Painting the Town Crimson

It was June 11, 1970, and the pageantry of Harvard's commencement was on display. A stage filled mostly with pink-skinned men dominated Harvard Yard: the honorable and reverend board of overseers; the high sheriff of Suffolk County; the governor of the Commonwealth; the president of Harvard and his deans. Then a stocky, and definitely unwelcome, fireplug of an African-American woman invited herself to the party. Cambridge tenants activist Saundra Graham grabbed the microphone and launched into a lusty attack on the university's plans to expand into Cambridge's Riverside area, which would displace residents and change the character of the neighborhood forever. The shock on the faces of the great and good was so palpable you could practically have sliced it and packaged it.

How dare a mere local resident tell the nation's oldest university to stay off her turf? Didn't she know that Harvard was doing good for all humankind? Wasn't the fearless pursuit of truth more important than a few rundown tenements and their blue-collar residents?

What a difference a generation makes. Thanks largely to the strategic impertinence of Graham and her followers, Harvard did make concessions to the Riverside neighborhood (although Harvard still plans to expand there). Now, Harvard has found a different way to enlarge its presence in neighborhoods and a very different way of going about it. The title that appears on diplomas, "Harvard University at Cambridge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," will likely be an anachronism before this year's freshmen reach their 25th reunion. Harvard University now owns more land in Boston than it does in Cambridge; the transformation of a large part of the city, of Harvard, and, potentially, how universities everywhere function could be determined in the decades to come.

The university is planning a mammoth construction project -- perhaps, by the time all the bills are paid decades from now, ultimately more expensive than the Big Dig. Within a generation or so, Harvard will execute one of the most ambitious building plans in American higher education since the railroad baron Leland Stanford decided that California needed a university. The College in a Yard, as one official history calls it, will be a quaint artifact of times long lost, and Harvard will, at least geographically, be more of a Boston school than a Cambridge one.

Even community leaders characterize Allston as having been isolated from Boston by the Mass. Pike and penned in by the Charles River. "It's like a gulag," says Ray Mellone, chairman of a community group called the Harvard University/Allston-Brighton Task Force. Soon, though, it may become a precinct of new architecture and tree-lined boulevards, theaters, restaurants, and stores, without losing a single unit of residential housing. Western Avenue, now largely a landscape of truck lots and body shops, may become a mirror of the upscale quarter that Harvard Square has grown into. Listen long enough to the planners and participants, and you start to believe that they are about to build the New Jerusalem.

It seems as though all that's missing is the public outcry of years past. "I wouldn't say there's anybody mad about it," says Alan J. Stone, a Harvard vice president and former Clinton White House aide. "You have to understand that we've been very consultative and very transparent, working early with the community."

Remarkably, a once hostile Boston City Hall now seems as happy with this utopian vision of a transformed Allston as Harvard does. And no angry Allston residents are likely to hijack a commencement ceremony anytime soon.

When Harvard, then led by the neurasthenic, ungregarious Neil Rudenstine, revealed in 1997 that it had anonymously acquired significant commercial land in Allston, Mayor Thomas M. Menino was infuriated. "That's absurd," he told the Globe of Harvard's explanation that buying land openly would have driven prices up. "Without informing anyone or telling anybody? That's total arrogance."

In what the Globe account called "a mocking singsong tone," Menino described the school's attitude as "We're from Harvard, and we're going to do what we want." The city and the Boston Redevelopment Authority had not been consulted. And virtually no one outside a small circle of Harvard insiders had known what the university was planning.

Local leaders were angered. "As far as I'm concerned, they practiced a deception," said Mellone back then. "There are a lot of people who are going to say we can't trust them. We have to make the process work, and that means making the neighborhood involved, not having deals made in a back room and then coming to us and saying, `Take it or leave it.'"

Harvard has continued to acquire land since 1997. Today it owns 344 acres of land in Allston; it owns just 223 in Cambridge.

THE LATTER-DAY PROCESS of selling the expansion to the community has been a painstaking courtship. Kevin McCluskey, a former chairman of the Boston School Committee who is now Harvard's community liaison, spends much of his time in Allston. Like any good Boston politician, he seems to know everybody in the neighborhood. "I get invited to baptisms, First Communions, confirmations," McCluskey says. At the urging of McCluskey and others, Harvard has committed to funding a tot lot in an Allston schoolyard and maintaining two baseball fields for the local Little League; it also donated the land for what is now the second-busiest public library in the city, named in memory of local hero Brian Honan, a city councilor who died at 39. (The acoustics in the building's music room proved to be execrable; now Harvard is paying to redo it. McCluskey is working to bring Harvard music groups there for free concerts.)

