The stately homes on Gordon Street in South Allston—on the other side of the I-90 turnpike—have seen better days.

There are scruffy sofas on front porches and peeling paint on some facades. The streets nearby—the heart of Allston’s business district—are filled with laundromats, liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, and night spots.

The neighborhood did not always look this way.

“When I was growing up around here, that area provided basic services to the community,” says Paul Berkeley, the president of the Allston Civic Association, who has lived in the neighborhood his entire life. “Today it is all bars and night clubs.”

Locals like William Marchione, the curator of the Brighton-Allston Historical Society, say that the expansion of Boston University (BU)’s undergraduate population in the 1960s doomed the area. As the number of undergraduates grew, homes were subdivided and owners moved out, and businesses catering to the student population began to dot the landscape.

“Prior to the 1960s, it was a very nice upscale residential neighborhood,” Marchione says. “The area deteriorated remarkably. I think the impact of Boston University on South Allston could serve as an example of the worst kind of impact of an institutional expansion.”

As plans for new undergraduate Houses in Allston become more concrete, the memory of BU’s expansion and the ongoing tensions over college students’ drinking and rowdy behavior in the area have left some residents wary.

Last week, a preliminary report released by Harvard planners showed that the University is considering four different configurations for new undergraduate houses along the Charles River in Allston. Among the possible sites are the current location of the College’s athletic facilities, the Harvard Business School (HBS) dorms, and a third area that includes parts of the One Western Ave. graduate housing complex and the HBS campus.

It is unclear when the new Houses would be built, although the report labels them as part of a potential “first phase” of Allston construction.

But some local residents say they might already have enough undergraduates in their community.

“This is a small working-class neighborhood and we have examples of what happens in our area when you have student housing,” says Berkeley, who is also a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force, a community group that reviews all of Harvard’s large-scale projects in the area and will provide feedback on the preliminary report.

Harvard students would not be interspersed in the neighborhood like students from BU, but residents still worry about the effect that a projected 1,500 new college students would have in Allston.

BRUSHES WITH THE LAW

For years, Allston residents have had little negative contact with Harvard students and, they say, too much contact with students at BU and Boston College (BC).

“Harvard has traditionally controlled [their] undergraduates better than other universities in the neighborhood,” says Ellin Flood-Murphy, a member of the Harvard Allston Campus Task Force.