In May the Independent published an op-ed about the shuttering of the Pit in Harvard Square. The piece walked a tightrope between nostalgia for what was and grappling with the site’s uncertain future.
What started as a rant wearing rose-tinted glasses led to a connection with a true Pit veteran. The original op-ed was accompanied by a photo of an “unnamed” punk teen, whom Internet sleuths were able to identify as Fernando Strohmeyer, former Pit Rat turned restaurant owner.
In an interview with The Independent, Fernando spoke in his own words about what the storied location meant to him growing up on the local punk scene in the 1990s. The conversation has been edited.
I’m curious to know your origins. You have a (617) number. Are you from Massachusetts?
Yeah. Divorced parents, so half JP, half Watertown.
What was it like coming up as a kid at that time in Greater Boston?
It was good. I mean, the actual childhood was not good, but what I discovered when I started hanging out in The Pit is that it was a nice respite from all that. It’s a good place to get away. You know all the other kids there. We’re kind of coming from similar situations.
You kind of banded together.
Oh yeah, definitely. I didn’t hang out with people that I went to middle school or high school with. I’d get on the bus after school and go there and hang out with my actual friends from all over the Greater Boston area, who would convene there every day.
What were the demographics like for the kids that hung out? Everything?
Everything. I started hanging out there in ’95. I was 14. But I was hyper aware of it since I was a little kid because I’d walked past The Pit with my parents when I was little and saw the punks and thought, “That’s so cool, that’s an option?” I found it pretty funny that I found myself. I was like, okay, yeah, I’m gonna do the thing – I’m going to be one of those people here. Good demographic. My mom is gay, and I had gay people in my life already but I didn’t know any teenagers, and it was in the mid ’90s, so everyone was like super, extra mean. People from every race. Slumming rich kids and, and other poor kids like me. Age-wise there were kids that were as young as 9 who were there every day, smoking cigarettes and hanging out already. People in their 30s, but for the most part the average was 16 years old.
It sounds like going to The Pit was something you looked forward to.
I looked forward to it, but there was nothing else to do. There was no Internet. If you wanted to hang out with all the people and talk shit or whatever you had to go to the place where they all were, and that’s where they all were. And man, you never know who’s going to be there when you showed up. You’re just like, okay, “These guys are here.” You just sat down and hung out regardless.
Do you have early memories of The Pit or maybe some fond or very strong ones that come to mind?
Tons. I have so many. Really bad ones that I will not talk about, scary ones, but also some of the funnest stuff ever. I don’t have children of my own, but if I had a 15-year-old, I probably would not be keen on them hanging out there. But I would also hope to have raised them in a way that they wouldn’t need to have a place like that to go to, you know? Everyone was kind of escaping. Everyone was trying to get away from something bad. Very few kids were from Cambridge who hung out there. There was a pull, they were drawn there. There’s a lot of people I met there who are dead. I experienced death as early as the first year hanging out there. It was super heady, in retrospect, but while it was happening I was having the most fun ever.
Two very intense sides of one experience – best memories ever, and learning a lot quickly.
It makes you grow up quicker, and I already kind of was in that stage with my home life, being on guard and having a good bullshit meter. That place only toughened you up even more. A lot of kids would come and hang out there because they thought it was cool and funny, and after a few weeks you never see them again. It wasn’t forever. It wasn’t for everyone.
Were there people trying to just sidle up to the experience for word-of-mouth credit?
Tourists. Me and my best friend – who’s still my best friend today, annoyingly [laughs] – I remember our first day, like “All right, we’re gonna do it.” He was 13, I was 14, and we’re going to go and try to sit close to the outside of it, by the top of the train station and then hopefully strike up a conversation with someone. You get in a little closer and a little closer and before you know it, you’re sitting on the slant. I don’t even know what it looks like anymore. I haven’t lived in Boston in so long, but I know they tore it down. There used to be a slanted wall. Once you made it to sitting over there, you were in. But it took a few weeks of going there to be able to make it to that point.
Was there a hierarchy?
Oh, absolutely. Everything I’m saying is so cheesy and so corny, talking about it. Like, dude, I’m 45 years old. I’ve moved on dramatically with my life. Even back then we thought it was cheesy if someone was, like, “Fernando, he’s a Pit Rat.” It’s not like that, you know, we just fucking hang out there sometimes.
So “Pit Rat” was being thrown around a lot.
I knew the term when I was a little kid when my dad was like, “Those are punks, those are Pit Rats, they hang out there every day.” I was like, oh, okay. It was like taking notes.
Hearing about it from an authority figure, you’re like, “I want to be that.”
