By Jeff Swoboda
From protests over Northeastern’s purchase of St. Ann Parish to arguments about the placement of residence halls, members of the Fenway community have voiced their concerns with Northeastern’s continuing expansion. Now, one Gainsborough Street resident has chronicled the drama between Northeastern and the community in a 200-page book.
The book, “Town-Gown History in the East Fens: The Residents’ View of Relations with Northeastern University,” depicts the conflict between the administration’s quest to become a top university and Fenway residents’ fight for a little peace and quiet.
The author, Marc Laderman, is a board member and former president of the Fenway Community Development Committee, a community action group that works to uphold residential life in the Fenway area. As a gift to Laderman, the Fenway CDC published 200 copies of the book. He said the goal of the book is to clarify the concerns of the community.
“The purpose of the book is to be able to give the long explanation of why people in the community are worried,” Laderman said. “What I hope is that the book will show there are substantive issues, and resolving the substantive issues has been much more difficult.”
Those issues include Northeastern’s struggle for land and students’ noisier weekend habits, he said.
Northeastern has steadily grown from its first land purchase in 1929, but from 1959 to 1975, the university experienced a jump in enrollment, from 20,000 to over 40,000 students. The number of resident students grew from 100 to 3,000 and 12 new buildings expanded the Huntington Avenue campus to 50 acres.
Laderman said this expansion led Northeastern students to branch out into the surrounding community, claiming it as their own.
“Students think the Fenway is their campus, or worse, they view it as a slum and treat it accordingly …The noise is in the form of stereos blasting, bottles being hurled through the air and a variety of mating calls reverberating off the brick walls of buildings in the Saint Stephens Street area,” Laderman wrote.
Some students, including freshman chemistry major Sam Jackson, who lives in White Hall near the Fens, said they feel the administration should do more to crack down on partiers.
“Northeastern should take action. If NU is pushing into these residential areas, there should be stricter regulations for noise pollutions … It might begin to attract the wrong type of students,” he said.
However, Kyle Oberkoetter, a freshman computer science major also living in White Hall, said he isn’t worried about the negative press.
“I don’t think it affects [the students’ image] all that much outside the Boston area,” Oberkoetter said.
In 2005, Northeastern administration presented an Institutional Master Plan (IMP) to the community. The IMP contained plans to acquire more property, specifically St. Ann University Parish. Residents were outraged at plans to turn the church property into more housing, and only once in the IMP presentation were “community interests” mentioned, Laderman wrote.
At a recent meeting of the Community Task Force, City Councilor Michael Ross spoke disparagingly of Northeastern’s choice to purchase St. Ann.
“How can you purchase property like this when you’re supposedly in the middle of a Master Planning process? There was a viable community proposal on the table. How can you trust an institution when they’re busy buying up your neighborhood? We worked hard to build up some trust, and now NU has again destroyed that trust,” Ross said at the meeting.
Laderman gave a copy of the pre-release to Director of Government Relations and Community Affairs Jeff Doggett, and said he had no intention of springing it on the university.
“I certainly did not try to surprise the administration with this book. I gave them an early draft … they had it a week ahead of everybody else,” Laderman said.
He said he believes the administration will probably try to downplay the book.
“I believe the standard reaction of the [administration] is … the ‘if we don’t respond to it, it will get less attention’ approach. I’ve never seen NU acknowledge a challenge,” he said.
Doggett said he had read the book, but saw it more as an opinion piece rather than a statement of fact.
“[The book is an] opinion piece written by one individual … any time somebody writes a piece, especially an opinion piece, it is their own ideas, their own point of view,” Doggett said.
Doggett said he believes the book’s publication is intentionally timed to coincide with the release of Northeastern’s Master Plan, but does not believe it will have a negative effect on the university’s image.
