After a three year struggle between Harvard and local activists over how high and how much the University can build near the Charles River, the battle reached its final stage this week when the decision was passed into the hands of nine local politicians.

But while the nine Cambridge city councillors could take six months to hammer out the final deal, the battle for the councillors’ votes is already heating up.

For months, neighborhood activists have bombarded the councillors with letters, phone calls and impassioned speeches at council meetings.

Now, they are threatening to make rezoning a crucial factor in the council elections this fall.

“We hope to make it an election issue,” said Alec Wysoker ’84, who lives in Riverside, the working-class neighborhood by the Charles which has been a hotbed of Harvard opposition. “We’re not against growth, but it has to be within the bounds set by the citizenry.”

Harvard has also begun its more conservative lobbying effort, starting with a letter to the council outlining the University’s case.

But the University will have a tough time pushing its case to a council which has long shown sympathy for Riverside’s cause.

Several of the councillors have already said they are supportive of Riverside, largely because the neighborhood is already home to Mather Tower and Peabody Terrace—two structures deeply-hated by local residents.

But at the same time, even some city councillors say that they consider the neighborhood’s demands unreasonable.

The fight at the council is shaping up as a struggle between the rights of a landowner and the rights of a neighborhood, with history—and an election—hanging overhead.

A Long, Strange Battle

The fight for the Riverside parcels—including the Memorial Drive plot currently rented by the Mahoney’s Garden Center and the Blackstone steam plant which Harvard recently bought—has dragged on for more than three years.

Early in 2000, Harvard announced plans to build a modern art museum on the Mahoney’s site, a project which met vehement neighborhood opposition. According to Riverside activist Cob Carlson, at an early meeting one resident declared, “If you build it, we’re going to bomb it.”

The neighborhood took their grievances to the city council and won a two-year development moratorium so that they could completely rewrite zoning for the neighborhood.

The Riverside Study Committee, composed of local residents and a Harvard representative, then spent more than a year hammering out their zoning plan, focusing mostly on University properties.