Hard Rock will be turning Long Beach’s Jergins Tunnel into a bar with music tying into the city’s “local vibe”
Earlier this year, Rolling Stone revealed that the tunnel in Lana Del Rey’s soul-searching album Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is a real place. Now the abandoned Jergins Tunnel in Downtown Long Beach, California will be turned into bona fide speakeasy.
City and business leaders announced Monday that the Hard Rock Hotel will be arriving to the coastal downtown in 2027, according to Long Beach Business Journal, at the vacant site of the former Jergins Trust Building on the corner of Ocean Boulevard and Pine Avenue. Mayor Rex Richardson announced that as part of the project, the Jergins Tunnel would be repurposed into a speakeasy with music that “ties into our local vibe.”
In the late Sixties, the tunnel was sealed off and closed to the public, but was once a subway that provided access the beach where food and souvenir vendors lined the walls. In her interview with Rolling Stone, Del Rey previously posed of Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd: “Would it be a worrisome concept to be boxed out and sealed up with all these beautiful things inside with no one able to gain access except maybe family?”
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“That was a question I had because that’s a very plausible thing that could happen with the music, with how pointed people’s perceptions of my music can be,” she explained. “Would it probably, plausibly, get to the point where it became a body of work that made me a vessel that was sequestered to the point where only family would have access to the metaphorical tunnel?”
Ocean Blvd received Grammy nods for both Album of the Year and Best Alternative Music Album. Meanwhile, “A&W” was nominated for Song of the Year and Best Alternative Music Performance, and “Candy Necklace” with Jon Batiste garnered a nod for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.