The University was named after John Harvard, a Cambridge-educated minister living in Charlestown, who had died at age 30. He bequeathed to the college 320 books and the princely sum of 779 pounds, 17 shillings, and two pence.

At the Water’s Edge: Resiliency for Lower Manhattan - New York - 12:30 PM, Friday, 25th September 2026 - New York City’s identity as a global capital of finance and culture is rooted in its origins as a seaport. At the epicenter of over 520 miles of waterfront is Lower Manhattan, where the city started over 400 years ago with the arrival of the Dutch.  Since then, the boundary of where land meets the water has changed – in some cases dramatically. Learn from experts what is at risk and what is being done to protect Lower Manhattan from tidal flooding and coastal storms, and to ensure that all New Yorkers continue to have access to the jobs, subways, and infrastructure that thrive in this central hub. With 19 of 28 subway lines, 512,000 riders per day and 10% of all jobs in NYC, resulting in $74 billion in annual GDP (8% of the City’s total), downtown is indispensable to New York’s future.  A range of current resiliency initiatives will be reviewed, including East Side Coastal Resiliency, Lower Manhattan Coastal Protection, and Battery Park City flood protection and water management systems. Discussions will also include how changes at NOAA, FEMA and the insurance sector may impact response and recovery to the next climate event, and its impact on the real estate and financial markets.Following the symposium, experts from the NYC Economic Development Corporation, Battery Park City Authority, and The Battery Conservancy will conduct a tour of completed and on-going resiliency work at Battery Park. Speakers:Alexander Mirescu, PhD, Head, Extreme Weather, Zurich Resilience SolutionsPatrick Geelan, North/West Project Director, Battery Park City AuthorityPaula Recart, President, The Battery ConservancyAlexis Taylor, Vice President for Climate Resilience, NYC Economic Development CorporationMolly Bourne, RLA,  FASLA, Principal, Mathews Nielsen Landscape ArchitectsModerator: Raju Mann, President and CEO, Battery Park City Authority

First Harvard Commencement - 1642 - Early in the afternoon the first Commencement at Harvard College — all nine graduates lined up in front of President Henry Dunster. He conferred degrees on the group in order of their parents’ prominence, which made Benjamin Woodbridge Harvard’s first graduate. After delivering an address in Latin, Dunster handed each new scholar “a Booke of Arts,” wrote one witness. But after the ceremony, Harvard took each book back.

Harvard University - 1636 - Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and among the most prestigious in the world. The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of academic disciplines for undergraduates and for graduates, while the other faculties offer only graduate degrees, mostly professional. Harvard has three main campuses: the 209-acre (85 ha) Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across the Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston's Longwood Medical Area.

Harvard Yard - 1718 - Harvard Yard is a 25-acre plot that encompasses the oldest buildings on the Harvard University Campus. The grassy area between Widener Library and Memorial Church is known as Tercentenary Theater. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates recently worked with Harvard over the course of more than a decade to restore and redesign the planting and circulation scheme for the yard. Michael Van Valkenburgh continues to be involved with the future of this landscape through his participation in the Harvard Yard Soils Restoration Project, an ongoing effort to implement a biological soils program at Harvard.

Harvard Hall - 1677 - The first Harvard Hall was built between 1674 and 1677. It was Harvard College's first brick building and replaced a decaying wooden building located a few hundred feet to the southeast. Samuel Andrew, a local Cambridge merchant and shipwright was the master builder.

Harvard Art Museum - 1896 - The Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums.The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985) and four research centers: the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis (founded in 1958), the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art (founded in 2002), the Harvard Art Museums Archives, and the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (founded in 1928). The three museums that constitute the Harvard Art Museums were initially integrated into a single institution under the name Harvard University Art Museums in 1983. The collections include approximately 250,000 objects in all media, ranging in date from antiquity to the present and originating in Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Harvard Science Center - 1972 - Harvard University's main classroom and laboratory building for undergraduate science and mathematics, in addition to housing numerous other facilities and services. Designed by Josep Lluís Sert, who was then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. These buildings were part of a modernist movement that sought to break away from the Georgian and related styles used at Harvard for hundreds of years. Thus, the Science Center is largely steel and concrete, with plentiful fenestration admitting natural light.

