Not only was the tunnel the final piece that neighbors could control, but it was also seen as an additional, unnecessary imposition in its own right.

Constructing the tunnel would require 20 months of digging under busy Cambridge Street—a street that had recently been torn apart for sewer construction—and neighbors were imagining more equipment, noise and fumes, Pitkin says.

“It becomes a 24-hour disruption to your life,” Pitkin says.

And many of the tunnel’s would-be neighbors were not convinced that the two buildings merited an underground connection.

“I think there was a general lack of persuasiveness about the need for the link,” says MCNA member Laura B. Roberts ’74. “It’s bad public policy to segregate vehicles and pedestrians.”

A Fractious Past

Battles over buildings are a recurring phenomenon in the fractious Harvard-Cambridge relationship.

Many Cantabrigians remember previous battles with Harvard over a variety of projects—most notoriously Peabody Terrace and Mather Towers, which so infuriated neighborhood activists that they staged a takeover of commencement in 1970.

Stone’s predecessor, Grogan—who was brought in to mend Harvard’s ties to Boston and is currently president of the Boston Foundation—says he felt Cambridge activists and city councillors were “utterly unsympathetic” to Harvard’s needs during his tenure as vice president.

He says Cambridge activists often invoke the memory of previous disappointments to justify their opposition to new projects.

“They take Peabody and turn it into ‘Remember the Alamo,’” Grogan says.

According to Grogan, he tried to respond to residents’ concerns without giving into what he calls “an element of absurdity in Cambridge that is famous.”

“When you are at Harvard you develop a thick skin,” he says. “You sift out the wheat from the chaff and go forward.”

For their part, Cambridge officials say they could not get through to Grogan, and he neglected to take issues in Cambridge seriously.

“Mr. Grogan came to us with different marching orders. His primary objective was to mend his wounds in Boston,” Sullivan says. “He did the job he was hired to do.”