Hill says he will continue to challenge the construction, arguing that the new buildings will block his mother’s view of the Charles River.

“The expansion of the neighborhood is going unchecked and really displacing minority and low income people, and at this point in time the city of Cambridge is not doing anything to stop it,” Hill says. “They have the power to do so and they’re not using it for the people who are most vulnerable.”

Power says construction on the Memorial Drive site is expected to begin this summer.

“Completing graduate housing has been a priority for the University, so the motivation has been to proceed with building as quickly as possible,” she says.

NORTH OF THE YARD

Residents in the Agassiz neighborhood say Harvard has stuck by the agreement reached in December 2003, permitting the University to carry out 1.6 million square feet of construction over the next 25 years, in return for providing millions of dollars’ worth of benefits to the community.

Residents have praised Harvard’s construction mitigation team, which responds to neighborhood complaints about construction-related problems like truck traffic, noise, and dust.

“The Harvard construction mitigation team has been terrific,” Carol Weinhaus, who lives next door to current construction, told University representatives at a neighborhood meeting in May.

According to the deal’s stipulations, Harvard made its first payment in March of $250,000 into a newly-created neighborhood fund that will go toward community programs. By the end of the summer, interim traffic calming devices will be installed in the area, says Thomas J. Lucey, Harvard’s director of community relations for Cambridge.

“I have to say that I was not optimistic about being able to work with [Harvard] when we started, but things have been very good,” says Agassiz resident Ellen Friedman, who helped negotiate the agreement.

In the first stage of construction in Agassiz, Harvard will build three new science facilities, housing laboratories and offices from multiple departments, which University planners say epitomizes the interdisciplinary nature of science in the future.

The Biological Research Infrastructure (BRI), the first building, experienced a fire in February that inflicted millions of dollars of damage and has caused a delay in construction, the length of which is not yet known, Power says.

According to Lucey, the University expects to complete construction of the second building, the Laboratory for Interface Science and Engineering, in the next two and a half years.

Plans for the Northwest science building on Oxford Street were approved by the Planning Board in mid-February, and construction is set to commence this summer.

The second phase of development in Agassiz includes the expansion of Harvard Law School, which recently completed a “fairly fine-grained” study of its needs, and now is looking at ways to utilize space to meet them, Power says.