She said a Massachusetts law barring state property like the tunnel from producing "environmental hazards" may make it illegal to run air hammers there at three in the morning.
St. Paul's Development
Development and its perennial partner, political strife, also continue on the other side of the Square. Controversy surrounds a prized plot of land recently sold by St. Paul's Catholic Church. The buyer, H.J. Davis, Inc., plans to build 90 to 100 condominiums on the parking lot across DeWolfe St. from Quincy House.
The Newton-based company's $7 million bid defeated a dozen other proposals for the site, including the University's. The terms of Harvard's unsuccessful bid for the site would have let St. Paul's parish choose between a $3 million sale price with a promise to include some low-income housing in the development, or a $4 million ticket to develop the whole lot for profit.
Harvard offered so much less for the property because its proposal was for a smaller development. The University would have built about 30 apartments there, with half the combined floor area that zoning allowed.
The Davis Corporation hopes to buy Harvard's adjoining parking lot opposite Leverett House. By combining the adjacent plots, it could build more condominiums and give residents a better view of the Charles River. Spiegelman said University administrators have not yet decided whether to sell. "It depends," she said. "In exchange for what?"
Spiegelman said Harvard might sell the land if Davis used it to spread out the development over more space, thus making it a better neighbor. "We don't want a canyon on DeWolfe St.," she said, nothing that "we've already created our own long wall" in the Quincy House facade.
In addition, Spiegelman said, "the density [of apartments] they're proposing is pretty intense." Zoning would permit Davis to develop 140 units if the two parcels were combined, but she said Harvard would probably not sell to Davis unless the developer promised to build fewer condominiums.
A deal may be ahead, Spiegelman said, because "that makes more sense than our trying sometime in the future to do something discrete on our own" to develop Harvard's parking lot.