Honoring Harriet Jacobs – with a luxury hotel?

In the mid-19th century, two Americans shaped the nation’s conscience on slavery from vastly different vantage points. Justice Joseph Story, a towering figure of U.S. constitutional law and a Supreme Court Justice and a Harvard Law professor, denounced slavery as “inhuman” and “repugnant to justice” – yet wrote the Amistad (1841) opinion and that of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the latter affirming the federal government’s authority to enforce the return of fugitive slaves. For him the U.S. Constitution needed to be prioritized over personal and even deeply moral views. Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, was 28 and 29 at the time of these decisions and had hidden for nearly seven years in a 3-foot tall attic crawlspace of her grandmother’s house after escaping bondage, likely learning of that very decision while in hiding. She fled north, still enslaved, three months later. She describes her life in a riveting memoir, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” a key abolitionist text.

Their lives converged, posthumously, on a quiet side street in Harvard Square.

Story Street, named in honor of the justice, is also home to the elegant Regency-style building where Jacobs lived later in life and ran a lodging house and local intellectual gathering place. Today, that house – and the legacies it embodies – are under threat.

A proposal at 17 Story St. for an 8.5-story hotel/residence/luxury boarding house (a multiuse project) that will have a few inclusionary (“affordable”) units would alter this historically and culturally rich site permanently, compromising not just the building’s historic setting but an opportunity to reckon meaningfully with two opposing strands of American history: law and resistance.

The proposed development seeks to move the Jacobs House forward to the edge of Mount Auburn Street and erect a towering structure next to it, casting shadows – literal and symbolic – on one of the most significant Black heritage sites in Cambridge and the nation. While the developer claims the house will be restored and honored, the truth is far more complicated. The project would sever the structure from its historical location and overwhelm it with a building out of scale, out of character and out of touch with the principles of ethics, justice and preservation.

This is not preservation. It is tokenism.

The Harriet Jacob House plan does an injustice to the memory of this great American heroine and the rest of the residential neighborhood nearby. The project seeks to take advantage of the City Council’s Feb. 10 upzoning to build.

The councillor who led the citywide luxury upzoning ordinance posted an essay (“It’s too expensive to keep things the same,” Aug. 11) with a large image of this proposal. He describes our area as having “the highest rents in the nation – prices that are the direct outcome of decades of policy choices.” That necessitates, in his view, more projects such as this one. This councillor maintains that the 17 Story St. development is among those that will bring housing prices down, but these hotel rooms and the expensive (short term? transitory?) residences that appear to be part of this project could be readily incorporated into hotel-lodging room schema and do the opposite. The costs would be very high. According to Momondo, the nearby Charles Hotel has rooms “ranging from $303 to $1,739 per night, with an average around $600.” Few Cambridge or other residents can afford these prices.

Story Street sits in the Harvard Square Conservation District, where design goals and guidelines were revised in 2017-2019. I know the guidelines well because I submitted the original petition to rewrite these guidelines in 2017 while working to preserve the Abbot Building (home then to the Curious George children’s bookstore). In the district report, we read that the Harriet Jacobs House property is very much “at risk.” The goals and guidelines of the district are specific and strict, and this proposal does not conform with many of them.

The Cambridge Historical Commission addressed the project at a meeting Aug. 14 as part of its Harvard Square Conservation District review procedures, and in light of a Landmark petition submitted by 35 neighbors and other residents seeking long-term protection for the Harriet Jacobs house. Its proposed repositioning will cost $7 million or more. This appears to be part of the reason so many extra floors and units have been added – because they will help recoup the cost of such a move.

Honoring Jacobs, a woman who endured years in an attic before fleeing and securing her freedom, deserves more than a commemorative plaque or a hotel meeting room in her honor for the magnitude of her sacrifice – and that of others. And to do so under the auspices of profit-driven luxury development feels especially perverse, particularly on a street that also commemorates a jurist who, despite personal moral opposition to slavery, felt compelled to entrench it in federal law. In 1866, the year Story Street was delineated and named, is also the year the United States officially recognized the end of the Civil War and the freeing of all enslaved people.

We can – and must – do better than what is planned for 17 Story St.

The proposal is at odds with this conservation district’s mandate to protect the area’s distinctive architectural and cultural heritage. The proposed Harriet Jacobs design ignores the small-scale and historic character of the adjacent Hilliard Street residential streets and block. The proposal introduces a hulking, mostly white façade that lacks visual nuance and overwhelms the historic site. It eliminates opportunities for a publicly accessible garden that could serve as a contemplative tribute to Jacobs. And it threatens to establish a precedent for upzoning that prioritizes density and profit over history, human scale and livability. The vague proposed hybrid-use model suggest a workaround of zoning rules, not a thoughtful plan for housing or hospitality.

This new structure is not designed to harmonize with its surroundings or even to add very much needed lower cost housing. It is a speculative land play, trying to squeeze maximum value out of a fragile site that should instead be treated with reverence.

This is not just a neighborhood or political dispute – it is a civic and moral issue. Harvard’s and Cambridge’s names and legacies are intertwined with Joseph Story, as well as the institution of slavery and the creation and ongoing use of Harvard Square. Jacobs, while not affiliated with this university, represents the voices it long excluded. To allow her home to be displaced and dwarfed in service of a luxury project is to repeat the very injustice she spent her life resisting.

There is a better alternative. Keep the Jacobs House where it is. Create a commemorative garden on the area that is now paved over just in front of her entry. Reduce the scale of any new building. Demand architectural design that respects rather than dominates. This is not about stopping growth – it’s about guiding it with conscience.

In the end, we must ask: Would Harriet Jacobs recognize herself in this project? Would Story believe this is how a just society reconciles its past?

Let Harvard Square and Cambridge be a place that remembers, not just redevelops.

Let them be places where history is honored, not bulldozed.

Let them be places where our built environment reflects our highest values – not our lowest ambitions.

At the Aug. 14 meeting of the Cambridge Historical Commission, members voted unanimously to move forward with a landmark study to determine if the Jacobs house should be preferentially preserved. While planning for a new structure can proceed as planned, if the commission votes in a subsequent meeting to landmark the structure, it will have the authority to address design recommendations with respect to height, shape, setbacks and other matters, factors that had been removed from its jurisdiction by council decisions last term. Harvard professor Orlando Patterson spoke at the meeting for the landmark petition, for which he was a signatory. As another speaker noted at this important meeting: With so much happening nationally to silence or hide Black voices and historic figures, let’s not be party to that also here in Cambridge. Preservation matters.

The writer is a Harvard university professor, Harvard Square Neighborhood Association president and one of the Landmark Petition Signatories.

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