But well-known neighborhood activist John Pitkin quickly withdrew, saying he needed Mid-Cambridge to support the agreement before he could sign—and saying that the benefits Harvard offered were not enough.

“There are a lot of good things in there, but the tunnel outweighs them,” Pitkin said in an interview yesterday.

Another negotiator, Betty Collins, said that she couldn’t support the agreement because Harvard refused even to discuss modifying CGIS’s south building—which negotiators at the outset aimed to change because it abuts the neighborhood directly.

“Once they refused to talk, I was really wondering what it was that we were compromising on,” Collins said.

All four neighborhood negotiators told the neighborhood association last night that they felt undue pressure from Harvard to sign on the dotted line.

Even Rick Childs, the lone neighborhood negotiator who continues to support the agreement, said that Harvard made July 3 a strong and sudden deadline.

“It just really felt like someone was putting a gun to my head,” Childs said.

Power, Harvard’s community relations director, said the University had long aimed to wrap up in early July because it wanted to have an agreement with the neighborhood negotiators in time to present it to last night’s neighborhood association meeting.

“Because the community negotiators were at the table with us for these 30-plus hours, my view was that it was necessary that the community representatives be able to speak positively about the negotiation and the agreement,” Power said.

While Harvard officials say they have looked into what they would need to do to build a tunnel-less CGIS, Harvard officials declined to say that they would be withdrawing the application for the tunnel.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.