If this sounds like stroking, it is. "It's part altruism, part enlightened self-interest," McCluskey concedes. As part of the strategy of winning hearts and minds, Harvard has abandoned its ham-fisted approach of stealth property acquisition. Still, some businesses have resisted Harvard's blandishments. "They came to us twice," says Fred DiStefano of Stadium Auto Body on Western Avenue (it takes its name from Harvard's nearby playing field). As usual, Harvard was represented by its real estate adviser, the Beal Cos., but DiStefano says he knew immediately who the real buyer was. "Everyone knows that Beal is Harvard," he says. "We didn't want to see the numbers."

For DiStefano, the reasons were personal: His Italian immigrant father built the business up from nothing into an operation that now employs 70 people. "It's not about money for us as a family," says DiStefano, who has eight siblings working with him. "It's about our ability to help the neighborhood and the people who work for us." Still, he bears no ill will toward the university. "They're a great neighbor," he says. "They're very respectful."

A symbol of this new neighborliness arose on Western Avenue, in the Harvard Business School's Spangler Center, a student gathering place that, instead of turning its back on Allston, is the first structure at the B-school with a grand entrance facing the community. Spangler, a Georgian-inspired building designed by Robert A. M. Stern -- ironically, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture -- has been opened periodically to the people of Allston. "One of the key parts of the building from our perspective," McCluskey says, "is that it has a hall where we're able to host seven to 10 functions each year for the community."

Both activist Mellone and Harvard's planners recognize the design of Spangler for what it is: a conscious attempt to open up the university to the community, to telegraph the sense that Harvard is a friendly neighbor. This is the first architectural expression of what has become a full-fledged niceness offensive.

Today, city and community leaders talk about Harvard's sensitivity -- the university, long the butt of not-so-gentle humor about its elitism, seems to have found its inner mensch. Even Mellone has a very different outlook today. "It changed once Larry Summers was president," he says. "We have a relationship with Harvard."

NOW THE GREAT WORK begins: leveraging the relationship between Harvard and Boston into concrete plans and then executing them. Car dealers, body shops, and all the miscellany of light industry will negotiate their leases with the school on a case-by-case basis. "We're doing very well working with Harvard," Menino says. "I'm very pleased with the community process."

The map of Harvard's holdings in Allston is breath-taking in its sweep. The WGBH studios along Western Avenue will be relocated to Brighton, with financial help from the university; the residents of the Charlesview Apartments, an East German-looking gray block off Western Avenue across from Harvard's athletic facilities, have approached Harvard to ask for a buyout; negotiations are ongoing. Because of long-term leases, the Beacon train yards in Allston Landing South will stay as they are for the foreseeable future: "The encumbrance of the railroad land is for as long as the land is required for transportation use," says Harvard planner Kathy Spiegelman, who used to work for the city of Cambridge.

A McCluskey tour of the lands Harvard can build on ranges from Western Avenue south to the CSX land, then, skipping over a residential area, west to a huge tract of industrial land that drops down from Western Avenue to the Mass. Pike. At one point, the land is virtually contiguous with property owned by Boston University, suggesting the possibility of the eventual transformation of Allston into an academic megaplex. "With Harvard, we have been focusing on job retention," says BRA director Mark Maloney. "Harvard can work with us on biotech from the most sophisticated level all the way to the manufacturing level. Harvard may be able to help us convert that biotech work into jobs."

As almost everyone interviewed for this story says like a mantra: Nothing is set in stone. Western Avenue, according to Spiegelman, will probably become a treelined swath that would not be out of place in the Back Bay, replete with shops and restaurants. But some local leaders would like to see something a bit homelier. "Western Avenue is pretty much a commercial boulevard through our neighborhood, without a whole lot of things that draw the people that live in the neighborhood," says Paul Berkeley, president of the Allston Civic Association. "We'd like a neighborhood feel -- you know, like coffee shops, dry cleaners, things that would draw people into the area."

