Block of Harvard Square road will go traffic-free, but plan to repurpose T tunnel meets resistance

One Harvard Square project got a win Monday in Cambridge, while another faced a setback.

In the spring, the Blue Bottle Coffee shop and two restaurants on Mount Auburn Street will have back patios to lounge in on a stretch of road closed permanently to pass-through car traffic, officials said. But a project to reuse an abandoned MBTA tunnel faces resistance in a bid to explore its reuse as an entertainment venue.

A block of Lower Bow Street, between Dewolfe and Plympton streets, was closed for at least two years of construction “without causing significant impacts on the safety or functionality of the surrounding traffic patterns,” transportation commissioner Brooke McKenna said in a memo to city councillors. This shows it to be “an excellent opportunity for pedestrianization.”

That will benefit the Daedalus and Sea Hag restaurants and, proponents say, give Harvard Square an additional stretch of European-feeling luxury.

There was one disagreement between staff and councillor Patty Nolan, who urged the plan in June with a reminder that pedestrianization of parts of the square has been discussed back to 2020: Nolan wants the city to try blocking the street with automated bollards that delivery drivers can lower by punching in a code on a keypad.

Deputy city manager Kathy Watkins thinks they will be too “fussy,” costing more to install and maintain than manual bollards that are taken away and put back by hand as needed.

“Cities all across Europe have been using these in snow, in rain,” Nolan said. “You don’t have to pay people to go back and forth like on Palmer street, where you have to have someone every single day, twice a day, go out” to move bollards. (Watkins also noted that the city’s removable bollards “tend to get removed and not put back.”)

Subway tunnel entertainment venue

While Nolan asked staff for at least an assurance that they were researching the automated bollards, mayor E. Denise Simmons rejected Monday that city staff would shut down a Harvard Square Business Association dream for reuse of an old subway tunnel, unseen by passengers for 40 years, that lurks beneath the pavement from Mount Auburn and Eliot streets to the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The mayor planned to send the report back to city manager Yi-An Huang.

“I’m disappointed that the office seems very unwilling to take even this modest first step to invest in and explore the future of one of our most important commercial districts,” Simmons said. “The Harvard Square Business Association has brought us a creative proposal that deserves more than cautious hesitation at a time when our commercial districts face unprecedented challenges.”

Before the mayor could take that formal step, councillor Burhan Azeem used his “charter right” to bump discussion by one regular meeting – to Sept. 29, because the council is off for next week’s Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah. He sought a “productive” discussion and Monday’s dialogue was “becoming hostile,” Azeem said.

Like the pedestrianization concept, public discussion of the tunnel dates back to 2020. But it’s been eyed by the association for longer, and members even paid for 3D imaging of the space to help craft designs – part of some $50,000 to $60,000 in private money already put toward the idea. The next step was asking the city for $72,000 toward crafting a request for proposals and seeing what firms might want in on development of the idea.

Huang demurred in a memo, though, as “the full cost of the feasibility study that the RFP would seek to fund could require an investment in the range of $500,000 to $1 million, and a viable funding source for this next phase has yet to be identified.”

There were objections from councillors to the call for proposals being shut down – vice mayor Marc McGovern noted that the $72,000 requested was already allocated for study in Harvard Square – and from John DiGiovanni, a developer and former president of the HSBA.

“The RFP process itself will likely take over a year, giving the city and others time to identify additional funding sources,” DiGiovanni said. Meanwhile, “neighboring cities are developing their mixed-use districts … Entertainment is the anchor, and we’re late.”

That the memo arrived Monday was a surprise to Simmons, who had a new order in place calling for Huang to report back Sept. 29 – which is now the date the issue will return anyway.

Sharing tourism funds

A final issue affecting the Harvard Square Business Association – and groups like it in Central Square, East Cambridge and Kendall Square – was picked up Monday long enough to be sent to committee.

An order by the mayor presented Sept. 8 asked the city to fund those groups directly instead of the Cambridge Office for Tourism, which had a new source of money since it was created 30 years ago: a Tourist Destination Marketing District fund that delivered it more than $1.5 million annually.

“With TDMD monies flowing into the Cambridge Office for Tourism, the time has come for the city to judiciously allocate taxpayer dollars among the organizations who are doing the good work of welcoming visitors and neighbors into our business districts while stewarding public space in organizing events that bring our community together,” said Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, in public comment Monday.

The call for a deeper committee discussion came from councillor Paul Toner, who said he wanted “to better understand what the tourist bureau does, and also what are the needs of the different associations,” and that a delay would do no harm: “The check for the year was already written and cashed,” Toner noted.

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