“With so much that we’re going to have to deal with over the coming years, we didn’t want to engage in a fight over a small property like that, especially if there didn’t seem to be any drawbacks,” Berkeley says.

While the community sees the UOS office as temporary, Harvard Director of Community Relations Kevin A. McCluskey says residents may be convinced that UOS should stay for the long term.

“When we get to the point where the community begins to assess how this use has worked, I think they will see that it’s a very benign use, without any negative impacts on the community,” he says.

“If we don’t have any particular plans for that spot, it may remain that way,” he says.

Digging In for the Bigger Dig

The task force—a joint Harvard-Allston committee known officially as the Institutional Master Plan Task Force—has had a powerful role in the future of both the neighborhood and Harvard since 1997, when news broke that Harvard had been secretly purchasing Allston land for nearly a decade.

While so far committee members have signed off on a number of Harvard’s proposals, discussions between Allston and the University have not always gone smoothly.

In summer 2000, when Harvard presented preliminary plans for graduate student housing at One Western Ave., community concern about the height of the building brought Harvard’s architects back to the drawing board.

Berkeley says the community is anxious to see how Harvard plans to develop the largely industrial Western Avenue into a pedestrian thoroughfare.

“The biggest concern right now is that the institutions tend to be allowed to build much bigger and more densely populated structures than traditional zoning for businesses allows,” he says. “We want to make sure that any new buildings are properly scaled.”

But Harvard’s Associate Vice President for Planning and Real Estate Kathy A. Spiegelman says a significantly higher concentration of people and buildings is a prerequisite to the shared goals of the neighborhood and Harvard.

“If you want retail action and vibrancy and public transportation, you have to have a higher level of density,” she says.

One of the community’s biggest concerns, Berkeley says, is that Harvard’s future development will allow more interaction between the campus and the city.

Aside from its sports facilities and the Business School, the University’s current facilities in Allston include parking and storage space for equipment, supplies and buses.

“We don’t view our neighborhood goal as being Harvard’s parking lot,” Berkeley says.