Word: craned
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...same time Crane began to call the key business friendships needed to exercise the necessary influence that his title of mayor could not provide. Frank Townsend, Chamber of Commerce president in the fifties--a man about whom Dyer says, "When I was selling Chamber of Commerce memberships to the city I was really selling Townsend,"--full into the Crane fold. He and the rest of the Harvard Square businessmen--at that time native Cambrigians, residences in Cambridge being perhaps the most important prerequisite to community power--played ball with Crane. And through Atkinson, Crane reciprocated, cutting taxes when every other...
With Harvard being at best naive, or reluctant to throw around the financial weight that its property ownership and endowment allowed, Crane and all other entrepreneurs looked across the street to Harvard Trust for fiscal leadership. Robert R. Duncan, president of the bank during the fifties, a man whom business people in the Square still remember as a "mover and a shaker," proved to be the perfect spearhead. Insurance man Dyer grumbles about the current leadership scene saying that if you asked him who could move things in Harvard Square today, ten minutes later he still wouldn't be able...
Although the retired Eisemann now claims to have exercised no interest in Harvard Square politics and never held a position in the Chamber of Commerce, several Cambridge reformers insist that he was a force even Crane had to reckon with. He still exerts influence as treasurer for select CCA candidates on the Cambridge ballot...
When realtor John Briston Sullivan wanted to erect the Treadway on city land between Mt. Auburn and Eliot St. in 1961, he had to go to Crane for the needed parcel. And in a unique deal Crane engineered the sale of the "air rights" to Sullivan to build the hotel provided he leave some municipal parking spots underneath. The Boston Phoenix reported in 1971 Crane was duly rewarded with some legal business at the other end of the state. Although Harvard had at the time offered to build a much larger parking garage on the site and then give...
Harvard's relations with Crane and the community were mostly colored by the president. And when Nathan Pusey '28 ruled, the administrators seldom packed out beyond the Yard's wells--unless there was some land to buy. Although University disciples would like you to believe that Harvard altrusticly scratched itself from the race to beat MIT to Central Square, actually Harvard did its best but was saddled with too meager a mechanism to buy, or just wasn't shrewd enough to deal with private land developers. When the banks of the Charles were covered with old coal storage dumps, only...