Both are planning to pack up and leave Allston.

But some speculated last year that the television station’s biggest fans in City Hall—including Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino—were irate that Harvard could force WGBH to leave the city.

In the end, the University helped the public television station find a new home, avoiding a potential dispute with Menino.

When Harvard first approached WGBH four years ago, the station was already outgrowing its 13 buildings and considering a major overhaul, according to station vice president of communications Jeanne Hopkins.

“The timing was right anyway to move and consolidate [the] buildings somewhere else,” she says. “We’ve had an interest in being closer together, and we thought it would be much nicer to have a planned expansion.”

Assisted by real estate planners from Harvard, WGBH found and purchased two properties in nearby Brighton, where it plans to move its 1,200 employees by 2005.

In addition to negotiating an end to WGBH’s presence on University land, Harvard also purchased a smaller parcel from WGBH located across Western Avenue.

This piece holds some of the station’s buildings and a Pepsi warehouse that has been a fixture in North Allston for nearly 50 years.

Pepsi recently announced that it, too, would move off Harvard’s newly acquired land to a to-be-built facility in Canton, prompting an article in the Boston Business Journal headlined, “Harvard Squeezes Pepsi out of Allston.”

“That headline was extraordinarily misleading,” says Pepsi spokesperson Kelly McAndrew. “We knew the property had been purchased by Harvard, and when you’re in a location for 47 years you’re going to make decisions about what’s needed.”

Harvard allowed the soft-drink maker to stay on the site after their normal lease had expired, she says.

“Our lease was up last November; we needed to go to Harvard and said were having some trouble,” McAndrew says. “From our perspective, they’ve been a wonderful business partner.”

Directly between Charlesview and WGBH sits another key piece to Harvard’s land puzzle. A modestly-sized warehouse of low-use library materials, the New England Deposit Library (NEDL) sits on land owned by Harvard. By contract, should the current tenants leave, the land would roll over to Harvard.

The depository holds book collections and archive materials from seven area institutions, including Harvard, Boston University, Boston College and the Boston Public Library (BPL).

Currently, Harvard uses the space to store few books, instead primarily using the warehouse to store “thousands and thousands of boxes of rainy-day book bags,” which are distributed at Harvard libraries.