“It’s always been a...much appreciated connection for the staff,” Cline said, noting that the structure provided a protected thoroughfare during the Cambridge winters.

Mrs. Widener’s gift, which historians have estimated at over $4 million, provided the funds to build the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library.

The library was named after her son, a member of the Class of 1907, who bequeathed his prized book collection the University following his death on the Titanic.

Harry Widener’s father also perished in the 1912 disaster, but his mother, Eleanor Widener, survived on a lifeboat and went on to endow what would become Harvard’s premiere library.

Mrs. Widener’s altruism, however, came with a few peculiar conditions, including a provision permitting her “to do grading and landscape work” on the grounds of the new library.

But the clause forbidding “additions or alterations” to the exterior has proved the most troublesome for Harvard architects and lawyers, and the Solomonic compromise which gave birth to the now doomed bridge between Widener and Houghton has stood in University lore for decades.