Cults of the Underground

The chase is on — and it’s headed to Harvard. A taxi screeches to an abrupt halt and a man hurriedly rushes out. The year is 1939, the fugitive is a suspected Nazi spy, and his pursuers are FBI agents that tracked him all the way from New York. They see him run into one of the River Houses, but then, without warning, he seemingly vanishes into thin air.

Later, it’s discovered that the spy thwarted surveillance by sneaking through the Harvard steam tunnels, a secret maze criss-crossing underneath most of campus. For years afterward, it remains unclear how the spy was able to navigate them or how he even knew about the tunnels in the first place — the legendary, enigmatic labyrinth still largely unknown to most of the student body.

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Throughout their history, the tunnels have served as something of a double-edged sword for Harvard authorities. In cases like the spy story, they’ve posed a security risk to law enforcement; in others, officers have been able to wield the network to their advantage.

When segregationist George Wallace spoke in Sanders Theater in 1968, Harvard Police escorted him out through the tunnels to avoid the potentially violent protesters outside. Similarly, when South African Consul-General Abe S. Hoppenstein was beset by anti-apartheid protesters after a 1985 speech in the Lowell Junior Common Room, he was ushered to a getaway car via the underground passageways.

The fabled history of the Harvard steam tunnels is so bizarre that the boundary between fact and fantasy frequently becomes blurred. A likely apocryphal story of the 1969 student occupation of University Hall holds that administrators fled the protestors through the tunnels, and urban legends of previous adventurers circulate in tunneling communities, slightly evolving with every retelling.

There is a recurring pattern of groups emerging for the purpose of exploring the underground. In the 1980s, an infamous cadre of “tunnel runners” was known for leaving graffiti on tunnel walls during their late-night expeditions. In 2013, a secret “Roofs and Tunnels” society got caught using the Lowell dish return to sneak into the steam tunnels. Just two years ago, a similar group named “Rho Alpha Tau” was formed to explore out-of-bounds corners of Harvard, but it has since died out. Between graffiti and spoken lore, there are indications that many other cohorts of tunnelers have come and gone, each leaving their unique marks on the subterranean mythopoeia.

All of these societies are drawn to the tunnels despite real danger — even small leaks in the steam pipes could be seriously hazardous. Besides this, there is also a legal threat: HUPD considers trespassing in the tunnels a criminal offense. Nevertheless, new disciples keep appearing, often exercising an almost religious reverence for the exploration of the unknown. They are the worshippers and the tunnels are their gods.

What repeatedly draws them to the altar? While there is the thrill of the cat-and-mouse game and the exhilaration of being somewhere off limits, the appeal goes beyond the elusion of authority.

Harvard’s steam tunnels are fundamentally a realm of mystery and intrigue. Consistently captivated by the unknown, tunnelers are drawn to interweave their own stories into the opaque history of the underground. In a place where myth and reality converge, the graffiti and stories that explorers contribute connect them to a colorful lineage of predecessors, in turn deifying them to their successors.

Adam V. Aleksic ’23 is a joint concentrator in Government and Linguistics in Kirkland House. His column “The Harvard Beneath Our Feet” appears on alternate Thursdays.