"The rationale for this isn't about looking for land and figuring out how to use it," says Spiegelman. "This is a residential community, but there's all that commercial and trucking use. It's their hope that Harvard will bring a more hospitable environment. It's about the responsibility of the university."

Harvard's Stone points out that, if the university develops housing in Allston -- and it is likely to build residences for graduate students and faculty -- it will be required by the city to ensure that at least 10 percent of it is affordable for the community.

Mellone marvels that houses on his block, typically purchased for five-digit prices just two decades ago, now fetch a half-million dollars or more. There is a concern, expressed by residents, that Harvard's presence may further drive up real estate costs. A concentration of relatively affluent professors and administrators might push Allston's rents and sales prices to levels comparable with those of Cambridge or Davis Square in Somerville. Even if the university's expansion creates new biotech and other academic support jobs, the people who hold them may not be able to live near their workplaces. "We may find ourselves with a lot of really smart people who will be paying really high commuting costs," Maloney frets.

This leaves the city in an exquisite dilemma. It wants new jobs, but it doesn't want current residents driven out by rising costs. AlthoughMenino's Back Streets initiative is designed to keep light industry -- and jobs -- in the city, he recognizes that the nature of Boston's economy is changing. "Cities have to reinvent themselves," he says. "That's what we're doing in Allston."

NOBODY YET KNOWS how, or when, or in what fashion change will come; a lot of political and academic horse-trading will happen in the next 30 or 40 years. "The full development of Harvard's Allston campus is the work of at least a generation," says Summers. "The cost will be in the billions."

Harvard, always jealous of its resources, plans to raise money for the new construction, not rely on its capital.

One very important question that has not been fully addressed is payment in lieu of taxes. Traditionally, when a nonprofit institution takes over commercial land, it offers to repay at least part of the lost taxes. The university and the city say that discussions are in their very earliest stages. Both agree that no resolution is likely until a final plan for the land is worked out. Harvard pays the city $2.4 million each year in property taxes for land it owns in Allston, and, under a program the two sides have agreed on, the school pays an additional $1.6 million in lieu of taxes for its Boston properties, an amount Menino has said is too little. Harvard officials are quick to point out that the university has also pledged $5 million over five years for after-school programs throughout Boston and that it will be decades before all of the land is converted to university purposes.

Both Maloney and Summers say that the two sides have pledged to keep lines of discussion open about a long-term solution.

The wounds of the stealth real estate deal still exist, although they have started to heal. "I don't think that we can forget that that happened," says Maloney. "But it happened with a different president, and it happened so long ago that we decided that we should put it behind us so that we can create a positive working relationship."

ALTHOUGH THIS IS certainly a tale of two cities, it is also a tale of two men who have formed an improbable -- and, they hope, ultimately successful -- relationship. It is not the Odd Couple, since it seems to have two Oscar Madisons and no Felix Unger. Neither Tom Menino nor Larry Summers stands on ceremony -- and, oddly, the mayor is less rumpled than the Ivy League president. As a longtime local politician who didn't make it up from Hyde Park to City Hall without learning how to work the system, Menino knows when to stroke and when to use the cudgel of municipal power. As a Washington veteran (look inside your wallet; there are probably bills there that bear his signature as Bill Clinton's last Treasury secretary), Summers remembers how to speak the language of politics. "I like Tom, and he and I have a good partnership on a lot of things," Summers says. "I don't think it's always been that way."

"Menino is really good," Summers observes one morning at a ceremony the two men held to honor city students enrolled in a Harvard Medical School program to encourage more children to become doctors. "We met one kid, and Menino asked what street he lived on. Menino knew everything on the block -- stores and everything else."

"President Summers has been very cooperative," Menino offers. "There's been a change in attitude."

Two years ago, in The Boston Phoenix, Seth Gitell quoted an anonymous "insider" as saying: "Everything with Menino is personal. It's respect, and Larry's not the best listener. Larry's an academic, and Menino just reacts very powerfully to people who are from a different world." (Gitell is now Menino's spokesman.)

Three years ago, Larry Summers had the kind of rookie season that, had he been playing for the Red Sox, would have gotten him sent down to Pawtucket. His much-bruited facedown with the African-American scholar Cornel West, in which Summers upbraided West for cutting a hip-hop CD instead of publishing academic work, and West, feeling dissed, decamped for Princeton, got Summers reams of negative publicity. Department heads were livid when he vetoed two tenure recommendations for scholars in their 50s, arguing that their best years were behind them.

