Nothing like the student takeover of University Hall had ever hit the city of Cambridge before.

Takeovers, protests and riots were commonplace all around the country in 1969. San Francisco State, Berkeley and Columbia had each had been disrupted, often violently, when students stood up against their schools. But not at Harvard.

Harvard had always been an untouchable, elite institution, maintaining an uneasy coexistence with a large industrial city. City residents tended to be suspicious, if not hostile, to the Harvard community. The University, for its own part, tended to ignore community concerns.

But that situation changed in April 1969, when several hundred students, led by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), took over the University's main administrative building, calling for an end to campus Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs and Harvard's expansion into the community.

Suddenly, Harvard and the city were forced to take notice of each other.

"It was the first time that town and gown ever came together on issues," recalls City Councillor Saundra Graham, at the time a community activist in the Peace and Freedom Party. "We just felt that [Harvard students] were all these rich, white students who didn't care about social issues."

Graham, who had emerged as a leader in the Black community in the years preceding the strike, had spent her time fighting many of the same issues the students were protesting--the Vietnam war, Harvard's rapid expansion into the predominantly, Black Riverside neighborhood and the city's lack of a rent control law.

In the SDS activists, Graham found an unexpected ally. When students started organizing to protest University policies, she began to talk to them, trying to find a common ground. When the takeover began, she actively supported it, helping to feed the students camped out in the building.

"At that time there was a rapport between the students and the community," she says. "We told them our concerns, and they listened."

Everybody was making demands in 1969. The students in the University Hall takeover had six--divided into two distinct categories. The first three called for the abolition of ROTC and compensation for the students receiving ROTC scholarships. The next three concerned community issues, calling on Harvard to freeze rents in University-owned buildings and to preserve the homes of workers near new University developments at the Kennedy School of Government and the Medical School.

Press coverage at the time gave far more attention to the Vietnam war and the ROTC issues than to the demand that Harvard reassess its role in the community. But the fact that student activists and community activists could come together on any issue signaled a great change in the way Harvard and the city looked at each other.

In the late 1960s, Cambridge was one of the largest industrial centers in the state. Although the two universities--Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--often dominated the scene, it had never really been a "university city."

Many of the city's 100,000 residents viewed the universities with alarm and distrust, particularly as they began to expand and take over local neighborhoods.

"It's a good bet that about half of them--those who proudly label themselves 'lifelong residents of Cambridge'--have muttered the word 'Harvard' like a druid curse at least once in their lives," The Crimson wrote in 1968.

Some city politicians--notably Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci--have practically made careers out of battling Harvard.