Honoring Harriet Jacobs—With a Luxury Hotel?

Left sketch of Harriet Jacobs, center top Jacobs Home, center bottom: Justice Joseph Story. 1834 engraving by Chester Harding. Right: proposed 8.5 story luxury "boutique" hotel/residence                                              e

Updated: to address the results of the Aug. 14 Historical Commission meeting.

In the mid-19th century, two Americans shaped the nation's conscience on slavery from vastly different vantage points. Justice Joseph Story, a towering figure of U.S. constitutional law and both a Supreme Court Justice and a Harvard Law professor, denounced slavery as “inhuman” and “repugnant to justice”—yet authored both the Amistad (1841) opinion and that of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the latter affirming the federal government’s authority to enforce the return of fugitive slaves. For him the U.S. Constitution needed to be prioritized over personal and even deeply moral views. Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, was 28 and 29 at the time of these decisions and had hidden for nearly seven years in a 3’ tall attic crawlspace of her grandmother’s house after escaping bondage, likely learning of that very decision while in hiding. She fled north, still enslaved, three months later. She describes her life in a riveting memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a key abolitionist text.

Their lives converged, posthumously, on a quiet side street in Harvard Square.

Story Street, named in honor of the justice, is also home to the elegant Regency-style building where Jacobs lived later in life and ran as a lodging house and local intellectual gathering place. Today, that house—and the legacies it embodies—are under threat. A proposal for an 8.5-story luxury hotel and residential complex at 17 Story Street would permanently alter this historically and culturally rich site, compromising not just the building's historic setting, but an opportunity to reckon meaningfully with two opposing strands of American history: law and resistance.

The proposed development seeks to move the Jacobs House forward to the edge of Mt. Auburn Street and erecting a towering structure adjacent to it, casting shadows—literal and symbolic—on one of the most significant Black heritage sites in Cambridge and the nation. While the developer claims the house will be restored and honored, the truth is far more complicated. The project would sever the structure from its historical location and overwhelm it with a building out of scale, out of character, and out of touch with the principles of ethics, justice, and preservation.

This is not preservation. It is tokenism.

17 Story Street (the Harriet Jacob House) sits at the corner of Story Street and Mt Auburn and the proposed plan does an injustice to the memory of this great American heroine and the rest of the residential neighborhood nearby. The 17 Story Street project seeks to take advantage of the City Council's recent Feb 10 upzoning in order to build an 8.5 story hotel/residence/luxury boarding house (a multi-use project), that also will have a few inclusionary ("affordable") units in the residential section of the building: HERE.
 
On August 11, 2025 the City Councillor who led the citywide luxury upzoning ordinance posted a Cambridge Day opinion piece with a large photo of this 17 Story Street proposal. His essay is titled "It is too Expensive to Keep Things the Same," and in it he describes our area as having "the highest rents in the nation - prices that are the direct outcome of decades of policy choices...."  - necessitating, in his view, more projects like this one. This Councillor maintains that the 17 Story Street development is among those that will bring housing prices down, but these hotel rooms, and the expensive (short term? transitory?) residences that appear to be part of this project could be readily incorporated into the hotel/lodging room schema and will do the opposite. The costs would be very high. According to Momondo, the nearby Charles Hotel  have rooms “...ranging from $303 to $1,739 per night, with an average around $600.” Few Cambridge or other residents can afford these prices.
 
17 Story Street sits in the Harvard Square Conservation District (HSCD), whose design goals and guidelines were revised in 2017-2019. I know the guidelines well because I submitted the original petition to rewrite these guidelines in 2017 while working to preserve the Abbot Building (home then to Curious George).  In this HSCD report, we read that 17 Story Street Harriet Jacobs House property is very much “at risk.” The goals and guidelines of the HSCD are both specific and strict and this proposal does not conform with many of them.

The Cambridge Historical Commission addressed the 17 Story Street project at a meeting on August 14, 2025 both as part of their Harvard Square Conservation District review procedures, and in light of a Landmark petition submitted by 35 neighbors and other residents seeking long term protection for her home. The proposed repositioning of the Harriet Jacobs house will cost $7 million dollars or more. This appears to be part of the reason so many extra floors and units have been added because they will help to recoup the financial cost of such a move. 
 
Honoring Harriet Jacobs, a woman who endured years in an attic before fleeing and securing her freedom, deserves more than a commemorative plaque or a hotel meeting room in her honor for the magnitude of her sacrifice – and that of others. And to do so under the auspices of profit-driven luxury development feels especially perverse—particularly on a street that also commemorates a jurist who, despite personal moral opposition to slavery, felt compelled to entrench it in federal law. In 1866, the year that Story Street was delineated and named, is also the year that the U.S. officially recognized the end of the Civil War, and the freeing of all enslaved people.

We can—and must—do better than what is planned for the 17 Story Street project.

The proposal is at odds with this Conservation District's mandate to protect the area’s distinctive architectural and cultural heritage. The proposed Harriet Jacobs design ignores the small-scale and historic character of the adjacent Hilliard St. residential streets and block. The proposal introduces a hulking, mostly white façade that lacks visual nuance and overwhelms the historic site. It eliminates opportunities for a publicly accessible garden that could serve as a contemplative tribute to Jacobs. And it threatens to establish a precedent for upzoning that prioritizes density and profit over history, human scale, and livability. The vague proposed hybrid use model suggest a workaround of zoning rules, not a thoughtful plan for housing or hospitality.

This new structure is not designed to harmonize with its surroundings or even to add very much needed lower cost housing. It is a speculative land play, attempting to squeeze maximum value out of a fragile site that should instead be treated with reverence.

This is not just a neighborhood or political dispute—it is a civic and moral issue. Harvard’s - and Cambridge's - name and legacy are intertwined with Joseph Story, as well as the institution of slavery and the creation and ongoing use of Harvard Square. Harriet Jacobs, while not affiliated with this university, represents the voices it long excluded. To allow her home to be displaced and dwarfed in service of a luxury project is to repeat the very injustice she spent her life resisting.
 
There is a better alternative. Keep the Jacobs House where it is. Create a commemorative garden on the area that is now paved over just in front of her entry. Reduce the scale of any new building. Demand architectural design that respects rather than dominates.  This is not about stopping growth—it’s about guiding it with conscience.

In the end, we must ask: Would Harriet Jacobs recognize herself in this project? Would Justice Story believe this is how a just society reconciles its past?

Let Harvard Square and Cambridge be a place that remembers, not just redevelops.
Let them be places where history is honored, not bulldozed.
Let them be places where our built environment reflects our highest values—not our lowest ambitions.

At the August 14th meeting of the Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC) members voted unanimously to move forward with a Landmark Study to determine if the Harriet Jacobs should be preferentially preserved. While planning for a new structure can proceed as planned, if the Commission votes in a subsequent meeting to Landmark the structure, they will have the authority to address any design recommendations they make with respect to height, shape, setbacks and other matters, factors that had been removed from their jurisdiction by City Council decisions last term. Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson whose important publications on race are familiar to us all, spoke at the August 14 meeting of the CHC for the Landmark petition for which he was a signatory. As another speaker noted at this important meeting:  with so much is happening nationally to silence or hide Black voices and historic figures, let's not be party to that also here in Cambridge. Preservation matters.