“I feel like Harvard has...more experienced negotiators and was able to manipulate the political situation very effectively,” Wysoker says. “Had we been able to be as sophisticated a negotiating team as Harvard was, we might have gotten more.”

Thomas J. Lucey, Harvard’s director of community relations for Cambridge, says the University could not always respond immediately because time was needed to coordinate its approach.

“It does take time sometimes to do some internal planning,” says Lucey, who came aboard last July. “When you deal with an institution of this size, there are lots of people involved in the decision.”

According to Murphy, the University made concessions over the course of negotiations, which he says demonstrates that the city was not outshone by the Harvard team.

Despite their criticisms of the process, Wysoker and Baumann offer cautious praise of the agreement itself—but some residents in Riverside remain dissatisfied with the outcome.

In April, Carlson filed a lawsuit against the nine councillors and City Manager Robert W. Healy, asserting that the city did not hold public hearings or conduct an appraisal of the land before granting an easement for Harvard to build a parking garage, the first step in the development of the area.

A Middlesex Superior Court judge dismissed the suit, but Carlson says he will keep fighting Harvard’s plans to construct large buildings next to his home.

He says he is not on good terms now with some of the other residents, viewing the agreement they negotiated as a “ridiculous deal” in which the wishes of the residents on his street were ignored so the rest of the neighborhood could reach a resolution.

Murphy refers to Carlson’s lawsuit as an example of the “range of views” that residents have about the Riverside agreement.

“There are some people, I don’t think they’d be happy unless Harvard Yard was torn down for community benefit,” he says.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Both residents and Harvard officials agree that signing on the dotted line did not wrap up the issues in either Agassiz or Riverside, but only represented the beginning of more work to be done to implement the deals.

Even the residents who support the pacts say they are still waiting to see if the promises will be kept—reflecting the deep-rooted suspicions of Harvard that residents harbor after years of town-gown battles.

“There is an opportunity here for Harvard to begin to melt that distrust, and obviously some distrust has melted or we would never have had the agreement,” Bloomstein says of the Agassiz deal. “It took an enormous leap of faith by the community to sign this agreement.”

In Riverside, the lingering vexation with the negotiating process remains in the forefront of residents’ minds.