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

Page 23 text:

, fp Q.. Kr , , .1 - J. sb ,,. I 4, A Y ff 1 f ww - fx ,ut 'V ff ' . 5 Q wx 5, , B i , Y ,ff Ig ff . ju . ya' . ' , Q L ,Y I I' I .XX , ?t f ' , V A X ' QT I , g xx 5 B W ff 5 , pf Q N I ,l it IMI I I

Page 22 text:

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.

Page 24 text:

To date, people comment not on the University's educational concerns, or its minority, elderly, and low income students, but still talk of the skimming of the Harbor Campus' buliding contracts. The shortcuts are now, ten years later, most apparent. Inside the University appears twice its age, the sorriest of all UMassfBoston stories. Bricks are loose and falling, tiles on every walkway are cracked and shattered, circulation is poor, keeping air unseasonably hot or cold, ceiling panels sag, chunks of carpet are missing But I hereby flush the remains of this scandal, leaving such University Heritage up in the air - as what is passed. orchester, Massachusetts. A poor old section of Greater Boston. In the early seventies, the time of UMassfBoston's siege of Columbia Point, sixteen per cent of Dorchester's families were receiving some form of public assistance, the area had less than one-third as many college students as the rest of the city. Not exactly a bastion of change and academic concerns, Dorchester was outraged at the prospect of UMassfBoston. Horror shows of urban renewal and ousted elderly were projected to citizens. Local opposition coalitions and petitions circulated the area, bad-mouthing the University. Dorchesterians did not want an influx of those snotty Cambridge types, the ones they'd been subjected to every time they left their parish. At first, UMassfBoston reportedly bought off town leaders. Later, concessions were sold: use of swimming pool, the opportunity to audit classes free of charge, the use of vacant rooms for community functions. In these, at least, UMassfBoston 20 would become an asset to the community. But what Dorchester's leaders did not vocalize, if realized, was that they were about to have a University not merely in their midst, but in their income bracket as well. UMassfBoston was designed for the education of people like Dorchester. Dorchesterians feared that UMassfBostonians would run them out of town and erect high priced high-rises in place of the long standing triple Mass! Boston was the generic label for the problems at hand. decker homes where they lived - and rented. Such renovation would have probably turned Dorchester into an AllstonfBrighton type student ghetto. But this never happened. I asked a landlord of several triples in the Columbia road area closest to Columbia Point to comment. He acknowledged, remaining anonymous, that landlords on the whole wouldn't mind a little renovations. I rent to anyone, he said. . .. some around here will only rent if there's government comp. lSection 8 subsidyj They get more for their place that way The property still brings in money. When asked if UMassfBoston students were a problem, he remarked, Look around. Do you see many students? Any renovation? Across Dorchester Avenue, a Hispanic with a waxed mustache and shaven head appeared to be making arrangements with two lads in shorts, turf shoes, athletic socks stretched over their calves. All three could have been UMassfBoston students, but most likely were not. The University population remains outside of Dorchester outside of University hours. However, the original reports of UMassfBoston's siege of Dorchester coupled with the legislatively scandalous building contracts triggered media coverage as if the poor had been slaughtered by the rich's cadillac. In all such print, the name UMassfBoston was the culprit, the generic label for the problems at hand. In 1984 the former Dorchester rage seems a questionable whiplash case - though definitely an indication, if misdirected, of the stench surrounding the entire development of Columbia Point. The long ranging effects of all such issues, however, centered on the University, establishing in its very foundation a severe psychological complex it has yet to outgrow. oston. A city with its own complex. San Francisco trolley cars, London double-decker buses, and an unreliable subway system make it all but impossible for a scheduled arrival to the Harbor Campus. A city where people from everywhere attend dozens of schools of higher education and leave for the summer. MIT, BC, BU. UMB. The sole public university of higher education struggles to gain recognition in this town of letters. Dr. Sheldon Kalick, UMass!Boston Psychology Department, commented on the school's self. It's like Cooley's 'Looking Glass Self ' Kalick said.