IF YOU THINK Cambridge is someplace between the Coop and President Bok's mansion up on Brattle Street, you ought to take a walk in the other direction down, Cambridge Street, past Inman Square to Roosevelt Towers.

Roosevelt Towers may be Cambridge's worst public housing development. Last month the city's Health Commissioner, James Hartgering, threatened to condemn the project's 96-unit tower building. He called the tower "unfit for human habitation."

Hartgering said that housing inspection reports and unreleased police statistics on juvenile crime in the project provide strong reasons for closing the eight-story tower. John E. Donovan, Assistant Executive Director of the Cambridge Housing Authority, opposes the closing of the tower, and he has claimed that Roosevelt Towers accomodations were not substandard.

Built with state aid in 1950, the project fronts on Cambridge Street between Windsor and Willow Streets, on one side bounded by a rambling old factory building, and on the other by rows of peeling two-story frame houses. Most of the Towers' 228 apartments are in five three-story lowrise buildings grouped surrounding the tower.

The tower looks out on a large concrete courtyard, too big for small groups to gather in. Instead, knots of kids gather on the stoops or in a gazebo-like structure in a small play area. Two mangled basketball hoops and a few backless benches fill the deserted concrete space.

In the high rise, the hallways smell of urine, and blasts of grafitti blur the walls. Chinks of light pinpoint holes in the apartment doors. Mailboxes have been ripped from the wall, probably by thieves looking for checks.

In the lower buildings, the situation is dramatically better, if not completely so. The mailboxes are intact; only the buildings' outsides are covered with grafitti. Rows of plywood windows--signs of burned out apartments--appear only in the tower.

TALK OF CONDEMNATION prompted an intra-governmental controversy over the use of money previously appropriated for the project. After Hartgering's statement, the State Department of Community Affairs inspected Roosevelt Towers. The State claimed that a $500,000 January apportionment for repairs and renovation of Cambridge public housing, including $161,000 for Roosevelt Towers, was never spent.

Reginald Guichard, Executive Director of the Cambridge Housing Authority, said that "red tape" held up spending the money.

Thomas Atkins, Secretary of the State Department of Communities and Development, opposes the demolition of the tower. Atkins has suggested spending more money for maintenance and renovation, reducing the number of families living in the tower, and possibly restricting the tower to elderly residents, to cut down on vandalism.

Roosevelt Towers has been plagued by violence. Three times in the past three weeks, over 100 youths have battled with pipes, bottles and bricks on the development's grounds.

On September 1, after a project resident was assaulted, four private security guards hired by the Cambridge Housing Authority left their jobs for two days. The guards' supervisor, quoted in The Cambridge Chronicle, said, "It looked like there was a riot coming, and I thought it would cool off the situation if our men left.

With the guards present, rival black and white factions fought at the Towers September 5, leaving 6 youths injured, and causing several small fires.

Much of the violence has been blamed on "outsiders." Commenting on the September 5 incident, Mayor Barbara Ackermann said, "Based on past experience I assume these are probably kids from other parts of the city converging on East Cambridge and complicating the problems of the Towers."

Some residents said that the incident began with a quarrel between a black youth and a white youth and then mushroomed.