The T pit. A brick square of sorts bordered by the glass windows of the Cambridge Trust Bank, Mass. Ave. and the T station. Most tourists and students on their way to the subway or to stores and cafes around Harvard Square avoid lingering in this smoky hangout of would-be adolescent punks sporting black leather, spikes and the latest in hair design and coloring. The pit is a hangout, and it's nothing like the IHOP or the yogurt store you liked to dawdle in after school. This is a real urban joint, the territory of ruthless teen-age druggies and anarchists. Or so you think.

15 Minutes went to check out the scene and meet the personalities that so often intimidate passers-by. Unfortunately it was raining on Saturday. And all we could find were Izzy, his friend Andrew and a pair of pink-robed hare krishnas.

Izzy was sitting at the top of the T escalators, taking shelter from the rain. He was sporting a leather jacket covered with leopard-spotted fur that matched his dark spotted bleached-blond hair. A bright-red mohawk ran down the middle of his leopard hair. Greasy black jeans, patched many times over at the crotch completed his outfit.

Izzy, 19, has been hanging out at the Square since he was 14. He comes to the Square to panhandle when he's broke and because it's safer.

"Other parts of town people just want to beat you up," he explains, though he has had many run-ins with the Harvard and Cambridge police.

He and his friends aware that they intimidate other people, too.

"They're afraid of things they don't understand," Izzy says of the timid students and tourists.

Izzy is the real thing. He won't let us take his picture.

"Anyone who'll let you take their picture are posers," says his friend Andrew, 27, in between sips of his Snapple Iced Tea. Most of the kids who hang out in the pit "have their parents buy hair dye and come to pick up 14-year-old girls," he continues.

"They don't understand what life is about," says Izzy. "Punk is everything to me." All the posers, "the skin heads, the jocks into hard core, don't recognize their punk origin."

During his five years of hanging out in the pit, Izzy has noticed an evolution, an absolute revolution in Pit personalities.

"The Nazi skinheads got into reggae and started smoking pot," he observes.

"There are a lot less ass kickers now. They've gone to jail or the graveyard," says Jesse, whom we met the next day.

We went back to the Pit on Sunday. It was sunny and Izzy was there hanging out with a group of 16-year-old girls, clothed in the latest fashions from the Limited. They said they were "from suburbia" and they came because they felt "comfortable."

Jesse, 19, lives with his parents in North Cambridge. With unwashed brown hair tucked in a cap and pulled back in a pony tail, Jesse corroborated many of Izzy's statements.