Then everything seemed to change; Summers was a frequent presence at student ice cream socials on campus and taught a popular freshman seminar. He started inviting Menino to events and going into Boston to see the mayor. The ivory tower economist morphed into the regular guy.

At the ceremony for school kids at the medical school, Summers, gregarious and robust, unlike his predecessor, wanders over to schmooze an onlooker. "I think it helps a lot that I've worked in government as well as academics," he says. If any president of Harvard since Henry Dunster (think buggy whips and rutted lanes to get an idea of when he reigned) has been on a backslapping, first-name basis with any mayor of Boston, the secret has been hushed up.

And if a president of Harvard ever before mugged for the camera while the mayor of Boston gave a speech at the Harvard Medical School -- offering to hold Menino's coat in the broiling heat -- the negatives of that image have long been destroyed. This is clearly not your father's town-gown relationship.

"I THINK I AM INCREDIBLY fortunate and a little bit daunted to be president of Harvard at a time when the university has this chance to move forward," says Summers, his foot on a polished coffee table in the elegant Harvard president's office, where he sits tieless in a dark checked shirt, the ever-present Diet Coke clutched in one hand. "My job is to make sure that there are no limits of bureaucratic rules and tradition, no limits of space or lack of resources. I think we can transform the university." He adds, "The choices that we make to construct the Harvard of the future are going to have far-reaching consequences."

"It's an important psychological shift," says Summers of the change in both geography and the structure of Harvard. In fact, Summers and his deans have the chance to remake the entire idea of the American university -- as radically as Charles William Eliot did when he brought the German tradition of rigid scholarship to Harvard, as Robert Maynard Hutchins did when he brought the Great Books to the University of Chicago, or Nicholas Murray Butler did when he brought the prototype of the core-curriculum idea to Columbia. Talk to Harvard professors and deans, and notions spin wildly about: programs that will teach students of public health about management at the business school; programs that will teach business students to be educational leaders at the relocated School of Education; biotech labs that will interact with computer scientists and physicists; a project on the origins of life that will bring astronomers together with biologists; ethicists and management experts dealing with issues like stem cell research from moral and business perspectives. Like Joshua at Jericho, Summers envisions breaking down some of the walls between the university's faculties.

In true academic fashion, the Harvard administration appointed task forces to study the use of the Allston campus; they dealt with undergraduate life, with life in Allston, with the professional schools, and with the future of science at Harvard. Having come up with a cornucopia of suggested uses for the land, Harvard has floated some likely ideas without yet committing to any of them. The university has hired an urban design firm, Cooper, Robertson & Partners, the Manhattan-based planners of New York's Battery Park City, to draw up a proposal for the best use of the land.

Their consulting architect will be the flamboyant but always interesting Frank Gehry, though there is no guarantee that he will actually design any buildings. Cooper, Robertson's chief executive, David McGregor, says that after his firm finishes a street-and-block plan for the land in 2005, a variety of architects will likely be called on to bring their own visions to individual buildings.

"I expect there will be at least an element of eclecticism," Summers says. "I would hope that these will be buildings that will earn people's admiration and affection 25 and 50 and 75 years from now, that we don't succumb to any flirtation with the trendiest. That would be a mistake."

Almost certainly, the Graduate School of Public Health will move from its location on Huntington Avenue and in rented properties nearby to the new space. The School of Education will likely move from Cambridge. There is a strong prospect that undergraduate residences -- additions to Harvard's system of self-contained houses with their own dining halls, social lives, and resident tutors -- will pop up along the Charles in Allston.

"You can never predict what will happen 40 years down the road," says Venky Narayanamurti, dean of engineering and applied sciences. "Science will change; science facilities are absolutely needed." The dean is seated in his conference room in Pierce Hall, a creaky antique whose designers were probably amazed by the invention of the typewriter and would look at a PC with the wonderment most people today would feel if they saw an actual Star Trek teleporter. Much of Harvard's science -- especially at the undergraduate level -- is still being done in relics of structures that far predate World War II. "The buildings are dated; it's hard to get them wired and give them the features they need," says Narayanamurti. "Harvard cannot be a great university without technology. . . . I see a new global health initiative, a real initiative between technology and society." What that initiative may be, only heaven knows right now, but putting public health cheek by jowl with engineering may spark imaginations.

