Grand Design: The New Master Plan
By Deborah Klenotic
"If I had one, my next vote on the Davenport project would be against
it," Tony Crayton jokes. "All this construction! The noise! I
can't take it!" A laugh bursts from him.
In his voice-and in the booming of the pile driver behind his apartment
building on Columbus Avenue-is the sound of success. Construction has roared
to life on what were once two empty lots and will soon be Davenport Commons,
a mix of graduate student apartments and community housing. Nearby, a parking
garage rises across from the Renaissance Park office building, which Northeastern
purchased in 1997. These two construction projects are the most recent
steps in N.U.'s move into Roxbury, following the directives of the university's
new master plan, the wellspring for its advance into the twenty-first century.
To Crayton, a former Boston city councilor who serves as finance chair
of the Parcel Eighteen-Plus Task Force, a community group formed in the
1980s, success means not simply that development has come to Roxbury, but
that the neighborhood has had some control over it and secured specific
benefits.
N.U. has done right by Roxbury, says Crayton. When buying Renaissance
Park after bankers foreclosed on the former Registry of Motor Vehicles
building in 1996, he says that "N.U. was perfectly happy to sit down
with us and work out every detail. We had community meetings and a process
in which the whole community had input." As a result, a preexisting
$10.5 million package of community benefits remained intact with the sale-something
that was not a given, notes Crayton. In Davenport Commons, N.U. will contribute
at least $30,000 toward each of seventy-five condominiums slated to be
sold to families with low and moderate incomes. (For a description of Davenport,
see the related article on page twenty-three.)
Crayton adds, "I've gone over the university's master plan several
times, and it shows they're holding to their commitment to not buy anymore
on the eastern side." All this makes having hard hats as next-door
neighbors for a couple years a bit more bearable. "N.U. is part of
this community," he says confidently.
Clearly, "urban" is not least for being last in President
Richard Freeland's oft-quoted mission statement that "Northeastern
will achieve excellence as a national research university that is student-centered,
practice-oriented, and urban."
To see how quickly n.u. is moving on its intensified urban identity
and other fronts, one need only lift the laminate cover of the newest physical
master plan and turn the glossy, oversized pages. It's a hefty collection
of colorful drawings, part current map of the campus, part schematic of
what the campus will look like in ten years, and part dreamscape. Two thicker
documents, the 1998 internal Master Plan Working Draft and the plan that
N.U. submitted to the Boston Redevelopment Authority in 1999, contain the
details of N.U.'s plans for growth. With this pile of paper, planners have
begun the job of putting Freeland's words into action.
Although the master plan is a work in progress, we nevertheless can
learn much about the university from what administrators envision for the
physical campus in the future. So let's open the book and embark on a little
time travel to the Northeastern of 2010.
Our first stop, naturally, will be the new visitors' center, located
in the new Behrakis Health Sciences Center on west campus. Guessing that
the new parking garage behind the health sciences building is likely full,
we pull into a second, larger new garage located on Columbus Avenue at
the Ruggles T stop. It's bustling. Students lift soccer balls and cleats
out of the trunks of their cars and head for the mosaic of new university
sports and recreation fields next door, bordering Columbus Avenue. A Boston
police officer pulls into one of the eighty parking spaces the university
provides free to the city force. People come and go from the garage to
the two buildings across the street. The newer facility is a hotel, or
a health sciences research facility, or a biotech incubator, or something
else gleaming with modernity, built per contractual agreement that a second
building go up on Parcel Eighteen (a 5.1-acre site where Columbus Avenue
meets Tremont Street at the Ruggles T stop) by 2006.
The other building is Renaissance Park. On its ground floor, the Whittier
Street Health Center is twelve years into its thirty-year rent-free lease,
and an adjacent pharmacy pays a reduced rent, thanks to Tony Crayton's
insistence back in 1997 that these community benefits remain in the deed
when N.U. submitted a letter of intent to buy the foreclosed building.
