New Riverfront Museums, Housing?

A planning committee has recommended construction of two art museums and University housing on a piece of the Cambridge waterfront now leased by Harvard to Mahoney's Garden Center. The development would fill a 2.3-acre site on Memorial Drive, with the Charles River promenade in front, the Riverside residential neighborhood in back, Harvard's Peabody Terrace to the north, and Western Avenue and the Cambridge Electric Light Company's steam plant on the south.

"This location is somewhat removed from Harvard's academic core," the committee acknowledges in its report, "but is in proximity to Harvard's River Houses, and to the University's facilities and property in Allston"--where Harvard has acquired 52 acres on which it is expected to construct a new campus (see "South by North Harvard," September-October, page 67). The museums would constitute a new cultural center "near the geographic center of a future interconnected Cambridge and Allston campus" and would serve "both the University and Harvard's host communities."

The University Art Museums presented a compelling case to the committee that Harvard needs a museum of modern and contemporary art. The Fogg Art Museum has plenty of recently minted art, some of it biggish, and no very good place to put it. The committee embraced the idea of celebrating modernity (as the Fogg once did conspicuously) and recommended further that, "if programmatically and fiscally feasible," a second museum be built to replace with a larger facility the present Sackler Museum, which houses ancient, Asian, Islamic, and later Indian art. Sitting across Broadway from the Fogg, the present Sackler, already half offices, would cease to be an exhibition area and would be "reused for core academic purposes." Some observers think it not especially workable in its present hybrid form.

Architect Renzo Piano of Genoa, Italy, has done very preliminary drawings of the sort of structures that he and James Cuno, professor of fine arts and Cabot director of the University Art Museums, have in mind.

The committee proposed, as well, that planners "actively consider complementary program components" to incorporate into the museum of modern and contemporary art, "such as a theater/lecture hall, a cinema, or related teaching/meeting spaces." Cuno reportedly has had informal discussions with officials of the American Repertory Theater about moving that organization to a new theater in the museum, thus freeing up the mainstage of the Loeb Drama Center for exclusive undergraduate use.

The two museums would require only three-fifths of the Mahoney's site, according to tentative calculations of their sizes. What might fill the rest? The committee recommends 50 to 100 units of University housing adjacent to Peabody Terrace or along the eastern edge of the site at the neighborhood edge.

The committee, which began meeting last spring, comprised representatives of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University Art Museums, the planning and real estate office, the provost's office, and the community affairs office, and was chaired by the administrative vice president, Sally Zeckhauser. It considered whether to build one or two museums, museums and some University housing, museums and hotels of various sizes, just 300 units of housing, or just a big hotel. Early in the process a third museum was bruited--perhaps a new incarnation of the Peabody Museum or the Museum of Comparative Zoology, or the public-exhibition aspects of one of those, but not their research collections. The committee assumed that any scheme would include at least one level of below-grade parking.

In analyzing the possibilities, the committee was mindful of community concerns expressed in informal discussions between residents and Harvard representatives. The committee understood, it reports, that neighbors want to maintain open space, views to the river, and pedestrian access through the site. They want the height of new construction to be low, and they worry about traffic the new development may bring. The committee's list of recommendations begins with this one: "Initiate a series of community discussions regarding planning for the site and transitions at the neighborhood edge."

Harvard has not always been so sensitive to the wishes of its neighbors, and its intentions for this very parcel of land have provoked protest in the past. A community group moved onto the stage in Tercentenary Theatre and brought formal Commencement exercises to a standstill in 1970 to protest the University's inflationary impact on the local housing market and its plans to build student housing on a predecessor garden center called Treeland. The protesters argued that Harvard should donate the land for the construction of low-income housing. The art museums themselves have stumbled in their relations with the public. When construction of the Sackler began in 1982, the museums blithely intended to span Broadway with an aerial connector, a capacious gallery-bridge joining the Fogg and the Sackler. Community opposition put the kibosh on the scheme. Nowadays, the potential power of the public is clearly understood (see "Good Zoning Makes Good Neighbors," page 84).

Cuno publicly disclosed his interest in the Mahoney's site at a community meeting in the spring of 1998. The museums were beginning to develop a master plan for the future of their complex, he said, going on to discuss alterations to the Fogg and Sackler museums then being considered, including the possible construction of a tunnel under Broadway to connect the two buildings ("Museums Ponder Missing Link," July-August 1998, page 68). Planners will not pursue the tunnel option if the President and Fellows accept the recommendations for the Mahoney's site.

"If a museum of modern art is built on that site, I hope that Harvard will think big and generously about it," says a major benefactor of the art museums. "Let the museum have breathing room. When the Fogg was opened in 1895, a blueprint existed that showed how it might one day expand onto the adjoining site, where the Carpenter Center went up instead in 1963. The Fogg has suffered from being hemmed in by the Carpenter Center. I would be terribly disappointed if that happened at the river site. The Sackler and the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Werner Otto Hall are not what they ought to be, and even when new they weren't. Let's not do something typical of so many Harvard projects and make a building that isn't what it ought to be."

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