The seating area in Harvard Square known as The Pit has been demolished, a new milestone for an ongoing renovation of the plaza on which it sat for decades — and the end of an era.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
CAMBRIDGE — In its heyday, they called it The Pit.
This week, it’s more like The Swamp.
Construction crews have begun pulverizing the former brick and stone sitting area, which had been a gathering space for young people in the region’s counterculture and those who bonded over not fitting in.
Tuesday, as part of broader Harvard Square renovations, workers scooped out chunks of rock as a pumpsucked brown water and mud pooling at the base of what was once a cherished and infamous landmark.
“There’s a feeling people have for that area, and it has to do with acceptance,” said Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association. “Anybody who went in there, regardless of their political persuasion, their race, their sexual persuasion, it didn’t matter. Everybody was welcomed. Even kids that were a little bit odd and outside the mainstream felt welcomed there.”
Jillson said her organization has salvaged several hundred bricks from The Pit, some of which it emblazoned with a metal plaque and sold off for $25 apiece in a fund-raiser for Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a nonprofit that works with homeless youth. About 200 are still stored in her office.
Local punks, alternative types, and street performers of all stripes played music, met friends, or simply hung around there with the other young people who showed up there day after day.
One of them was Marc McGovern, now a Cambridge city councilor and the city’s vice mayor, who was a self-described “pit rat” as a teen in the 1980s. (The Business Association this year paid tribute to this little-known aspect of McGovern’s past by gifting him a framed photo of himself taken when he was a spiky-haired high-schooler hanging around in a leather jacket).
He’s still nostalgic for those days all these years later, McGovern said.
“That time of my life was an unsettled time for me, and I found protection and community in The Pit. So it’s really important to me,” McGovern said.
“Pit rats” weren’t always beloved by everyone in the square, he recalls. Some of the kids and young adults who hung around got into trouble with drinking or drug use, and there could be violence. But the space had vast meaning for many and a reputation.
He remembers tourists and families of prospective students got a kick out of seeing real Boston punks so close to the serene Harvard campus. “We used to charge people to take our pictures,” he said.
McGovern hopes the new version of the plaza when it reopens will also offer a place for all kinds of people, perhaps wayward youths included, to go. And that there aren’t calls to shoo away whoever winds up in the plaza.
“Hopefully, it can still be a place where people can gather and meet friends and feel that they’re part of something,” he said.
People who weren’t whiling away afternoons there remember The Pit, too.
It wasn’t exactly John Olsen’s scene, but the 74-year-old said that while growing up in the area, he appreciated that The Pit existed as a refuge for the people who found camaraderie there.
“ It had its pluses and minuses, but it was home to a lot of people,” said Olsen, a retired architect who lives in Winchester, who was out for a stroll through the square on a recent springlike morning.
He said he has had mixed feelings about the changes that have come to the neighborhood over time, but believes the new spaces being built by the city to replace the old can themselves become as beloved as The Pit once was.
“It’s a very different place than it was when I was here in my younger years, but I’m growing to appreciate it now,” Olsen said of the square. “I just hope that it develops its own character over the years.”
By the 2010s, when talk began of renovating the plaza to bring it up to modern standards of urban design and accessibility, it had begun to show its age.
The project has been delayed again and again amid a combination of supply chain issues and the difficulties of building in a crowded intersection atop a troubled MBTA stop.
Demolition work on the plaza began recently, Cambridge spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said.
Related: Harvard Square was never what it used to be
People with fond feelings for the landmark held a well-attended goodbye ceremony in June 2022 called Pit-A-Palooza that featured a “Rocky Horror Picture Show” tribute and a rowdy performance from the Boston hardcore punk band Colin of Arabia.
“Dress the part – drag out your fishnets, leather and studs!” an invitation to the party read. “Show your kids how cool you were!”
During the festivities, the city officially proclaimed June 25 as “Pit Rat Day.”
It stayed open to the public for nearly three more years as other work in the plaza got underway.
Now, it’s gone.
Given The Pit’s state of disrepair in its latter days, that’s for the better, said Peri Onipede, of Watertown, as she stopped to grab a coffee at a nearby café.
“Just walking through it, there would be water puddles and ice, so you had to be careful,” Onipede said. “I know it was popular with the kids and the students, but I always felt I had to walk carefully through The Pit.”
So she won’t miss it. She hopes the renovation turns the spot into a more accessible place for people to spend time, and considers it a good sign that the plaza renovation will preserve the kiosk that was the longtime home of Out of Town News, which she frequented.
The plans for the kiosk call for it to be a combination information booth and a pop-up.
Overall, Onipede said she just wants the plaza project to be done with already — for the construction to stop, for all the barricades to be removed, and for the next phase of the square, however, it will be, to begin.
“It’s long overdue,” she said. “It’s been closed for so long, and it’s just been an eyesore for a number of years now. I hope there will be something attractive that brings people here.”
