By Karen Klinger

While it is still mostly prohibited to pahk the cah in the Harvard Yard, some changes have come to the university’s signature piece of greenery this fall, as anyone who has walked through it recently could attest.

At the instigation of Harvard President Drew Faust and a committee on “common spaces” she appointed last year, the yard and other heavily trafficked parts of the Cambridge campus have been enlivened with brightly colored chairs and tables designed to bring people together for discussion and relaxation.

The initiative also includes bringing in performers to put on free, open-air lunchtime shows, starting last month with dancing by cast members from the American Repertory Theater’s production of the disco musical “The Donkey Show.” Other performers have included the Banda Roncati, an Italian marching band that was in town recently to perform in the annual “Honk” parade.

Faust told the Harvard Gazette the idea is that “developing gathering places that are visible and attractive can help to enhance the campus and create a sense of place that is distinctly Harvard’s, yet open to the surrounding communities.”

Installing the tables and chairs, she said, is “a small step in that direction and it will be interesting to see how the experiment works this fall.”

In addition to Harvard Yard, the furniture, performance spaces and sometimes, food carts, can be found next to the Science Center, Memorial Hall, the Old Yard, Lehman Hall, Boylston Hall and the Radcliffe Quad.

Those performing in the yard have included the duo Las Aboricuas, comprised of guitarist and vocalist Maite Parsi and violinist Betty Widerski, who entertained their audience with Latin music, especially songs from Puerto Rico.

(The group also appeared October 9 on NeighborMedia correspondent Karin Koch’s show “BeLive: Vida Latina.” For more information, contact them at las.aboricuas@gmail.com or call 508-237-5241. To see a portion of the program in which they play a bolero from the 1940s by Mexican composer Augustin Lara, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB1uXv8zuOQ).

On October 16, the all-female a cappella group “Cliffe Notes,” a subset of the Radcliffe Choral Society, is slated to perform in Harvard Yard at 1 p.m., with a repertoire it says will range from “jazz to pop and everything in between.”

More information on the performance schedule is available at www.arts.harvard.edu.

While the entertainment will end and the tables and chairs will be put away at the end of October, history professor Lizabeth Cohen, the head of the common space committee, told the Harvard Crimson that efforts to bring members of the university and the larger community together will not end.

“Putting out those chairs and tables in the Yard was not a major construction project but has changed the social environment on campus,” she said, adding that the committee’s next challenge is to find a new common space for use in the coming winter months.

In the meantime, a less visible change will be ongoing in Harvard Yard, something the New York Times recently called an “underground revolution” that began with a pilot project in the yard and is now spreading throughout the campus.

A Times article on September 24 described how the grass in the Yard and elsewhere on university property is thriving since Harvard began using compost and compost "tea" rather than pesticides and synthetic nitrogen to enhance its green spaces.

The story by Anne Raver (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/garden/24garden.html?emc=eta1) described how Faust “became intrigued by the effort last spring when she saw a display that the Harvard Yard Soils Restoration Project had set up outside her office.”

The article said that since Harvard began composting tons of grass clippings, pruned branches, leaves and other material at the university’s Arnold Arboretum and mixing vats of compost tea in a Harvard-owned garage, it has saved tens of thousands of dollars it otherwise would have spent trucking the material off for disposal and buying compost and fertilizers.

The university also has reduced the use of irrigation by 30 percent, saving two million gallons of water a year, and the new process has not only enhanced the appearance of the grass (which takes a beating in the Yard from as many as 8,000 pedestrians daily) but has allowed trees such as the newly planted oaks outside Mass Hall to thrive.

Faust has also brought the new organic regime to Elmwood, the Harvard president’s house on Brattle Street, where she said the orchards, after being treated with compost tea, are recovering from leaf spot and apple scab.

The Times said that to help laypeople apply what the university has learned about creating compost and brewing compost tea, Harvard has posted a kind of “mini-course” on its Web site: www.uos.harvard.edu/fmo/landscape/organiclandscaping.