Barry R. Bloom, dean of the School of Public Health, says that one priority of the school is "the coming epidemic of chronic diseases -- diabetes, cancer, metabolic syndrome. We do work on violence in Boston and prevention of violence and substance abuse. Moving closer to Harvard gives us new abilities to hook up with computer science, engineering, and laboratory sciences, to extend our ability to deal with those problems."

The new development will probably mix humanities and social sciences with hard science. "I think having a science campus is a very bad idea," says astronomy professor Alyssa Goodman. "At Science Hill at Yale, they're physically isolated and kind of marginalized."

At planning meetings, Goodman says, she has found odd reactions: "The humanities people got up and said they were jealous."

It's likely that liberal arts disciplines will have at least some representation in Allston, but don't expect to find the neighborhood crawling with lawyers. When the trial balloon of moving Harvard Law School was floated, the law faculty objected vehemently. Not even the president of Harvard wants a few hundred highly skilled lawyers on his back.

The dean of the Graduate School of Education, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, is already thinking about what her faculty can do with the schools that end up as neighbors. "The problems that children bring to school are complex. We already have faculty beginning conversations about child well-being. It touches on issues of depression in children, readiness for school, nutrition, abuse in the home."

Although it has a $23 billion endowment, Harvard has always stubbornly insisted on a philosophy it calls "Every tub on its own bottom" -- the notion that each school must raise its own money and live on its own endowment, rather than dip into the large common pot.

Schools like education and divinity produce graduates who do not usually become plutocrats, unlike some graduates in business or law. But the separation of funding may change. "Larry is very interested in having pipes connecting the tubs," Lagemann says.

All the major players speak excitedly of the promise that proximity will provide. "New linkages will be formed," says Narayanamurti. "There will be profoundly important life-science activities" when the science and public health faculties become neighbors, says Summers.

The idea that a public health scholar can walk across the street to a biology lab or that an education-management professor can drop in on a business school professor, without extensive commuting from the Longwood Avenue campus or the fringes of the Cambridge campus, has aroused interest in every corner of the university. "Not a small number of undergraduates do research at the Medical School and the School of Public Health," says William C. Kirby, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Undergraduates and the entire community can benefit from new combinations that bring scholars together who have not had an opportunity to work together."

A university that was actually successful in breaking down the barriers between its faculties -- and that is not even close to certain yet in Harvard's case -- would be a paradigm for a new era in higher education.

Lagemann waxes rhapsodic when she talks about the chances of her school joining forces with the business and government schools. Only a few schools of education -- Harvard, Teachers College at Columbia, and Stanford chief among them -- spend much time working on the state of education in America and the process of teaching, rather than simply churning out teachers.

"What the ed. school needs to bring to the table is expertise about teaching and learning; the Kennedy School brings expertise on policy and process; the business school brings expertise on management," says Lagemann. "They need to be equal partners."

Back in the late 1800s, a visionary with the euphonious name Christopher Columbus Langdell reinvented American legal education with something he called the case method, in which students studied actual court cases instead of memorizing statutes. The method of studying real-life experiences instead of theory has been replicated in law, business, government, and medical schools throughout the country. Lagemann hopes that Harvard can reproduce it in training educators as well, once her school is nestled in among a group of graduate schools that use it.

Kim B. Clark, dean of the business school, says that the move will enrich his professors as well. "We have a lot of faculty who are pursuing issues in health care and the life sciences," he says. "I hope that that work can be informed by the presence of people working in the life sciences."

The new campus may be beautiful; it may bring new jobs to the area. It will certainly change the nature of the university. But it is a vision still inchoate, slouching toward Allston to be born.

Many billions of dollars, and many years, will decide what that vision is and whether it will become reality. Even undefined, it is certain to evolve into a plan for an institution that will serve what one Harvard commencement hymn refers to as "generations yet unborn." But, as with Moses dying within sight of Canaan, it is a dream that the dreamers will never see fulfilled.

As Cooper, Robertson's McGregor says: The last of "these buildings -- when they come, we will be long gone."

Michael Ryan is the coauthor of Lesson One: The ABCs of Life, published by Fireside Press.