My dad took me to my first punk show. He thought that a punk rock community would be a good place for me, and it was. My dad died when I was 17 of cirrhosis, so it was a very intense household to grow up in. By the time I was 17, I had, compared with my classmates in high school, deep friendships with people and peers from other parts of Massachusetts because of The Pit. When that happened to me, I had so much support and so many people who were with me throughout the whole thing. If I didn’t have The Pit, I would have had no one to really talk to other than teachers. So because of that, it was very, very important.
It was definitely a very important space for the youth, just because there weren’t a lot of resources for being young and also being alternative.
Yeah, we had the Boys & Girls Club in Watertown, and there was one in Jamaica Plain. Those were fine and all, it was good for swimming and recreational activity. No one was really there to talk to you. By the time I was 13 and I started getting into more subculture-y things, The Boys & Girls Club, it wasn’t cutting it anymore. I needed something with a little more. And I found it in The Pit.
Are there any classic Pit stories that you remember happening?
All right, so, yeah, all right. I thought of a few of them.
Great!
I wanted to have some fodder for you.
All right.
So, we used to do a thing called ”Pukey Tourist.” There was the Au Bon Pain across the street, that’s also no longer there. We would go there in the summertime when Harvard Square was just flooded with tourists, and they would stop and take pictures of us, and we thought it was really, really annoying. We knew the punks in Piccadilly were charging tourists for pictures. We weren’t going to try that. We just wanted to get them to stop taking pictures of us. So my friend Dan thought this thing up. We would go to Au Bon Pain and stuff our pockets with the free creamers that they had. We’d put like two or three of them in our mouth unopened and then pretend to be sick in front of the tourists on the sidewalk by biting down and spewing out all the creamer in front of them. Try to like, not get their shoes, but definitely close to their shoes.
Oh my god.
Just freak them out a little bit and just be as gross as possible. And, you know, so, so cheesy.
That’s awesome. Are you kidding me?
That was so much fun. I experienced a lot of things that definitely led to me and a lot of my friends’ future alcohol and drug problems for sure, which luckily we don’t have anymore. But it was definitely easier to happen there.
This is the ’90s, it’s pre-Internet. Something that’s happening to a lot of young people now is this instant gratification issue – “I want something that’s going to make me happy now.” If you had to fight through boredom, what were the kids doing all day?
In my first couple weeks there, I witnessed someone shooting heroin for the first time. And that person was my age, and I thought that was crazy. I’ve never touched that stuff. It wasn’t just the ravers and homies and punks and skinheads. We’re all hanging out, having fun together, but there was also a slew of, we called them “home bums” back then, the wacko crazy homeless dudes from the Harvard Square area. The homeless culture was totally different back then. We had a select few of three or four different people that would run to the 7-Eleven and buy us forties and stuff like that. All the payphones over there next to Out Of Town News and anyone hanging out there every day, they were all drug dealers. You could just walk up to any and you knew which ones sold what. You could score some weed real quick or LSD, mushrooms. Those were all big back then. And then heroin. There wasn’t a big cocaine scene there because cocaine is expensive. The idea of us doing cocaine was insane, but heroin was definitely everywhere. I noticed that as soon as I started hanging out there. I went to so many funerals for people I met in The Pit because of heroin. It’s crazy. By the time I was 18, I had gone to a dozen.
Oh my gosh.
When I was 18, 19, I started working jobs in Harvard Square. There was a Store 24 on the corner of Church Street and Mount Auburn. I worked there on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift for a year and a half. That was around the time I was kind of still hanging out in The Pit, or kind of phasing out of it. I worked at the Tower Records in Harvard Square around the same time, and then I worked at the Toscanini’s, which was, what’s in there now? Now it’s J.P. Licks. I was there for six years. My entire life was in Harvard Square for so long. Watching it change and watching the new generation of Pit kids, I’d look at them, and kind of scoff, like “Amateur hour over here.”
Like, “You guys have no idea.”
Yeah. You guys got it easy. It was about the time they were starting to get rid of all the pay phones, because the times are changing.
Was there a reason you started to pull away? Did you have a moment of “I can’t keep doing this”?
I definitely remember when we started hanging out there and seeing kids who were like 18 and 19. We were like, “Why are you guys hanging out with a bunch of 13-, 14-year-olds?” We thought they were kind of lame and we were like, “We’re not going to do that.”
I was in a punk band that was also doing pretty well, The Vigilantes. We signed a record contract when I was 17 and we had a punk house in Central Square. So we’re all kind of living there, seven people in a two-bedroom apartment. I still talk to those people almost every day, unfortunately, because they’re still my best friends in the entire world. The ones that are alive. The whole point was to go and find a community, I feel. And I found it, so there’s no need to hang out anymore. I didn’t need any more community. We had the people we needed. We were doing our own thing and trying to grow up, but we still wanted to be punks. We still did punk stuff, but it didn’t require hanging out outside. We knew liquor stores, we could go buy our own beer. We could acquire anything that we needed and we also had jobs. A lot of us did not come from good families. So we all had jobs. We were growing up. You know?
