To Metro, With Love

It was another late night at The Crimson when I pulled three books from a black shelf tucked away in a corner. A spiral-bound libel manual prepared by our lawyers in 2008, a paperback Harvard University library guide from 1920, and a skinny red leather-bound book with gold type printed on its spine reading “Wilson Report.”

The Crimson was beginning its renovation and staff writers were invited to sort through the items left in the office. Some items would be stored until the end of the renovation, while other items would be tossed out. The black bookshelf was one such casualty — any writer was invited to take what they wanted from the shelf before it was thrown away.

I had been writing for the Crimson since my freshman fall and decided it would be nice to have some keepsakes from my time – something tangible from this part of my Harvard experience. I selected the books with little thought, and they met a similar fate in my room – untouched and unread.

***

When I was packing up to move into my Lowell House dorm for sophomore year, I revisited my Crimson keepsakes.

Cracking open the book labeled “Wilson Report,” the first page bore the book’s true title: “Preliminary Report of the Committee on the University and the City.” It was dated December 1968.

I brought the Wilson Report with me to school, inspired by my own semester reporting for the Crimson’s Metro desk, largely covering the City Council and City Manager. Many of my pieces covered the financial relationship between Harvard and the city it calls home.

The Wilson Report was more than 50 years old, and yet it could have been written today. A quick skim yielded topics that echoed my own coverage: university relations, housing, and cost of living.

I took it with me to read further, curious about the overlaps between the report and my semester covering Cambridge. In some small way, I also wondered what my time on Metro would mean to me when I left and what, if anything, it meant to the people I felt I’d been writing for.

***

I never saw myself as a journalist or a writer. I didn’t write for my high school newspaper and had no intention to pursue journalism in college or after. When I came to Harvard, though, I became enamored by The Crimson and its office on 14 Plympton St.

The walls were lined with caricatures of Crimson Presidents past, filled with award plaques, and framed front pages. Many more plaques had fallen off and were lying haphazardly on tables. There was a buzz of excitement, of purpose.

Though we were all amateurs, the work was real. We would call and text public officials and file public records requests. We cleared pieces with lawyers and sent comment requests to public relations teams. I covered real issues that I felt mattered to real people, that mattered to me.

In the claustrophobic red brick walls of Harvard, I felt like I was stuck watching the world change around me. I wanted to do something, to be a part of something that meant something to people — The Crimson became my outlet.

I covered criminal charges against a sitting city councilor, a city budget under stress, a half a million dollar council race, the impact of Cambridge’s super PACs, and the city’s adjustment to Trump’s second term.

I also wrote my fair share of seemingly trivial or unglamorous articles, like a city councilor’s recurring April Fool’s Day prank where he proposed annexing the city of Boston.

My co-writer and I often laughed about our groundbreaking coverage — Pulitzer-worthy exposés on the pedestrianization of Lower Bow St. or the return of two-way traffic on Garden St.

Often, when writing, we found ourselves digging through past Crimson coverage, linking pieces by other reporters and ourselves. Those forays into the Crimson archives yielded equally absurd Cambridge antics.

Previous coverage included former Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci, a longtime antagonist of Harvard. He often devised creative publicity stunts to incense the University, including threatening to pave over Harvard Yard to make a parking lot. Vellucci’s distaste for the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine, led him to declare their building a public bathroom and propose converting the building into a dog pound.

Truthfully, Cambridge City Government wasn’t my first choice to report on. But, like a good rom-com, I accidentally fell in love with Cambridge. Zoning policy and universal preschool began to intrigue me. The recurring voices at public comment grew more familiar. Items on the weekly council agenda, once obscure, became easily recognizable as Monday night story fodder.

***

“These are troubled times,” the Committee on the University and the City wrote in the Wilson Report. It goes on to recount the tumult of the 1960s — political assassinations, student encampments, and the shaking of American institutions.

But the report pivots — its main concern was not the nation’s political woes. The University had taken it upon themselves to remedy a much smaller but no more significant set of problems in the city that had grown alongside it.

As I sat in my dorm room, I recognized all the same problems: rising housing costs in part caused by the rapidly growing university, neighborhoods broken up by gentrifying transplants, and local workers disillusioned with their vastly wealthy employer.

The relationship I covered 50 years later was much the same.

Humans are creatures of habit — and our politics reflect that. The same issues recur, the same disagreements persist. There’s value in telling those stories for a reader in the moment, but local journalism is not just a momentary endeavor. It is an investment in the historical record of ordinary lives.

Today, readers are inundated with stories about New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. But most people in our country don’t live there. Local journalism recognizes that stories are not for the privileged few, that there is value in recording bike lanes, property taxes, and zoning in every town and city.

Our troubled times are not helped by the loss of local news outlets that not only covered the stories the New York Times and the Washington Post would never notice; they also built trust in communities that national coverage can never replicate.

In many places, stories about the day-to-day go untold.​​ The more I wrote for Metro, the more I worried about work like ours dying out. Around the country, local papers have gone by the wayside in a media ecosystem dominated by social media and cable news.

Maybe that’s why I felt such a connection with the Wilson Report. It was a reminder that perhaps my work wasn’t fleeting. My mind traced back to the dusty pages covered with stories of real issues that mattered to real people and their lives in Cambridge.

It’s possible that a young student 50 years from now, restless and idealistic, will go through the articles I wrote in search of a reminder that some things remain constant — that the stories of the past are not degraded by time. Instead, they weave their way into the realities of today.

Metro gave me the platform to tell the stories of the interconnected lives and mutual striving of 118,000 people — it let me etch into history, a humble record of a city, as it is.

—Magazine writer Jack B. Reardon can be reached at jack.reardon@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @JackBReardon.