University of Massachusetts Boston - Beacon Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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arrest. A park Square Campus leased from Boston Gas, an armory, Avis Rent-a-Car. Sherry Thomas, UMassfBoston '72, currently Director of University information Services, remembers Wordsworth, Hardy, Yeats, and Frost a la Nelson in the Hale Lounge on Thursday afternoons, with Duncan presenting songs and roses for all on the first sunny day of spring. Students and faculty formed a community, UMassfBoston downtown, the brain of the streets. Everything seemed to be coming up roses. lt was decided the University would be granted its own facilities. ln 1966 Trustees and legislators perused an initial list fifty locations long, including the Watertown Arsenal, NASA site in Cambridge, and Copley Square. The University's Park Square people believed Copley Square, just blocks away and still in Boston, the best possible site for the best education in this best of all possible worlds. We would have even helped them carry boxes and desks, commented one former student. But Student!Faculty resources were not called upon by the school's power source. To the Banker and Business minded Trustees, there was no other site but the cheap and barren Columbia Point, an area of former City Dump, P.O.W. Camp, and Calf Pasture. And so public higher education was picked up and moved down the expressway, around the corner, and smack dab in the middle of a narrow peninsula in Dorchester. After all, one school official was quoted on the Waste Land locale, We'd only be displacing rats. Rats indeed. The Copley Square site would have placed the University in the center of the 18 Hub, Boston shining, glinting off its S350 million monument to Public Higher Education. Columbia Point, however, did not smell so rosy. ln fact, it stunk like rotten eggs, one trustee noted. And it stunk of more than just a dump site's methane gas. A 1973 DorchesterfColumbia Point Task Force Report tells why Columbia Point in the end: lt was not tax producing land, irty-white seagulls once loomed brilliant on the Bay-blue horizon. nor were tax producing uses seeking to locate there Land aquisition costs were minimal Lastly, what better place could be found for unruly and possibly fractious students than on a peninsula jutting into the harbor with only one access road and 6,000 housing projects residents for their only neighbors. The decision to stick UMassfBoston on Columbia Point reflects Hancock Life's interests as well, Hancock owning the Point and wanting its own offices on the Square. UMassfBoston didn't have a chance downtown. Instead, the fledgling University was positioned upon the Point. A place where thousands of dirty-white seagulls once loomed brilliant on the Bay-blue horizon, swooping to pick at Boston's garbage. And though seagull's were largely absent, the droppings began to surface with UMassfBoston's construction in 1970. Deep piles were driven far into the seaside marsh filled with twenty year's trash, piles to support the red-brick monstrosity to be erected there. Above, Logan-bound air traffic's screams were shut out with extra sound proofing. Below, gas pumps pumped the methane from this asshole of the city. lt would not have made a pretty picture for any school's beginnings, and it did not develop as such for the University. Of S350 million allotted for eleven buildings, only six were constructed for S130 million. UMassfBoston's legislative foundation was shaky, to say the least. Eventually, the Columbia Point University building project would become known for its bribery and sloppy building practices, a couple local politicians would be sacrificed down the tubes. And of course, the original neighbor of UMass!Boston's Harbor Campus, the Boston Globe, would follow only the problematical and soggy legislative first steps, zeroing in on the muck from across Morrissey Boulevard. The move to Columbia Point was definitely a step that ' changed and shaped the University's future. And the problems began almost immediately. Ironically, the first disaster was a break in the main sewage line. And later that year, a performance of The Construction Workers - a play by an original faculty member that students are still required to read - would provide further dramatic irony in the opening celebrations of the new 020 Theatre. So long Park Square, hello Dorchester Bay.