To the editor:
Any visitor to Nahant comes away with a lasting impression. Nice beaches. Pretty views. A small town. There are places along Nahant Road near Short Beach where it seems like you can stretch out your arms and span the whole spit of land, from shore to shore. And, objectively speaking, Nahant is tiny. At just one square mile, it’s the smallest town in the Commonwealth as measured by land area.
That’s one of the reasons Northeastern University’s (NU) proposed development at East Point is so controversial. NU already operates about 33,000 square feet of lab and classroom space. The proposal is for 55,000 square feet more, bringing their total space to almost 90,000 square feet.
That is an ambitious goal, and it would make their combined footprint nearly three times the size of the next-largest building in Nahant — our public school. For a town this small, something so big just feels wrong.
But let’s not trust our gut instincts alone. Let’s consider some facts. I set out to do that by compiling a list of all the university-operated marine science centers from Maine to Maryland, set in seaside communities just like Nahant.
There are at least 14, including Northeastern’s campus at East Point. I found publicly-available data on the square footage of their facilities, and then compared this to the size of the host town, as measured in square miles.
The ratio of the two data points ranges from 33,000 square feet to one square mile at the high end (NU’s existing footprint), to 82 square feet to one square mile for the tiny University of Massachusetts field station on Nantucket.
The average size is 7,488 square feet of building to one square mile of town. So how does the NU proposal compare? The ratio is off the charts: 90,000 square feet to one square mile, or more than 12 times the average.
My conclusion is that, here in Nahant, our instincts are correct. A footprint of 90,000 square feet in a town this small doesn’t just feel wrong; it is objectively out of scale, gargantuan compared to the size of our town. It is like trying to cram an elephant into a matchbox that’s already three-quarters full.
So just as Nahant leaves an impression on visitors, let’s leave our guest Northeastern with a lasting impression of what we Nahanters already know to be true: This town is too small for the scale of your outsized ambitions.
Vote “yes” to authorize eminent domain on May 15.
Christian Bauta
Nahant
