Conservation district ordinance hinders Cambridge from meeting its needs
There’s a through line that connects the many periods of Cambridge’s history: Change. Indigenous peoples formed a thriving civilization here that lasted until the arrival of colonial settlers, who named their new home Newtowne before deciding on Cambridge. Our city served as George Washington’s headquarters as he led an army fighting to end British rule.
Before the Civil War, industrial development commenced and later accelerated, as New England’s economy transformed from one based on agriculture. Waves of Irish, Italian, Lithuanian and Portuguese immigrants came here to work in factories and changed Cambridge’s ethnic makeup. African Americans would join them as they finished their great migration. These Cantabrigians made it all, from glass and machinery to ink and candy.
It was in this context that our neighborhoods took shape. Workers cottages were built in East Cambridge. Triple deckers in Wellington-Harrington. Apartment buildings in Neighborhood Nine. Builders built what they could, where they could – because people needed places to live. Nobody prevented our neighborhoods from adapting to the needs of the time.
To take one of many examples: In 1920, a five-story apartment building with about 50 units was constructed at 41 Bowdoin St. To its left was a 3,000-square-foot Colonial style house built in 1812 that sat on a large plot of land. To its right: a 3,700-square-foot Victorian style house built in 1890. Today, Elizabeth Warren and her husband live there.
A house once sat at 41 Bowdoin. The builder who bought the property and tore down the house recognized Cambridge needed more homes for the city’s workers. This happened repeatedly. Take a walk around Mid-Cambridge and you’ll see apartment buildings from the early 20th century everywhere. There was no zoning to stop builders from replacing single-family houses with apartment buildings. Nor were there historic or conservation districts.
Today, it’s much more difficult to meet the needs of the time.
It’s as true now as it was more than a century ago: We need to build housing for the folks who work here. People make different things in Cambridge today – life-saving vaccines instead of rubber hoses – but they still need a place to live. We need housing for lower-income residents who contribute to Cambridge’s diversity and character and do the essential work that makes our city run.
Our city’s Neighborhood Conservation District ordinance fails to take these needs into account. It doesn’t require the historical commission to analyze the impact of the districts on our housing crisis. It prioritizes aesthetics over affordability.
The NCD ordinance doesn’t recognize the essential role that change has played in Cambridge’s history. There’s an irony here. The ordinance’s goal is to interfere with change, but change is the very thing that created the built environment the ordinance seeks to preserve.
Certain buildings are absolutely worth preserving where appropriate. Striking architecture such as the Registry of Deeds on Cambridge Street is very much worthy of protection, as is the Cambridgeport Savings Bank Building in Central Square. But structures such as these aren’t what ultimately made our city special. Rather, it was the people who lived and worked in those structures, which allowed them to make Cambridge their home.
The best way to honor our history is to adapt to our needs, just as our forebears did.
Dan Eisner is a pro-housing advocate and has been a writer and editor of social studies textbooks for two decades.
Well written my good man. Classic Cantabrigian thinking.
Our forebears did indeed adapt did they? They needed more land and they took it. Who cares what …or who….was there before?
And indeed we have built willy nilly. To the results of traffic congestion, built over wet lands, zero flow rivers, and a multitude of other ills from “meh, this looks good let’s build here”
And so I applaud you for advocating the building of an office/apartment/starbucks mega rise on every corner.
Because having to walk more than 50 feet for your meeting while carrying your half caf double chocolate soy sadness is way worse than overloaded sanitation systems and more tree chopping.
{{slow clap}}
Mr. Eisner’s opinion piece advocating for the gutting of our Neighborhood Conservation Districts so that we might quixotically house every Cambridge worker, whether they wish to live here or not, reveals just how little the author understands about both our past and our present City. Along similar lines, the inclusion of 41 Bowdoin Street as a representative example of good density provides a great case study in all that is potentially wrong with the so-called Crowe petition supported by the author, as well as with the Affordable Housing Overlay he supported before it.
First, I feel compelled to correct a few factual errors. 41 Bowdoin Street, apparently chosen by the author for its attention-grabbing proximity to Senator Warren’s home, was built in 1927, not 1920. As a result, the Zoning Ordinance, first passed in 1924, was already in effect when the building was constructed. Zoning may have been more limited in its scope then, but 41 Bowdoin was very clearly built under the prescribed rules of the day. Also wrong: it contains 33 apartments, not “about 50 units.” Lastly, the building, built by noted architect and developer Hamilton Harlow, was most definitely not designed for lower-income residents as the author suggests.
Hamilton Harlow was a graduate of the Peabody Grammar School, a local boy who attended MIT, got married, served during World War I, and went on to a very successful career designing and developing numerous apartment buildings throughout the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Harvard University. These buildings were designed and marketed as luxury residences, with central heat, decorative fireplaces, oak paneling, elevators, and even Frigidaire appliances. They served a growing population of young urban professional singles and couples. At least 15 of these so-called “Harlow buildings” still exist in the neighborhood, all of which replaced large single-family homes on large parcels with much larger 4- and 5-story brick buildings. (An example of such a pre-existing single-family still stands next door, the Elizabeth Frost Tenant House at 35 Bowdoin Street, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.)
Mr. Eisner highlights 41 Bowdoin Street as a great example of additional density inserted into an existing neighborhood with no detrimental effects. And, in general, he is correct: 41 Bowdoin is a relatively pleasing building, designed to convey a sense of monied exclusivity to its well-to-do residents. The materials used, as with all of Harlow’s buildings, are high quality, and the design aesthetic, despite its great size, fits with the surrounding homes. Ignoring the fact that the building provides no open space, no room for tree canopy, no side setbacks, and looms over its immediate neighbors on both sides by several stories, I still see it as an otherwise appropriate, high-density addition to what was previously a very low-density neighborhood. Alewife and its developers could learn a lot from Mr. Harlow’s body of work.
