“What’s wrong with what’s there now?” questioned Councillor E. Denise Simmons, adding that she understands the dorm-filled neighborhood’s frustration with the “hootering and the hollering and the throwing of beverages” that comes with University housing.
“Harvard has to be a little less pervasive,” she added.
Reeves added Harvard’s other tall buildings in Riverside are enough of an imposition on the neighborhood, and pointed to University holdings across the river as a better site for future expansion.
Deep-seated bitterness about Peabody and Mather Towers in the late 1960s has hung over the zoning talks from the very beginning.
“I can still see the chains across the so-called open passages to the Charles River,” said Lawrence Adkins, a lifelong Riverside resident and president of the Riverside Neighborhood Association. “It’s reliving an old war.”
—Staff writer Alexandra N. Atiya can be reached at atiya@fas.harvard.edu.