“I wouldn’t even call them talks,” he says. “We have a very active rail business through the region and the plan now is to remain as a tenant there and keep doing our business.”

The CSX easements have long been the thorn in the side of potential Allston developers. The presence of the railroad thwarted Genzyme’s plans in the early 1990s to expand across the site Harvard now hopes to develop.

“We could never get anything by that railroad. No luck whatsoever,” Fitzgerald says. “In fairness to the railroad, it’s not something you can easily pick up and move.”

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, in his annual letter to the faculty, said Harvard plans to reroute those easements—a costly, but not impossible move according to Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA) Deputy Director of Real Estate Bill Tuttle.

“Any right in property can get purchased. Easements get bought out all the time,” he says.

Cleaning House

Over the next several years, Harvard will be buying out leases and financially coaxing tenants to relocate to other Harvard property.

The acquisition this June of the Arsenal on the Charles, a Watertown business complex, will serve as “swing space”—a place to relocate businesses and house Harvard users in transition for the move to Allston, according to Sally H. Zeckhauser, Harvard’s vice-president for administration.

Even with the land consolidated and the leases bought out, Harvard must undo the environmental damage to the site from two-hundred years of industrial use, including Naptha manufacture. Currently, both the extent of the damage and the cost of correction are unknown to the University.

The cost for the preparation of the land is not known, but the Central Administration has established a half-billion dollar infrastructure fund to cover the costs over the next five years.

The Central Administration estimated that at least $500 million would be needed for the project—a sum that is far too large to be sustained by its current budget. In an unprecedented step, the central administration will tax the endowments of Harvard’s nine schools directly, taking one half of one percent of each school’s endowment over the next five years to prepare the site.

The funds will be governed by a new infrastructure committee comprised of Harvard Corporation and Central Administration members as well as members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—a concession to FAS concerns that despite paying nearly forty percent of the total fund, they would not have any more sway in the decision-making process than those schools that were paying less.