Four years from now the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library will sit on the banks of the Charles across the street from Eliot House. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of visitors will pour through it during its first year. It will change the map of Cambridge drastically and it may also change the complexion of academic Harvard. For half of the $20 million raised from the public for the memorial will be given to the University on the endowment for the John F. Kennedy institute of Politics.

The Library's effects, either for good or ill, on both the Harvard square area and the University's curriculum will be enormous. The Library and Institute may constitute the most valuable development at Harvard is this century, or they may seem ten years from now to have been the greatest mistake the University over made.

I

The City of Cambridge will obviously undergo substantial changes because of the Library. The planning of parking, access, and facilities for the floods of visitors has already led the MBTA to consider re-routing its Harvard-Ashmont line. In the meantime, land values in the library area have jumped by more than 100 per cent.

But ultimately, the Library's greatest impact may prove to be on the daily life of Harvard Square. Though this plan have not yet been made public, architect I.M. Pei has said that he is considering placing University buildings, low-rent offices for student organizations, and stores run any local merchants on the site.

Pei decided long ago that in addition to the buildings housing the literary and its components, other structures would have to go up on the 2-acre site. The library complex will include an area set aside as a memorial to President Kennedy, a building containing the archives of his administration, a museum, and a building to house the Institute of Politics. But the five, presently used for a repair yard by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, is a large one, and Pie decided early that he did not want to have large expanses of grass of parkland. The Library was to being urban memorial, he said. He suggested that "support facilities"--commercial buildings for the use of visitors and members of the University community--be built on the site.

Obviously the planning of these support facilities is crucial not only to a program for the library, but to the sure of the Harvard Square area. In the facilities include only tourist services and no buildings connected such the University, the entire 12- Harvard plot would be isolated from Harvard, no more a part of the University community than the streetcar tracks ready there.

The positive possibilities are suggested by one plan that would build commercial facilities along Eliot Street, bridging the Harvard Square- little Square area and the memorial complex. Such facilities might include ground-floor businesses opening both onto Eliot Street and the memorial area, with upper stories being available for rental to student organizations or businesses. It is, of course, possible that the businesses selected to occupy the commercial buildings under such a plan would attract no students whatever, and that the area would remain tourists' property. But suppose that Eliot Street, as accessible to the Houses as the present Harvard Square area, were lined with attracted restaurants and sidewalk cafes, off-beat clothing stores, book stores, art supply stores, and offices for student organizations presently cramped in tiny quarters in a University building on Dunster Street. Even groups like the Advocate who presently own their own quarters but have difficulty in keeping them up, might be interested in low-rent offices on the Library site.

If the area were somehow filled with the right mixture of buildings -- and even the selection of the individual businesses would be a problem -- the commercial center of Harvard life might shift in that direction, and student activity, too, moves there.

In other words, it is as if Harvard had the chance to design a new Harvard Square, or to expand the present one drastically.

If it is decided to try to integrate student life into the memorial complex, Harvard must then decide to what extent it wants to make use of the new space for its own purposes. Should it build classrooms, Faculty offices, a Student Union? What should the Institute building include? Would it, for instance, be valuable to build a lecture hall larger than 1200-seat Sanders Theatre, presently the University's largest?

It is easy to see how the library complex can emerge as an area to all intents and purposes dead to Harvard. Less concretely, one can imagine an area that greatly -- and beneficially -- changes the nature of the Square and of the University. But this last will not happen accidentally; if the University decides to make such use of the land, it must virtually look over Pei's shoulder while he does his planning.

II

The John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics was originally intended to bring scholars and politicians into closer contact, on the assumption that other office-holders can use academics as profitably as Kennedy did during his political career.

As Richard E. Neustadt, the Institute's director, has planned it, a regular flow of politicians will visit Cambridge to study, or to write, or simply to meet professors and students. Some of the politicians will be men who have retired from public careers, lost elections, or found themselves between jobs. Others will be young men on the verge of a political career.