David McGregor, the managing partner of Cooper, Robertson & Partners did not return several calls for comment.
LAST STEPS
Two important constituencies—the student body and the Allston community—will have to be won over if undergraduate Houses in Allston are to become a successful reality.
Chair of the Undergraduate Council’s Student Affairs Committee Aaron D. Chadbourne ’06 said that he is concerned that students living in Allston might feel alienated from the rest of the campus.
“If the University…is going to extend the College in Allston, the number one consideration is that it feels [like] a connected campus, and as it stands, putting Houses across river is not going to create a unified campus,” he said.
Chadbourne said that planners had to prioritize transportation planning in order to connect the two sides of the river.
“Unless you have transportation, it’s irresponsible to talk about putting Houses there,” he said. “You have to cross the river, but then you also have to get to the academic buildings.”
Indeed, planners have proposed ways of integrating any new buildings in Allston with the rest of the University.
At an April 28 Harvard-Allston community meeting, McGregor said that planners had considered building a new crossing of the Charles River.
The three proposals he outlined—a tunnel from the area around the stadium to Harvard Square, a new bridge between the Larz Anderson Bridge on JFK Street and the Weeks Memorial Foot Bridge, and a major renovation of the Weeks Memorial Foot Bridge to allow Harvard shuttle traffic, all correspond to possible undergraduate housing sites.
The University will also have to face community members who are skeptical about Harvard’s plans to put undergraduates in Allston.
“I don’t know if the community has said that it wants any students living in Allston. We don’t really want student housing here,” said Paul Berkeley, a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force, the community group that reviews the University’s large-scale projects in Allston. “Harvard task forces might say this, but the community task force did not. The Harvard-commissioned task force has never met with us.”
“It will have to be reviewed by the community before anything happens,” added Ray Mellone, who chairs the task force.
Nevertheless, several other Allston community leaders contacted for this article said that as long as the new Houses stayed on the river, away from residential neighborhoods, the community would probably approve the proposal.
—Staff writer Joseph M. Tartakoff can be reached at tartakof@fas.harvard.edu.