Many people have fond memories of the Harvard Square landmark. But The Pit had a dark side that shouldn’t be glossed over.
Io Nachtwey’s doomed life in The Pit, the circular brick plaza above the Harvard Square T station, began sometime in the summer of 2001. Originally from Hawaii, she was 22 and homeless when she drifted into Cambridge. She quickly joined a loose-knit community of misfits who loitered and skateboarded in and around The Pit, often panhandling and sleeping on nearby streets or in graveyards.
Within a few months, she was dead — murdered in an especially savage attack.
On Tuesday, the Globe reported that the city had demolished the Pit, which originally opened in 1982, provoking an outpouring of nostalgia for the days when “pit kids” (or, to some people, “pit rats”) gave Harvard Square a grittier punk vibe. A mythology seems to have emerged that back in its heyday, The Pit provided a welcoming environment for troubled teens and runaways, who returned the favor by keeping the soul of “real” Harvard Square alive before the ATMs and high-end boutiques took over.
“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,” Denise Jillson, the executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, told the Globe.
I don’t mean to argue with people who have happy memories of their time in The Pit. And it’s certainly true that The Pit in the daytime was a less menacing place than it was at night.
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But anyone tempted to romanticize The Pit and all it supposedly represented should read about Nachtwey’s death. The Pit “community” didn’t welcome her. It quite literally killed her. Described as sweet and naive, Nachtwey was raped, stabbed by another Pit regular, finished off with a nunchuck blow to the head, and then dumped into the Charles River.
Former Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley, who prosecuted hundreds of homicides in 17 years in office, said Nachtwey’s killing was “one of the most horrific, horrifying murders in my time as DA.”
“This young woman was truly an innocent kid,” he told me. Four people were convicted in her murder; two others pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for their testimony.
It was not the only crime associated with The Pit. As an announcement for Cambridge’s 2022 “Pit-a-palooza” gingerly acknowledged, “[s]ome of the rats were victims of violence and sexual assault and their experiences are the dark side of this otherwise positive experience.”
You think?
There are, obviously, crimes in every setting. But the rose-tinted nostalgia for the era of The Pit kids strikes me as deeply misplaced, and a continuation of the willful indifference by many Cantabrigians to The Pit’s “dark side” that set the stage for Nachtwey’s death in the first place.
Many of the kids who slept in and around The Pit needed help, and maybe they would have received it if more people in Cambridge had viewed The Pit as a problem and not as a perverse source of pride. Cambridge wore its willingness to let Pit kids sleep on the street as some kind of badge of countercultural honor. Embracing The Pit flattered Cambridge’s self-image as a Bohemian enclave; it also left the kids themselves in danger.
“The street is a very dangerous place, it’s a dangerous environment for anybody,” Conley said.
What does it matter? The Pit kids are long gone, and now so is The Pit itself. But there’s still plenty of homelessness, and plenty of dispute over what to do about it. So mourn the end of an era if you must — you can even buy a brick salvaged from The Pit, with the proceeds going to a charity that supports homeless youth. But hopefully the next time some vulnerable young person like Nachtwey ends up here, there’s no pit quite so deep waiting for them.
