The Harvard battles that have come to define his name in his neighborhood came only within the last dozen years. In earlier years Pitkin worked on neighborhood projects such as the controversial integration of the city’s technical and traditional high schools.

When he speaks of past struggles, he remembers a time when he spent less time fighting Harvard and devoted more time to other community issues.

Not given to overreaching claims, Pitkin deals in specifics. If there’s any person in Mid-Cambridge who shows up at every meeting and knows the details of every project, it would be Pitkin.

Hugh Russell ’64, who founded the MCNA with Pitkin, says Pitkin is an effective leader whose style is based on extensive research and thought.

“He’s like a lot of us who are professionals who sort of rebuilt our houses, raised our families and have lived here for a very long time,” Russell says.

“I think he listens to everybody, he’s a very thoughtful person,” hel adds. “He tries to really understand why things are going on and what the very biggest picture is of things.”

Pitkin recalls that his first experience with controversial Harvard building projects involved a museum—the Sackler—which Harvard wanted to connect to the Fogg with a bridge over Broadway Street.

Describing a loud and contentious meeting about the Sackler-Fogg bridge proposal in his typical understated manner, Pitkin says the issue “stirred people up.”

But Harvard’s growth didn’t become a focus of the MCNA president until around 1990, when Harvard tore down a former Gulf gas station and put up the Inn at Harvard, Pitkin says.

Pitkin recalls that controversy surrounding the inn brought about a meeting of neighborhoods who put together an action plan.

“That really put [Harvard expansion] on the city’s screen in a different way than it had been before,” Pitkin says.

More than perhaps any other community activist in Cambridge, Pitkin remains aware of what’s going on beyond his own neighborhood. Of Riverside, for example, he says that the neighborhood along the Charles, which is home to many of Harvard’s dorms, has been “hardest hit” by Harvard expansion.

But though they face the same threats, Pitkin says, neighborhood efforts are largely disjointed.

“The neighborhoods have a sense of identity. There is a sense of territoriality,” he says. “I think that each neighborhood is fighting their own issues, fighting their own fight.”

In Riverside, Anger Boils