Lizard Lounge and Cambridge Common Will Close in May 2027 After Three Decades on Mass. Ave.; Owners Plan to Sell the Building

The Lizard Lounge, the basement music club under the Cambridge Common restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, will close at the end of May 2027 along with the restaurant upstairs, its owners told WBUR in a report published Friday.

Owners Holly Heslop and Charlie Christopher plan to sell the building, WBUR reported. Heslop said the couple was in talks with a buyer. The parcel at 1667-1673 Massachusetts Ave. was assessed at $3.58 million, according to Cambridge city records cited by the station.

"It's been a long run, and we know it's time," Heslop told WBUR. "Although I don't think either of us is particularly emotionally ready for it."

Heslop, 77, described the decision as a reluctant one. The restaurant's chef of 28 years, Arcesio Suarez, plans to move back to Colombia, and Christopher, 82, has been dealing with chronic health issues, WBUR reported. "I'd rather go until I couldn't go anymore, but I'm facing the facts," Heslop said.

The couple opened Cambridge Common, a pub and restaurant serving American food, in 1996 on a stretch of Mass. Ave. between Porter and Harvard squares, and opened the Lizard Lounge in the basement the following year, according to WBUR. At the time they already ran Christopher's restaurant and the small music venue Toad in Porter Square. When they bought the Mass. Ave. building, the basement was a function hall with pink walls and banquet tables.

"We had to unsee that and kind of do our thing down there," Heslop told the station. "It felt good right away, as we just started to rip out some of the old stuff and do our red walls and loungey feeling."

The club became a training ground for young Boston musicians and a regular home for established local acts, WBUR reported. It has hosted Patty Griffin, Guster, Martha Wainwright, Lori McKenna and Morphine's Mark Sandman, and the Boston-born band Lake Street Dive got its start there, releasing a concert film and live album recorded at the club in 2011. The venue also hosts a popular Sunday poetry night.

Billy Beard of the band Session Americana, who booked the club from its opening until 2021, helped design its look: dark red walls, dim lighting and no proper stage, WBUR reported. Bands set up on a carpet in front of a red curtain with the audience on three sides. Beard said he got the idea after a 1993 trip to Nashville where he saw bands "come off the stage and play in the round." "The physical confines of the space forced you to present music in a different way," he told the station.

Mike Rivard, leader of the Moroccan-jazz group Club D'Elf, said his band played the Lizard Lounge every other Friday from 1998 until the venue closed temporarily in March 2020, and hopes to revive the residency for a few months in 2027 before the club shuts for good, according to WBUR. "Going there is just a big breath of relief, like, 'Ah, we're home,'" he said.

Matt Smith, managing director of Club Passim in Harvard Square, told WBUR the Lizard Lounge "has been an essential part of the Cambridge/Somerville music ecosystem for over 30 years." He added: "Change is inevitable in a lot of ways, but this is a loss that we'll be reckoning with for a while."

Heslop said running the club was always financially difficult and that the restaurant effectively paid for the music. "We've been lucky that we've been able to have both clubs, Toad and Lizard Lounge, under the umbrella of a big restaurant because the liquor license is covered, the insurance is covered, everything is paid for, really, by the restaurant," she told WBUR.

The announcement adds to a list of independent venue closures in the area over the past decade. WBUR cited Johnny D's in Somerville's Davis Square, T.T. the Bear's in Central Square and Great Scott in Allston. When the couple put their Porter Square property up for sale in 2023, there were similar worries, but Toad was preserved and the restaurant reopened as McCarthy's, the station reported. Rivard told WBUR he worries the region is heading toward a point where most live music is in "corporate-run venues."

Staff were told about a month ago, Heslop said. "We've got three incredible managers who, after the tears subsided, have said, 'Well, so we're just going to make it the best eight months ever,'" she told WBUR. A public sendoff is planned for the spring, according to WBUR and Boston.com.

Still unknown: who is buying the building, what the buyer plans for the site, and whether any part of the music program could continue elsewhere.