(N.U. also agreed to provide $1.5 million in Renaissance scholarships for
older Roxbury residents who wish to return to school.) Other Renaissance
Park tenants, such as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard
Pilgrim Health Care, rent the remaining eight floors at market rates.
We pause to watch the soccer and softball games and enjoy the sunshine,
as do some grad students and other residents of Davenport Commons who've
crossed the street to sit on the grass and bleachers near the "Northeastern
University" sign.
Then we walk through the Ruggles T station. Descending the steps to
Forsyth Street, we enter the west campus and immediately see evidence of
the "student-centered" part of N.U.'s mission statement: hundreds
of students walk about or hang out among curved brick buildings counterpoised
with well-placed glass and leafy verdure. A broad tower rises-high enough
to be uplifting but not so high as to be aloof-and billows out gently toward
the corner of Parker Street and Huntington Avenue. At all levels, from
ground to roof, students can be seen behind glass walls, working at lab
tables or sitting in classrooms or in living rooms.
Half of all undergraduates live on campus now, and close to 1,700 students
make the warmly modern West Village complex their home: 275 in the newest
residence hall, which is a seven-story building that stretches down Ruggles
Street; 1,050 in three sinuous buildings designed by William Rawn Associates;
and 340 in Willis Hall, now thirty years old.
As we cross Centennial Common and approach the Behrakis Center, its
expansive, curved glass front leads our eye down the seventy-foot-wide,
sapling-lined mall that it faces across from the John D. O'Bryant African-American
Institute. Next to the institute is a huge hole, soon to be a six-story
academic building. Our gaze passes between the opaque glass ends of West
Village Residence Halls B and C and through the ample portal cut out of
Residence Hall A, where an edge of the Museum of Fine Arts can be seen.
While we have a pleasant "arrival experience" (as the planners
call it) at the visitors' center, students enrolled in the Bouvé
College of Health Sciences-formed by a merger of the College of Nursing
and the Bouvé College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences back in 1999-attend
classes on the six floors above. Computer labs, instructional labs, multimedia
classrooms, offices, and perhaps a clinic fill the building, which was
funded by a $6 million gift from trustee and alum George Behrakis, $5 million
in government money, and $19 million in bonds. Tucked between it and the
new Ruggles Street dorm is a six-story parking garage that also houses
the university's physical plant. The three buildings were designed as one
unit by Kyo Sung Woo Architects and Rothman Partners.
Meandering through the tower's portal while students cross over us on
a glass-encased bridge, we stop for a moment at the fountain. It's on the
site of what in the 1700s was the Roxbury town landing, according to a
Boston Historical Society plaque.
Between the fountain and Huntington Avenue is a lot of open space: Hillel
House and 71 Field Street are gone, with Hillel relocated to a building
on St. Stephen Street and the physical plant to the Behrakis Center. The
Parker Building and 26 Tavern Road await demolition. Field and Tavern Streets
are gone, overlaid by west campus.
Northeastern has a savvy new entrance from Huntington Avenue in the
works here, one that makes a focal point of West Village Residence Hall
A's captivating tower. Perhaps LeBeau Park (where Parker Street meets Huntington)
will be expanded. Next to Willis Hall, the first few floors of a ten-story
building layer upward. This will be another residence hall or possibly
an academic building. Another option is an arts building, which would be
fitting, given Huntington's designation as "Avenue of the Arts."
The boulevard itself is all new: T stations, sidewalks, and streetlights
have been replaced, and around the T tracks are grass and rows of columnar
trees. Specifically wanting this greenery, Northeastern helps pay for its
maintenance. The rest of the $15 million worth of élan was funded
by the city. We admire it over the rim of a coffee cup as we sit at a festively
awninged window in White Hall's ground-floor eatery.
