What follows is part of the Globe’s weekly Camberville & beyond newsletter, which explores the latest from Cambridge and Somerville. You can read the Jan. 15 edition here.
Alewife station is kind of dystopian, if you pause and look.
It’s not just the gross drips of water from above, the boarded-up windows, and the scaffolding, and rust, and trash. It’s not just the decaying ceilings and floors, the peeling signs. Not just the layer of grime across the station. Not just the deteriorating garage with closed-off parking ramps covered in a colorful array of graffiti.
Not just the vacant storefronts. Not just the discarded syringes in plain sight — next to a day care.
It’s something more. It’s that this grim place is the Camberville welcome to people walking from nearby and commuting in from the ‘burbs.
It’s that this is how the MBTA greets so many passengers boarding its most popular subway line.
I emailed the T to ask: What gives?
It wasn’t always this way. Alewife Station used to be a gem.
People had been trying to extend the subway beyond Harvard Square starting soon after that station opened in 1912.
It took a lot of decades and dollars and generations of community advocacy, but the Red Line extension to Porter, Davis, and Alewife was finally completed about 40 years ago. And the last dazzling link was greeted with huge celebration.
At a ribbon-cutting, officials cheered the grassroots movement that stopped a massive urban highway expansion and pushed politicians to lean into public transit instead.
“Since the opening of the original Harvard Square Station in 1912, there have been dreams of extending Red Line service to the northwest,” then state transportation secretary Fred Salvucci said in March 1985. “With the opening of Alewife . . . those dreams are now cast in cement.”
Today, Alewife’s concrete has cracks in it.
Alewife Station, and its garage in particular, has been a trouble spot for a while, chunks of garage concrete tumbling down in recent years. So it was regarded as good news when the MBTA made a splashy announcementin 2024: The agency was looking for a developer who, in exchange for getting to build around the station, would pay to tear down the crumbling garage and rebuild parking for the T.
Then: crickets.
I reached out to the MBTA about the ignominious state of the station, and what its future might be. I pointed to the note on the agency’s website that said, “We’ll select a joint development partner and begin project planning in summer 2025.”
MBTA bails on Alewife project, leaving fate of crumbling garage unknown
The T told me this week that the agency actually “has voided” that effort, “finding that current market conditions are not favorable to maximizing the property’s value for transportation priorities.”
In other words, “the financials did not work” given the economic tumult of the last year, Erika Mazza, a top T official, explained to me. So the agency has gone back to the drawing board to come up with a different way to entice an Alewife Station developer. Perhaps, she said, the T could offer a deal that would require less upfront private-sector spending so the math works out felicitously for everyone involved.
In the meantime, she told me, “the garage is structurally OK.” And the T will turn to focusing on the rest of the property in due time.
I asked Mazza, the agency’s chief enterprise development officer, how Alewife got so bad. Forty years is a long time, but not such a long time.
She noted there was underinvestment in the infrastructure of the whole T for decades, and Alewife Station is no different. Since Phillip Eng became general manager almost three years ago, she said, the agency has worked to get the system safe and rid it of slow zones.
Getting the trains running on time “and getting our system safe for riders to return is primary,” Mazza said. “And with that, we are also looking at our stations and what we can do.”
As for Alewife, Mazza told me the agency is trying to attract new tenants to enhance “vibrancy and help on the attractiveness of the station while we strategize on next steps.”
Mazza didn’t say it exactly, but I heard her subtext as this: It took decades for the system to fall into this state of disrepair, so the riding public could maybe give the T some grace, or at least some time, as the agency triages fixing the system, and the stations, piece by piece.
I’ve kept going back to Alewife this month, looking at what the station is, musing about all it could be. But on each visit, I can’t shake the feeling that — for now, at least — this is truly the end of the line.
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Joshua Miller
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