John Harvard Statue - 1884 - John Harvard was an Englishman from the Southwark neighborhood of London. He emigrated to New England in 1637 but died of tuberculosis only one year later. He is buried in the Phipps Street Burial Ground in Charlestown. When Harvard died he bequeathed half of his fortune and his entire library to the new college that was founded in Cambridge. The college was named after him in 1638. Daniel Chester French (Massachusetts native who also created the Lincoln Memorial sculpture, among many other famous monuments) sculpted the John Harvard Statue, now known as the "statue of three lies" in 1884. The three lies are: 1) the sculpture is not of John Harvard because, of course, it was created 250 years after Harvard died. French used a student as a model. 2) The statue incorrectly states that the founding of Harvard was in 1638, not 1636. 3) The plaque lists Harvard as the founder of Harvard college, when he was in fact only a benefactor after the Massachusetts colonial government founded the college.

Harvard Square - Harvard Square is a triangular plaza at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street, and John F. Kennedy Street, near the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The term "Harvard Square" is also used to delineate the business district and Harvard University surrounding that intersection, which is the historic center of Cambridge."If you think it's a good idea to preserve the architecture of historic places, then Harvard Square presents a quandary. It's always been in a state of constant change. If you really want to preserve its essential character, shouldn't you wish it to keep changing? Does that qualify as preservation? Change it does, sometimes so fast it feels like a time-lapse film. Charles River Bank becomes Harvard Trust becomes BayBank becomes BankBoston becomes Fleet becomes Bank of America. Tweedy undergraduates in preppy jackets and ties give way to Goth-clad teens with pierced tongues. Mom-and-pop stores bite the dust, displaced by brand-name outlets that make today's square into a predictable outdoor mall. We're looking west on Mass. Ave. at snapshots of the square at two moments in its history. The 1906 photo was made for a postcard, one of a series put out by the Detroit Publishing Co. The square then was like a spider in his web: It was a hub for electric trolleys, powered from a network of overhead wires, that connected it with Newton, Watertown, Arlington, and Boston. Behind the closest trolley, we can see the triangular façade of the Harvard Cooperative Society. The Coop took over a building that was built in 1841 as the Cambridge Lyceum, a public lecture hall whose guests are said to have included Nathaniel Hawthorne. Today's Coop building replaced it in 1924, but its triangular pediment is probably the architect's homage to the old lyceum. Ghosts of the past linger in other ways. To the right of the Coop, in the newer photo, is the aluminum-finned façade of the Bank of America. That façade was applied in the 1950s, in an attempt at modernization, over the face of a brick neo-Georgian building of the 1920s, which in turn replaced the mansard-roofed dorm we see in the old photo. The ghost is the 1920s façade, parts of which you can still see if you look through the fins. It's as if the old building were behind prison bars. Cambridge city planners are doing a study of the square, hoping to improve it as a pedestrian environment, with wider sidewalks and easier street crossings. Further change, in short, is on the way." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - A History of Change," Boston Globe, 26 September 2004

Harvard Stadium - 1903 - Harvard Stadium was completed in 1903, with modifications in the 1910s and 1920s. The structure is a designated National Historic Landmark, and is notable for its early use of monolithic reinforced concrete, its simple horseshoe shape, and its role in shaping the sport of American football. It is the oldest college football venue still in use. Construction of the Stadium was funded by the Harvard College class of 1879 and funds from the Athletic Committee. The building was constructed from funds provided by the Athletic Committee and the Class of 1879. "The WGU (World`s Greatest University, as a Globe columnist snidely dubs Harvard) is preparing to launch a major expansion into Allston, across the river from Cambridge. In the older photo, we show an early beachhead of that invasion, the Harvard Stadium of 1902. College football was the sport of the day, and WGU, hard as it is to believe, was a national power. WGU found it wasn`t easy to shoehorn a major sports facility into a crowded town. So the stadium was sited across the river, to be followed in the 1920s by the Harvard Business School. Today, unable to grow in Cambridge in the face of defiant neighborhoods, Harvard hopes to drag other schools – all of which are kicking and screaming – out of the magic ZIP code 02138. The stadium is a remarkable building. The entire exterior is wrapped in an arcade that is one huge chunk of poured-in-place concrete. The largest such structure in the world at the time, the stadium demonstrated the architectural potential of this new material, preceding, by two years, Frank Lloyd Wright`s great Unity Temple in Chicago. The stadium`s horseshoe shape, with classical details, recalled the theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, an association the young scholar-athletes must have enjoyed. A performance of Aeschylus`s Agamemnon, with live horses, took place here in 1906. The stadium`s lead architect was Charles McKim, designer of the Boston Public Library and Symphony Hall. In the foreground of the older photo is a rickety bridge across the Charles, with an operable span in the middle for coal and lumber barges. A bridge has stood in this location since 1663. The new photo, in which the stadium is obscured by more recent buildings, shows the Larz Anderson Bridge of 1913, designed by Edmund Wheelwright, best loved for his Harvard Lampoon building. Both photos were taken from an upper window of the Weld Boathouse of 1907. In its early days, Allston-Brighton was known as Little Cambridge. With Harvard`s anticipated expansion and investment in the community, it will perhaps, in a sense, be so again." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Harvard Stadium," Boston Globe, 9 July 2000

ArtLab - Harvard University - 2019 - The Harvard ArtLab, designed by Barkow Leibinger in collaboration with Sasaki, features a unique one-story “pinwheel-like” plan. It consists of a series of studios, workshops, and media spaces that surround a central “Hub” space. The Hub can be opened and closed by four large sliding partitions, enabling performances and exhibitions. The structure is built with lightweight steel columns and open web steel trusses on a concrete slab, making it both energy-efficient and adaptable. The exterior is clad in transparent insulated glass and high-insulating polycarbonate panels, which range from transparent to opaque. This design allows the building to exploit natural light during the day and glow like a “lightbox” at night. Completed in 2019, the building also includes lightweight steel columns, and open web steel trusses.The ArtLab serves as a cross-curriculum space for the arts, designed to be curated and adapted by its users. It provides recording studios, sound-editing stations, and rooms for rehearsal, improvisation, and informal performance. The ArtLab encourages interdisciplinary arts-practice research and serves as a collaborative activator for the school and the greater Allston and Cambridge neighborhoods. It aims to expand participants’ engagement with the arts and foster a sense of community through its versatile and interactive spaces.

Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University - 1872 - The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is a botanical research institution and free public park. It is the oldest public arboretum in North America, and the second largest link in the Emerald Necklace. The collection of temperate trees, shrubs, and vines has a particular emphasis on the plants of the eastern United States and eastern Asia.

Harvard Museum of Natural History - 1998 - The museum is housed in the University Museum Building, located on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It displays a sampling of specimens drawn from the collections of the University's three natural history research museums: the Harvard University Herbaria the Museum of Comparative Zoology the Harvard Mineralogical Museum. The museum is physically connected to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at 26 Oxford Street. This museum is the most visited museum at Harvard University. The museum starting collecting in 1858, and the current collection is about 21 million specimens.

Harvard University Library Services Building - 2007 - An inviting glass street wall and a crown of skylights announce the new home of Harvard University Library`s Weissman Preservation Center for some of the rarest books in the world, Information Systems offices, and a street level bookshop. The site on Mt. Auburn Street, surrounded by historic Harvard social clubs and Sert`s Holyoke Center, is at the very heart of pedestrian activity and energetically protected by the Cambridge Historic Commission and neighborhood groups. To balance competing community desires for a building in scale and size suited to the character of the street, and the university`s need for the maximum usable area for its programs, we created a carefully calibrated building with four stories above grade and two stories below using concrete flat slab construction to minimize overall building height. The new building projects an image of lightness and openness with its finely scaled and proportioned window wall facing Mt. Auburn Street. Along the sidewalk, a canopy protects the bookstore, display vitrines, and bookstore entry. At the top floor, sculptural skylights bring daylight into the Preservation Center. A new through block landscaped pathway links Mt. Auburn Street and Winthrop Street beyond. Sustainable design thinking played a critical role in winning community approval. The use of a geothermal heating and cooling system eliminating noisy and unsightly roof top mechanical equipment was a key to success for neighborhood groups. The north facing window wall and generous skylights minimize artificial lighting load, provide an ideal environment for the activities of the Preservation Center, and create a lively and open face to the street. After an extended community review process, members of the Cambridge Historical Commission dubbed the project “ a little jewel box.”

Harvard Square Theater Mural - 1983 - The top portion of this mural was commissioned when the theater moved its entrance to Church Street in 1983. The lower portion was painted in 1991.

Harvard University Blackstone Offices - 2006 - The 46 Blackstone Street renovation unified three 19th-century masonry buildings into an environmentally sustainable workplace for Harvard University Operations Services (UOS). A glazed 100'-long lightslot joins the buildings, and a three-story skylit stairway allows light deep into the building. Over 90% of occupants now enjoy daylight, fresh air and views from operable windows. Blackstone was Harvard's first LEED Platinum-certified building, and a model for environmental design on campus. At the time of completion, it was the highest-scoring LEED renovation in the nation, and the oldest building to earn Platinum certification. Energy-saving features include an innovative insulation system at the historic brick walls, a geothermal cooling system, and a heat recovery wheel. Energy-efficient, low-VOC equipment and materials were used throughout (including daylight sensors, occupant sensors, and an energy-efficient elevator). A landscaped courtyard, sculpted from earth excavated during construction, requires no irrigation; a bio-retention pond treats storm water runoff.

Harvard College Yard purchased - 1637 - The Overseers purchased the College’s first piece of real estate: a house and an acre of land from Goodman Peyntree. Located on the southern edge of “Cow-yard Row” and soon distinguished as the “College Yard,” this tract became the nucleus of present-day Harvard Yard and remains at the southern end of the Old Yard (the area west of Thayer, University, and Weld halls).

Harvard Graduate Center - 1948 - The Harvard Graduate Center, also known as "the Gropius Complex" (including Harkness Commons), was commissioned of The Architects Collaborative by Harvard University in 1948. The first modern building on the campus, it was also one of the first endorsements of the modern style by a major university and was seen in the national and architectural presses as a turning point in the acceptance of the aesthetic in the United States.

Harvard Biological Laboratories - The science has changed since Harvard's Biological Laboratories were completed in 1932, but the Labs remain at the center of Harvard's biological research work in the 21st century, serving as a primary building for research groups of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Notable research conducted in the labs includes that of the winners of the 1967 and 1980 Nobel Prizes. The door panels, the building's exterior friezes, and the pair of life-sized bronze rhinoceros flanking its entrance are the work of sculptor Katherine Lane Weems. Cut into the brick facade, the friezes represent four of the zoographic regions of the world.

Harvard-Yenching Library - 1929 - The Harvard–Yenching Library is the primary location for East Asia-related collections at Harvard Library. The building was originally built in 1929 for Harvard's Institute of Geographical Exploration and currently houses part of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, in addition to the Harvard-Yenching Library. In addition to East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Manchu, and Mongolian), it houses collections in European languages and Southeast Asian language (Vietnamese). Totaling more than 1.5 million volumes, the Harvard-Yenching Library has one of the largest collections in East Asian studies outside of Asia. The library has been located at 2 Divinity Avenue on the Cambridge campus of Harvard University since around 1957. Following World War II, the library began collecting more social science publications. The once predominantly humanistic collection evolved into a research library that encompasses East Asian materials in all academic disciplines. A. Kaiming Chiu served as head librarian of the library until his retirement in 1964, after which he was succeeded by Eugene Wu. In 1965, the Chinese-Japanese Library of the Harvard-Yenching Institute was renamed the Harvard-Yenching Library to reflect the expanded nature of the library's collections. The Library eventually added Tibetan, Mongolian and Manchu publications, as well as Western language monographs and journals. A Korean collection was added in 1951, and a Vietnamese collection in 1973. In 1976, management of the library shifted from the independent Harvard-Yenching Institute to the Harvard College Library.