The rest of our stroll reveals new shapes and faces on buildings throughout
the dense older section of campus. The research cynosure for the health
sciences disciplines is the reorganized and upgraded Mugar and Robinson
Buildings, which the planners refer to as the "backfill" left
by the new Behrakis Center classrooms. Three million dollars in renovations
have just begun in Cullinane Hall, ultimately to result in two computer
teaching labs, each with more than forty computers and one student per
machine; a larger lab with eighty computer stations; and an administrative
suite that groups the offices of the deans and advisers to provide students
with "one-stop shopping," as it's called in the master plan.
A clamor of hammering and drilling can be heard from Dockser Hall, where
offices and academic spaces are being built. The spruced-up Cabot gym now
boasts a glass-sided viewing area for recruiting and receptions.
Returning to the Columbus Avenue playing fields, we catch some lacrosse
action and then head down the street to the Claremont Café or one
of the other South End restaurants that have become hangouts for students
and N.U. staff. back in the present day, vice president of business Jack
Martin explains the nature of the planning process. "A master plan
is evolutionary," he says. "One day you finish your master plan,
and the next day you start changing your master plan. Circumstances are
always changing. Fund-raising, for example. Also our buying the former
RMV building [now Renaissance Park]-that was a case of reacting to a circumstance
somewhat unforeseen.
"Here's another example: After our 1987 master plan, there was
a serious economic decline. In 19891991, banks were failing. In 1987,
we couldn't have known that. What we did know was this: there was a declining
rate of eighteen-year-olds in Massachusetts. To be competitive, we had
to 'rightsize': we became smaller and better. Now what are we responding
to? More and more college students want to live on campus. The result is
our new west campus dorms. And more students want fitness centers; our
recreation center had to be built. And health sciences is big now; we'll
soon have a new health sciences center. So you can see, the master plan
evolves in reaction to the environment."
The master plan may change yet again this spring, when the Boston Redevelopment
Authority, which must approve the plan, is expected to vote on it. Regardless,
"the only thing that's certain about university campuses is that they're
constantly, incrementally changing," says Willliam Rawn, whose Boston-based
firm designed both the master plan and the striking West Village Residence
Hall complex. "Our role as master planners is to create a framework
to last over time, so that different trustees, presidents, and architects
can all work from it."
That framework for the future consists of two areas on campus the master
plan recommends for development: west campus and Parcel Eighteen. N.U.
already owns the land at both. "We don't say what specific use the
building will have or even what design," explains Doug Johnston, a
senior architect at Rawn Associates. "We simply project where buildings
can go and the relative space they can occupy."
Rawn architects have also identified two areas they recommend for recreation
or open space: the university-owned parking lot on Columbus Avenue between
the Ruggles stop and the existing N.U. parking garage, and the air rights-which
Northeastern doesn't now own-over the T tracks from the Massachusetts Avenue
station to the Ruggles stop. They've also recommended street-front improvements
on Huntington and Columbus Avenues.
"Students interested in a city university would be hard-pressed
to find a better one than N.U.," Freeland says. "After Harvard,
we have the most attractive setting of any urban school in Boston."
This appreciation for the campus's unique location is voiced by everyone
involved in the planning process, but perhaps no one more than Rawn: "N.U.
has the best location of any school in Boston. If you think of where you
can go to school and be near the Fenway, walk to Back Bay, and take a short
T ride into downtown, you realize this is an extraordinary site. And N.U.
is much more engaged in the city than, say, Tufts or BU. It makes Northeastern
an extremely desirable place to go to school."
The university's engagement with the city is reflected in "many,
many parts of the master plan," says Freeland. "We are totally
the opposite of Harvard. We celebrate our open edges-so nobody can miss
the point that we are open to the city."
This interconnection of campus and city is echoed even in the configuration
of university buildings. Freeland points out that "the master plan
intentionally doesn't segregate areas of campus. We take a much more urbanistic
view-the classroom, residential hall, office, and research building are
all integrated."
