subway line notwithstanding), but such a shuttle will be useless unless the traffic-plagued intersections through which its route would have to run are redesigned.

In building new housing in Allston, the University should have two goals in mind. The first is to construct a viable student center to anchor a new set of undergraduate residences. The second, and perhaps more important objective, is to create more housing across the river than would be abandoned in the Quad, not to increase the student population but to alleviate the housing crunch that plagues Harvards 12 existing houses. New housing in Allston should be used to eliminate partitioned common rooms and over-filled suites, not to add further strain to Harvards academics. As the administration looks to enlarge the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), it should allow these new faculty to teach smaller classes, rather than enlarging the student body in parallel.

Housing in Allston will benefit from its location near the river and near a new student center. It must be contiguous, providing its residents the convivial environment enjoyed by current Quadlings, instead of strung out along the river. Unlike current HBS housing or the site between HBS and Western Ave., the plot of land now occupied by assorted athletic facilities is well suitedwithout major bulldozingfor the type of contiguous, student center-anchored arrangement we propose. It also presently represents underutilized land, with windowless athletic facilities and view-indifferent sports fields gracing prime riverfront real estate. Director of Athletics Robert L. Scalise, who is also a member of MPAC, said last week that the benefit of having undergraduate housing near the river could outweigh the cost of moving athletic facilities further inland. We feel that not only would those costs be vastly outweighed by the benefits of contiguous and proximate student housing, but also that locating undergraduate housing elsewhere for the athletic facilities sake, and at the cost of a contiguous, student-friendly set-up or, worse, a student center, would be unacceptable and would represent an unacceptable loss of potential.