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Did you know that the HBS tunnels are connected to the Harvard University tunnels across the river? Read on, and all shall be made clear!
Although connected, the two tunnel systems are very different. The ten miles of Harvard steam tunnels are hot, accessible only to workmen, and thus mysterious objects of undergraduate fascination and lore. They’ve been written about in four Harvard Crimson articles in the 1960s-80s (see here, here, here, and here). Besides being the setting for a murder mystery (Jane Langton’s The Memorial Hall Murder, 1978), the Harvard tunnels over the years have provided escape routes for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (MBA ’39) and Alabama Governor George Wallace during student protests and covert entry for police into student-occupied University Hall during antiwar protests in 1968.
By contrast, HBS tunnels are cooler, mostly accessible, and not very mysterious at all, except for the closed-off parts. Like another local underground system, the MBTA, the HBS tunnels are color-coded — with red, blue, green, and orange “lines,” plus purple, brown, gray, and yellow branches. They reach all buildings on the campus except three: Burden, the Class of 1959 Chapel, and the Dean’s House.
Click on the map to enlarge it.
The two main tunnels, the red and the green, are wide and almost entirely open, blocked only by card-unlocked doors to the Wyss and Hamilton parts of the tunnel. All tunnels have blue police call boxes and red fire-alarm boxes, and the red and green ones also have laundry rooms, study-group rooms, vending machines, and storage rooms along their lengths. The brown and yellow tunnels are quite narrow with quirky angles and have little of interest on them, except that one branch of the brown tunnel (running to the green tunnel and not shown on the map) is the location of the Harbus offices. The gray tunnel (running from Spangler to Aldrich) has 546 “commuter” lockers along its walls, for students living off-campus.
The older parts of the tunnels (the green, purple, and northern part of the red) were originally used to deliver food from a central kitchen to the residential halls’ dining areas (now the lounges). Those older tunnels are filled with steam pipes and telephone, data, and electrical conduits along their walls, but one side of the southern part of the red tunnel and both sides of the blue tunnel are bare and cry out for decoration of some sort. The orange tunnel’s walls have been adorned with enlarged pages of old economic treatises and cartoons on business subjects and photos of the campus buildings and the Weeks footbridge under construction.
Back before Shad was built, in the winter I used to take an afternoon constitutional in the tunnels, and on one of those walks, behind an open door usually locked, I “discovered” the tunnel to Kresge. Nervously going through a workroom and down a ramp, I found a hot, narrow, half-dark tunnel almost completely filled with large steam pipes and with long planks placed in the standing and running water on the floor. Along the way, openings on both sides led to well-lit rooms, one of them filled with a big, noisy, dynamo-like shape reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. At the tunnel’s end were two openings, leading to a large workroom on the left and straight ahead a dark opening, closed off with chicken wire, that might well have had Dante's words at the entrance to Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” written over it. “Aha!” I thought when I first saw this. “That’s the tunnel under the river to the Harvard houses.”
Alas, that is not the case. The truth is even stranger. That dark opening is the mouth of a tunnel leading to the Weeks footbridge, where it constricts to about a yard-and-a-half high to pass through the middle of the bridge, below the pedestrians and above its three arches — just room enough for a crawling workman and for pipes carrying steam from the Blackstone steam plant (which Harvard acquired in 2003), on the corner of Western Avenue and Memorial Drive, to HBS and under North Harvard Street to the Harvard athletics complex.
HBS’s associate director of facilities management, Jason Munro, recently gave photographer Susan Young and me a tour of the Kresge (perhaps better called the Weeks) tunnel and its branches, which lead to Kresge, McCollum, and McArthur halls and even to Soldiers Field Park (this tunnel is a long, dark pipe 5½ feet in diameter). The Kresge-Weeks tunnel is better lit than 20 years ago, and soft rubber tiles have replaced the planks. But a bit of water is still running on the floor, and the “dynamo” room is still noisy, but not as much as I remember. Jason later escorted me behind the chicken wire (which has been replaced by a locked, metal-grille door) and into the Weeks tunnel, which dips slightly as it goes under Storrow Drive. A wooden ramp leads up to the narrow spaces above the arches.
Because the HBS tunnels were designed to be part of student life, no doubt a certain amount of tunnel lore exists, but it hasn’t been collected. I note here that the purple tunnel under Glass Hall was the scene of at least one twist party in 1962, spilling out from the basement offices of WHBS radio station after the broadcast day was over. Emeritus Dean John McArthur told me about a curious incident in which HBS workmen closed off a corner at the westernmost junction of the green and red tunnels to make a “clubhouse” for their card games. That was soon gotten rid of. And before security was strengthened, Jason Munro remembers being startled by coming across homeless people sleeping in the Weeks footbridge tunnel. If you remember some facet of tunnel life not mentioned here, by all means tell us about it. Many thanks from an innocuous tunnel interloper.
Kresge tunnel looking toward Weeks footbridge. Click photo for larger view.
Tunnel branch to McArthur. Click photo for larger view.
Photos by Susan Young.
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