By Spencer Buell Globe Staff,Updated May 29, 2025, 4:04 a.m.

CAMBRIDGE — There is a damp dustiness down here, in the abandoned tunnel underneath Harvard Square.
Aside from the thin rays filtering through a sidewalk grate, there isn’t much light where we’re standing, 20 feet below the beer taps of Charlie’s Kitchen and the Harvard grads snapping pictures in front of the Kennedy School of Government. Only the sound of traffic overhead occasionally breaks the subterranean silence. There are no signs of life, not even rats.
Could this space, which few people have laid eyes on in more than 40 years, come alive with music and be the newest — and most unusual — addition to Boston nightlife? An under-the-ground, over-the-top, idea, for sure. But through the light of our flashlights, the possibilities seem to expand.
A local real estate mogul has long argued the music venue is not as far-fetched as it sounds on the surface. And now, he’s found a receiving audience among elected officials in Cambridge, who are exploringwhether it is, in fact, possible, and, if so, what it all might cost.

Although hidden from people driving or walking atop it, the tunnel runs between Brattle Square and the Kennedy School.
One section is used by the T for storage and for housing exhaust ducts and a high-voltage power station.
Another, a long straightaway under Eliot Street, is unused altogether.
When Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, first saw that abandoned section on a tour in 2019, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Descending down a utility stairwell, she expected to find it falling apart, or marred by a jumble of view-obstructing columns.
What she saw instead was a sturdy rectangle of wide open space that was, by her count, about 300 feet long, 22 feet high, and 58 across at its widest.
“It was pristine,” said Jillson, “as far as tunnels go.”
John DiGiovanni, the real estate mogul who brought music venue The Sinclair to Harvard Square, said his jaw dropped.
“Whoa!” he remembers thinking. “Where do you put the stage?”
Ever since, the two have been boosters of a live entertainment venue in the tunnel, showing it off to developers, officials, and business leaders. They even paid for a 3D scan of the space and hired a designer to create mockups of how concerts, TED talks, Harvard speaking engagements, art exhibits, and all kinds of events here might look.

Let us here state the obvious:Turning a century-old underground tunnel, currently without utilities, into a space fit for hundreds in a partying mood, would be no easy feat. It certainly wasn’t designed with that in mind when it was built in 1909 for trains and buses to access a now-removed transit yard, nor when it was sealed shut long ago in 1980 during the extension of the Red Line. Right now, the only access is through narrow corridors and down utility hatches or through a gap between a pair of exhaust fans the size of jet engines.
Even building above ground in Harvard Square seems to take forever. The renovation of the small plaza atop the Harvard MBTA stop has taken years, and millions of dollars, to complete.
But DiGiovanni and Jillson believe turning this unused portion of the decommissioned tunnel complex into something wondrousis too good an opportunity to pass up in a neighborhood they believe needs more live events to draw in visitors.
“It would be preposterous for me to say, ‘dig a tunnel under these streets and create a venue.’ But it’s equally preposterous that you wouldn’t study how you can transform this one,” DiGiovanni said. “It’s already excavated!”


Cambridge is starting that process now. Earlier in May, the City Council voted in favor of spending $72,000 to get a formal estimate for an engineering study.
How much a study of that kind would cost is unknown, but it is expected to be many hundreds of thousands more.
Who will pay for it is also an open question.
The tunnel is still owned by the MBTA, and Cambridge officials have expressed reluctance to invest large sums without buy-in from the T or other private investment.
Would the transit agency even be interested in becoming landlord to a nightclub or paying to have it refurbished so it can be sold? The T wouldn’t say.
But DiGiovanni believes there is good reason to do so, including that it could be a revenue source for the T at a time when it could use the money.
Much of the work of turning the tunnel into an entertainment destination would ultimately be done by a venue operator. Asked about the viability of a tunnel-based music venue, a spokesperson for AEG, which operates live event venues across the country, said it was “a little premature” to weigh in.
Still, the idea has some allure to people with experience in live events.
Ed Kane, owner of Boston nightclub and music venue company Big Night Entertainment and a Harvard alum who grew up locally, said it sounded on paper like a dream come true.
“It’s been a fantasy of mine forever,” he said. “Ever since I started nightlife I’ve dreamed of opening a place in an underground station.”
It wouldn’t necessarily be the first of its kind, according to the Harvard Square Business Association. In Washington, D.C., an abandoned subway tunnel in Dupont Circle was repurposed into an arts venue called Dupont Underground. A similar project repurposed a drinking water reservoir in Houston into a venue called The Cistern.
The primary question, according to DiGiovanni, is how many people a subterranean venue in Harvard Square could fit. Capacity would depend on the size of the usable space, and the points of egress that would need to be built into the Harvard Square streetscape to get people in and out quickly, he said.


He has crunched the numbers and believes it would need to host at least 800 in order to be worth it for the millions of dollars of investment required to get it up and running.
“What would be spectacular is a 1500-capacity venue,” he said.
There is certainly plenty of room down here in this big, long, dark tunnel under Harvard Square.
For now, there’s nothing but.
