The tunnel’s absence will perhaps most affect the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, which will be split between the two CGIS buildings.

“It certainly is going have an impact on our operations,” said Jim Cooney, executive director of the Weatherhead Center. “The lack of a tunnel just means it’s going to be that much less smooth and there’s going to be a lot more going across the streets.”

For their part, city councillors and local activists were hardly celebrating the death of the tunnel last night.

Although many were pleased that Cambridge Street will remain tunnel-free, they also expressed dismay that even lengthy, face-to-face negotiations could not produce a mutually satisfactory solution for Harvard and the neighborhood.

To them, it represents another blow to the already tenuous relationship between the University and the city.

“The hope was to develop a process and mechanism by which better agreeements and understanding could be reached between the University and the community,” said Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan, one of the city’s main negotiators. “The sad piece of it was that the the process fell apart.”

Neighborhood activists also expressed frustration that the process broke down.

“We got into a bad situation and we tried to come up with a way to improve it with the negotiations,” said John R. Pitkin, the neighborhood activist who led the charge against the tunnel. “It didn’t work.”

Former Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, who had made the tunnel one of his pet projects, said the neighborhood residents would lose out in the end because they would not receive the benefits Harvard had been willing to offer them in return.

“Sometimes the phrase ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face’ has a sadly clear meaning,” Knowles wrote in an e-mail. “One can only be sad that a few intemperate residents will have blocked such a valuable improvement of their neighborhood.”

—Staff writer Alexandra N. Atiya can be reached at atiya@fas.harvard.edu

—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu