Looking Ahead

Bard says what he wants most from Harvard is a sense of the master plan—what the end result of a decade of development will be.

“I think Harvard’s finding it difficult to give us a commitment on the long-term,” he says. “A lot of people in the neighborhood want to have a sense that were not going to be going through this again in 10 or 15 years.”

Harvard’s vision for the future of the North Yard hinges on the coordination between HLS and FAS, two schools that both want to expand in Agassiz, their current home. The University’s top administrators expect to make a decision in the coming months on which of the two will be the linchpin of a campus across the river in Allston.

One of Cambridge activists’ traditional complaints about Harvard is that it is not one University with one unified plan, but rather a vast conglomeration of independent fiefdoms, each of which wants a piece of the neighborhood.

But Stone says that Agassiz’s desire for long-term guarantees puts pressure on Harvard to use a more centralized planning process.

“One of the interesting things about community relations is it puts a responsibility on the internal parts of Harvard to talk to each other,” he says.

Both FAS and HLS have been unrolling plans for the neighborhood in the past few months.

In the next few months, FAS will break ground on the Biological Research Infrastructure (BRI), a two-level, 75,000-square foot underground facility to be located below the courtyard of the Biological Laboratories off Divinity Avenue.

The BRI will include 16,000 cages for laboratory mice—less-than-appealing neighbors which early in negotiations prompted several Agassiz residents to ask that the so-called “vivarium” be the first thing moved to Allston.

But in an April meeting, after Bloomstein expressed satisfaction with the way the negotiations with Harvard were going, the ANC agreed to support the BRI.

“This is one small scurry for mice, and one giant step forward for the Agassiz neighborhood,” said City Councillor Brian Murphy after the meeting.

Also in April, the Harvard Corporation approved $100 million in funding to build a cutting-edge engineering and physical sciences building, the Lab for Interface Science and Engineering (LISE). Community discussion about this building has not yet begun, says Senior Director of Community Relations Mary H. Power.

Meanwhile, just next door, HLS has hired consultants to help plan its expansion, and several ACID representatives are on that study committee.

Law School Dean Elena Kagan says the goal is to involve residents early in the process, before any building starts.