And because of Bowdoin Court’s location in the Residence B zoning district, the building today could only be increased in size by a small amount (3900 square feet) under the AHO’s new rules. Of course, this would raise its Floor Area Ratio, a useful measure of the building’s overall size, from its current 1.71 FAR to the AHO-permitted maximum FAR of 2.0, a 17% increase. (For those unfamiliar with these dimensional requirements, an FAR of 2.0 is precisely 5 times denser than what the base zoning in the district permits: 0.40 for a lot of this size). But given the high cost of new construction in Cambridge, it seems unlikely that 41 Bowdoin Street would ever be redeveloped under the current AHO rules, since a 17% gain in additional floor area hardly justifies scrapping 100% of the existing, well-maintained building.
Sadly, the same can not be said for another Harlow building nearby. In 1922, five years prior to the construction of 41 Bowdoin Street, Harlow and his business partners constructed Peabody Court, a 66-unit apartment building on a large parcel of land three blocks away at 41 Linnaean Street, across from the current Graham & Parks School. Unlike Bowdoin Street, the Peabody Court development exists within a narrowly drawn Residential C-2 zone, surrounded on all sides by neighbors in the lower density Residential B zone. The denser C-2 designation means that the parcel could support a project with much more height, much more density, and much less open space. In fact, simple dimensional calculations show just how large such a replacement structure might be: up to 227,000 square feet, even when accounting for the 35’ required setback from abutting residential districts. That converts to an FAR of at least 4.76, or more than 13 times larger than that allowed for a similarly sized parcel in the Res B zoning district next door. The existing 5-story building could grow to 7 stories, and, because of its corner location, an expanded building footprint could cover almost the entire lot with only 7.5-10’ setbacks. And due to a loophole in the AHO language, those skinny 7.5’ wide “yards” would actually count as open space, in effect meaning that such a project might provide absolutely no real open space at all for the 280+ new housing units included in such a giant boxy structure.
When the Affordable Housing Overlay was first approved, we were repeatedly assured not to worry; that all historic review processes would continue as before; and that the AHO would not result in the wholesale destruction of historic structures or existing homes. And like the old house at 35 Bowdoin Street, Peabody Court is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, considered a classic example of the courtyard apartment block style popularized by Ralph Adams Cram.
Now we hear that the Crowe petition and its proposed amendments would, among other drastic changes, completely remove all Affordable Housing Overlay (AHO) projects from historical oversight. Given that a listing on the National Register conveys no actual real-world protection to historic structures, 35 Bowdoin Street, Peabody Court, and all other similar historic structures, in some cases already oversized for their surroundings, could potentially be sacrificed to make way for much, much larger buildings in their place.
In the end, Mr. Eisner and his ABC devotees may consider all change to be good, particularly when proposed by their out-of-town, corporate developer friends peddling millions of square feet of new tax-generating lab and office spaces. Personally, I’m not so sure I agree, particularly when the changes being discussed are to previously negotiated historical protections and come at the expense of our shared local history. At least to me, not all development is inherently good, not all solutions solve the problems we set out to tackle, and, sadly, some folks like Mr. Eisner hope you don’t notice when they quote simplistic but colorful historical details, while simultaneously trying to change the terms of the deal to which they previously committed.
these are excellent statements. Have we learned nothing about how unchecked development without a plan bares consequences? Since when does instant gratification have priority over looking at possibilities attached to those older properties which document how far Cambridge has come, what we have lost and how to balance the future. Alas, Mr Eisner is of the tear down the old and build the bright shiny new, he and his compatriots who have no respect for history. We haven’t even begun to creatively investigate housing strategies.
Ironically, at a meeting on the Crowe petition, a supporter called in from Provincetown, where people love the scale, history, quirkiness and where they have very strict preservation and zoning. Go figure. I also find it ironic that his wife, in full disclosure, works for the City of Cambridge in the Community Development Department (CDD).
Interesting that Dan Eisner used Avon Hill as a positive case in point for his thesis because Avon Hill is a neighborhood not only with an NCD, but also a good portion of it is protected on the National Register of Historic Places!
He and the “A Better Cambridge” folks continually make the FALSE claim that the goals of an NCD and affordable housing are mutually exclusive. They are not.
Today in Cambridge and in the country at large we need to balance and achieve all kinds of important goals simultaneously. The ABC advocates argument is more like the right wing extremist’s “Drill Baby Drill!” rhetoric on the topic of environmental and global warming goals versus the desire for more access to fossil fuel energy supplies.
Allowing for the destruction of historic properties and neighborhoods is like sacrificing our National and State Parks in favor of development.
Historic parts of cities throughout America were destroyed in the name of “progress” back in the middle of the 20th Century, and those forces were every bit as convinced of their crusade as Mr. Eisner and colleagues seem to be now. We don’t need to go back to those gross mistakes from that time.
The recent push for an NCD in East Cambridge is completely about preventing rampant, careless destruction of our old buildings by developers to produce so called luxury housing. The motivation for the NCD was born out of what was happening on Otis, Thorndike, Spring Street, for properties which sold for well over a million dollars. The NCD review period we’ve had here has in turn helped to prevent the worst destruction from happening. Cambridge CAN and MUST pursue multiple goals simultaneously – not one at the willful and arbitrary expense of all others