In the winter of 1956, the President and Fellows of Harvard College paid $33,000 for a pretty, grassy plot of land on the corner of Mt. Auburn and Plympton Streets, intending to build on it. But the building plans fizzled, and no new plan has emerged in the intervening 19 years; the 13,000 square-foot plot is still grassy, still pretty, and obscured enough so few people now know who owns it.

The land goes under several aliases: the Cambridge assessor catalogs it as lot 81 on block 161; the Harvard Real Estate Office in Holyoke Center files it under 52-58 Mt. Auburn St.; and most Harvard undergraduates know it simply as the private garden of the exclusive Fly Club.

If you're anxious to lounge some afternoon on the pastoral lot, you'll have to overcome one stumbling block: the high wire mesh fence that encloses three sides of the property. And climbing it may not endear you to Harvard officials. While they say there's no reason why University members cannot use the land, they also express reservations about mounting the fence to get there.

To follow a less rigorous route to the land you can always join the Fly, an all-male final club whose land lies directly west of lot 81 and that, thanks to Harvard's persistent failure to use or lease the land, can offer its members privileged access to the plot.

But joining the Fly is no easy task either, since its non-alumni membership runs to about 60 undergraduates and five grad school students. If those odds don't frighten you the club's initiation fee (over $100) and monthly dues (over $25) might scare you off.

The Fly does not lease the land from the University; in fact, no rental agreement exists between Harvard and the club. The University has never asked the Fly to pay for using the property, although the President and Fellows of Harvard College must pay significant property tax on it. Last year those taxes ran to $4817.80 for the lot, which is assessed at $26,000. That fiscal 1974 figure represents only one annual payment of the 19 Harvard has turned over to Cambridge since purchasing the land in December 1956. In fact, since 1957, Harvard has paid Cambridge over $45,000 in property taxes for the land while it was being used exclusively by the Fly. (In 1974 dollars, with earlier payments recalculated according to changes in the consumer price index, the payments come to about $57,000.)

In interviews earlier this month, Administration officials took varying positions on the University's use--or non-use--of the land. One turned a critical eye toward what he considers an inequitable arrangement; others defended it, suggesting that a tacit Harvard-Fly Club agreement allows the club to use the land in return for maintaining it, an agreement they say benefits Harvard by sparing it substantial upkeep costs.

However, a Fly Club official reported that while the Fly does cut the lawn on the property it does not do so under any agreement. He also indicated the grass cutting has incurred only minimal costs for the Fly.

According to those interviewed, the University's subsidization of the Fly Club garden-backyard has continued for 19 years because of Harvard's failure to adopt a short-term use of the land after it scrapped its 1956 building plans. As one administrator put it earlier this month, the Fly's exclusive access reflects not a policy for such land, but "just an evolution."

If the evolutionary theory stands up, the process of natural selection for lot 81 dates back to 1956, when the Fly owned both its present property, on the corner of Mt. Auburn St. and Holyoke Place, and the adjoining lot that runs all the way to Plympton St. Having "no particular use" for the land and jumping at the chance to cut its property taxes ("every square foot we sold saved us taxes"), the Fly offered the land to a highly interested Harvard, according to Thomas Whiteside '32, who was then and still is a trustee of the club. The deal, adds Whiteside, seemed "mutually sensible."

That fall the negotiations for a sale hit the front page of The Crimson, which announced Harvard's plan to buy the land and speculated that the plot would be used for a new "commuter center." Hinting at Harvard's plans, the then undergraduate president of the Fly told The Crimson, "In view of the University's need to expand in the Cambridge area, we feel that such a sale of land, which isn't being used for anything at present, is justified, although we hate to see it go." More tea leaf reading on the land's destiny came from an anonymous, high-ranking University official, who said, "You don't expect a valuable piece of grass like that to remain unused, do you?"

By May 1958, plans for the commuter center--the rough equivalent of Dudley House--had grown firm enough for Charles P. Whitlock, present dean of Harvard College and then Dudley's Allston Burr Senior Tutor, to discuss publicly the size of the proposed building. That autumn The Crimson even carried a sketch of tentative plans for the five-story building, which was to be erected shortly after what is now the new part of Quincy House. The Crimson story concluded by stating that the commuter center would "definitely" be built on the Mt. Auburn-Plympton St. corner.

But Harvard soon dropped the plans because of a lack of ready alumni funds and the completion of another University building. According to Whitlock, who traveled through the country in the late 50s seeking funds for the new building, alumni gifts only ran up to $4000, while approximately $500,000 was needed. Then, when the Harvard comptroller moved out of Lehman Hall and into the brand new Holyoke Center, the vacant older building offered an ideal spot for Harvard's commuters.

So lot 81 remained vacant--and open only to Fly Club members.

Through the 60s and into the 70s Harvard occasionally considered the site for one of several other proposals: