During his time as Harvard University’s president,
Harvard had little room for growth in Cambridge, its home since the 1600s. But just across the Charles River sat Allston, a working-class Boston neighborhood where the university had assembled hundreds of acres of land. There, Summers envisioned developing a sort of Silicon Valley of the East — a worthy competitor to California’s Stanford University and the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology for high-tech innovation.
More than two decades later, that vision is unrealized. ...