Two Sides of the Tunnel

More than half a decade ago, FAS unveiled the new government center, a plan to bring together the government department and a dozen far-flung area studies centers under one roof.

The plan offered professors a long-awaited chance to get out of cramped Littauer Hall and into a modern space with new opportunities for cross-cultural studies.

But from day one, the neighbors were not happy.

Anticipating a constant stream of students passing through their neighborhood, and long dark shadows falling from the five-story building, Mid-Cambridge residents protested at a long series of meetings.

In response, Harvard made significant changes to the plans—dividing the center into two four-story buildings on either side of Cambridge Street, to be connected with a tunnel, which FAS administrators envisioned as a lynchpin of the project.

“It makes two separate and discrete buildings into a complex, which is really what we wanted to create by doing the CGIS,” says David A. Zewinski ’76, associate dean for physical resources and planning in FAS. “It’s tough to have a center that’s in two separate buildings, although not impossible.”

Several city planning boards were convinced, and signed off on the blueprints, tunnel and all.

But local activists continued to oppose the project, charging that the two smaller buildings with a tunnel represented significant University expansion into their neighborhood.

“There would be a campus type of feel,” says former president of the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association (MCNA) John R. Pitkin. “It would erode the residential character.”

Within weeks of Stone’s arrival last year, the University had permits for everything but the tunnel.

Pitkin says residents did not realistically think they could stop the entire project.

Nevertheless, when the MCNA met last January, the residents took a straw poll: not one member voted favor of the CGIS project.

In the next vote at the same meeting, only two members raised their hands in support of the tunnel.

Unable to stop Harvard from constructing the CGIS on its own property, neighbors zeroed in on the tunnel—the one piece of the project that could still be fought.