Similarly, he links the university's academic goals to the rest of its
mission statement. "Getting the number of beds up is critical to our
academic aspirations," says the president. "The single most important
element of the master plan is the addition to student housing and the continued
transformation of N.U. into a residential campus." Attracting well-prepared
students in future years-and then keeping them here, which has long been
a problem-is of great importance for Northeastern, an institution that
depends primarily on tuition for its operating budget. And, in fact, the
primary use of the master plan framework thus far has been to develop student
housing. Freeland would like to see seventy-five percent of undergrads
living on campus in the future.
Next in priority are the university's teaching and research facilities.
"My fundamental academic goal," Freeland continues, "is
to provide first-class space for instruction and research for all the programs
we offer. Engineering and business now have excellent facilities. Law has
its own building, which is a pretty good building, but down the road it'll
need attention.
"The biggest gap in that goal has been the health sciences. The
facilities were a chronic source of awkwardness in accreditation visits.
Our decision to combine the colleges of pharmacy and nursing and trustee
Behrakis's donation were about as perfect a coming-together of donor and
need as you're ever going to get."
Right behind health sciences he prioritizes the College of Criminal
Justice and the College of Computer Science. "Also, co-op continues
to be our flagship, and I'd like to create a facility that reflects our
commitment to working with the business community. We're now developing
a concept for an employer center for meetings, seminars, and colloquia,
possibly for Stearns Hall."
In sum, the master plan is far more than a building plan; it is a blueprint
for achieving all of Northeastern's aspirations. "A university is
a system in which all elements need to move forward together," Freeland
says. "We can both raise our sights academically in national terms
and strengthen our ties to our local community." gathering information
on the university's research needs was part of a long, involved planning
process. A working committee appointed by President Freeland and chaired
by Martin met more than a hundred times in 1998 and 1999, Martin says.
The working committee consulted with a faculty advisory committee, cochaired
by George Thrush, associate professor of art and architecture, and Allen
Soyster, dean of the College of Engineering, and heard from various experts
on and off campus. "I think the master plan is very, very good,"
comments Thrush. "The planning process is a complicated process, involving
academic direction, marketing, fund-raising, what students want, and so
on."
To guide future decisions on what to put in the planned new buildings,
Thrush and Soyster provided the president with ratings and questions to
consider. "Basically, the physical planning was being done by Bill
Rawn," Thrush says. "Therefore we viewed the buildings in the
plan he came up with as containers and gave President Freeland an outline
and spreadsheet to use to rationalize the decision-making process when
the time comes to fill those buildings."
If the master plan is vague in places about the next ten years' developments,
it's even sketchier about building beyond then, but it does list a few
possibilities: The former South End Auto Supply Company warehouse, a large
Columbus Avenue building now owned by Northeastern, may be extensively
rehabbed or replaced with a new academic or administrative building. The
university may buy condominiums in the immediate campus neighborhood and
use them as faculty housing. A squash and fitness facility could be added
to the front of Matthews Arena. The African-American Institute could be
relocated to a better site. An art gallery might go up. The aging United
Realty Complex (Holmes, Lake, Meserve, and Nightingale Halls) might be
razed to allow a new building for the College of Arts and Sciences. If
the air rights over the Amtrak/Orange Line tracks are acquired, a park
could cover that depression and join the two sides of campus. A bell tower
may be built to serve as a campus and city landmark.
Ironically, the possibility of a bell tower echoes Northeastern's first
master plan, designed in 1934 by famed architect Herman Voss, of the Boston
architectural firm Coolidge Shepley Bulfinch and Abbot. Voss's drawings
show a monumental tower to be erected in the middle of the main quadrangle,
facing Huntington Avenue. The idea of that tower was abandoned a decade
later and the master plan scaled back, because of cost and the utilitarian
architectural preferences of the day. Today's master plan recaptures Voss's
energy and, bell tower or no, announces to the world, "You have arrived
at Northeastern-and Northeastern has arrived."
Deborah Klenotic, a freelance writer in the Amherst, Massachusetts,
area, wrote on the West Village Residence Hall in the September 1999 issue.
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