Do you have feelings about how Harvard Square has changed? You said you haven’t been in a while, and I’m curious to know how long you’ve been in New York.
I went there a few years ago right before they tore everything down, and, uh, I took some pictures there with my friend Jasper. Just kind of goofing around, and it was funny because there was literally no one hanging out there, no one sitting down, not even an old man having a cup of coffee, I don’t know, there wasn’t anyone there. It was kind of crazy. I don’t know, everything changes. The Harvard Square that I hung out in was different from the Harvard Square that my parents hung out in. Living in New York for the last 15 years, I’ve watched everything here change. It’s how the world works.
Change is inevitable, but transitions are tricky.
It’d be nice if it changed for the better. I heard that they’re tearing The Garage down also, which is pretty nuts.
That’s been in the works for a while, it’s been at a stop-and-start for a long time. What ended up drawing you to New York?
I had to. I mean, I was 31 years old, I didn’t want to end up a townie. I didn’t want to live in Boston my whole life. I was mentioning Jasper, he’s the person who I went to The Pit with for the first time and was in my band. We lived together, and we’re both here. We’re both in businesses in the same neighborhood here in New York. He was opening a seafood restaurant and needed someone, a consultant to come in as a chef and build out the kitchen and menu. So my wife and I moved here 15 years ago and it was about a year of work to get that done. And then, I started doing my own thing and I opened my own restaurant nine years ago, and have been doing that ever since.
Was everything better in the ’90s? Everybody says it was.
So, all right. How old are you?
I’m 25.
You’re 25? Okay, so I got 20 years on you. Let me tell you. Nostalgia is fun for a little while, but it’s dangerous. You can get trapped by nostalgia. And there’s nothing worse than someone who’s always just talking about how good it was back in the day without doing anything to make everything in the future better for themselves.
But short answer, yes, it was so much fucking better, insanely better.
One of the questions people ask is, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if you just woke up and it was in 1996 again?” It’s like sure, kind of, but can I be 45? I don’t want to be fucking 15 years old again. I don’t want to go through that shit again, one time with that was fine. And not just because of my personal stuff. Anyone at that age. I don’t want to go through high school.
Is there anything from your youth that you think has changed for the better?
Definitely the inclusion for LGBTQ kids. Back then they had to go to the Pit and to be a weirdo and hang out, they couldn’t even be in their own hometowns. I feel like now maybe those kids can hang in their own towns and don’t have to take three buses just to hang out. I remember other parents from the school that I was going to seeing me, and it just horrified them. You know, “Thank God my child is not like that,” and I say, “Yeah, but you should get to know me. I’m actually really well read. I’m in the National Honor Society. I’m a good student, you know, I’m a nice person. I just dress like this, listen to this music.”
We know so much more now. Back then, before the Internet, if you didn’t know something you had to really work hard to research it and find the answer to it. Or be around people, you know, sages and other older knowledgeable people who can teach you things. The quest, the desire for knowledge is kind of dissipated, I feel.
It’s hard to say what’s gotten better. For the most part, everything’s trying to turn to shit.
My last question is going to be the most important. You seem like a very big music person. If you could make a musical Mount Rushmore with your four favorite bands, who do you think would be on it?
Like apropos from the Pit? Or me now?
You now.
My old band I mentioned, Vigilantes, in March we opened for the Dropkick Murphys for a 30th anniversary thing. We went and opened one of the shows. It was fun playing for a lot of people, and we got to play with this band called Showcase Showdown. Back then they were the most pivotal local punk band and they broke up. They played that show in March. So definitely Showcase Showdown. They’re so important. It’s hard to say. The Specials. Most of your bands and the things they sing about are kind of the same, you know, about uh, equality, inclusion and optimism. Dumb, dumb optimism, you know.
Fontaines DC are great. I’ve seen them a bunch in the last couple of years and they’re blown up. Their message, their political message for Ireland, and deep, interesting poetic lyrics and a kind of punk rock music background. And, uh, I don’t know, Wu-Tang. Because of, you know, I don’t need to explain that. Around the same time that I was hanging on the Pit, getting into punk I was also deeply getting into hip hop and Wu-Tang were definitely the spearhead of that.
I mean, they’re pretty punk rock.
Exactly. An older boy in the Pit showed them to me, you know. “So you guys, it’s like nine guys, it’s like a band, you know, and they’re super crazy and they’re mean and entertaining.”
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, I really appreciate it.
How’d I do? Do you feel like you got what you’re looking for?
Oh, yeah, this is fantastic.
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