Fenway Park (9 page)
Authors: John Powers
A REGIONAL MEETING PLACE
Not long after Fenway Park opened for baseball in 1912, it became the venue of choice for all kinds of activities—from baseball and other organized sports to civic and religious meetings, including a massive turnout of 50,000 on June 29, 1919, for Irish political leader Eamon de Valera and the adoption of resolutions in favor of Ireland’s independence.
In subsequent decades, Fenway was rarely opened for non-Red Sox events, which makes the first decade’s schedule unusual. Among the hundreds of events held there in its first decade:
• In 1913, the Boston Braves were allowed to play several games at Fenway when the Red Sox were out of town. The holiday twin bills—featuring the Braves against the New York Giants on Patriots Day, and the Braves versus the Brooklyn Robins on Memorial Day—were expected to draw much larger crowds than their South End Grounds could accommodate. More than 22,000 fans watched each of the separate-admission holiday doubleheaders. Braves Field opened in 1915.
• In 1914, the Boston Lacrosse Club played the University of Toronto on June 1, immediately after the Red Sox played a game against the Washington Senators. It was noted that Red Sox President Joseph John Lannin, “an old lacrosse player himself,” approved the use of the field, with baseball fans allowed to stay after the game to watch the lacrosse match free of charge.
• Later in June 1914, Boston College held a “baseball carnival” at Fenway, with the BC baseball squad dropping an 8-0 decision to Holy Cross, after Boston College High School had beaten Rindge Technical, 2-1, in the first game. The games were featured as part of BC Commencement Week, and two bands entertained some 3,500 fans between games and between innings.
• In July 1914, Fenway Park was the scene of dancing, acrobatics, band and orchestra music, and a parade, all put on, according to the
Globe
story, “of the children, by the children and for the children.” The hope was that some 30,000 children in the Boston area would spend 10 cents each in order to attend, thus raising $3,000 to benefit children in Salem, Massachusetts, left destitute by a massive fire there on June 25. Boston vaudeville theaters and “moving picture houses” were expected to provide several acrobatic displays and other acts.
• On August 17, 1914, the Progressive political party held a Fenway Park outing at which former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was to speak. More than 10,000 tickets were sold for the event, and Boston Mayor James M. Curley was to attend. The outing included track events and a baseball game, but partway through the ball game in the late afternoon, rain forced the cancellation of the rest of the athletic program, and Roosevelt’s address was hastily moved to Boston Arena. About 4,000 people assembled for the address, which required “a great scurrying for trolley cars, taxis, and other means of conveyance from the baseball grounds to the arena,” where Roosevelt spoke for an hour.
• In November 1914, the Dartmouth College football team thumped Syracuse, 40-0, before some 13,000 fans, in what the
Globe
story called “a display of versatility in modern football which has never been surpassed by any eleven which the Boston public has had opportunity to see in action.” The Syracuse team had earlier in the season defeated football powers Michigan and Carlisle, but was no match for Dartmouth, which went on to outscore its remaining nine opponents for the season by 359-25.
• Just one week later, on November 29, 1914, a combination of local All-Star football players, most from Harvard, defeated the Carlisle Indians, 13-6, before a crowd of 5,000 in a game to benefit the Children’s Island Sanitarium. The game was called the last important game of the local season.
• In July 1915, it was “Natick Day” at Fenway Park, where the Red Sox played the Chicago White Sox, and the town of Natick, Massachusetts, feted one of its own—veteran American League umpire Tommy Connolly. Nearly 5,000 residents of Natick attended the game, which required “39 special electric cars to bring the greater part of the throng,” along with autos and railroad trains. Practically all business in Natick was suspended for the afternoon, and umpire Connolly was honored in a pregame ceremony. A Natick representative “told umpire Connolly what a great umpire he is and how beloved he is by his fellow citizens,” and Connolly was presented with a silver loving cup.
• In November 1915, Everett High defeated Waltham High, 6-0, before 12,000 fans at Fenway in “one of the very best played school football games ever seen in Greater Boston,” thus winning the right to play Central High School of Detroit for the national scholastic football championship.
• On Memorial Day, 1916, about 5,000 Spanish-American war veterans formed in line at Copley Square and marched to Fenway Park for a memorial service featuring bands and drum corps. Two years later, on May 26, 1918, about 35,000 attended a memorial service presided over by Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell for departed U.S. soldiers and sailors.
• On September 4, 1916, the Galway Men’s Association hosted a field day at Fenway Park with several thousand in attendance. The event featured Irish football, foot races, and step dancing. The highlight was a hurling match between the Shamrocks of South Boston and the Cork Club of New York, which the hosts won handily.
• Some 10 days later, the Bay State Odd Fellows held a parade through the streets of Boston, followed by religious and patriotic services at Fenway Park, with some 14,000 in attendance. The story noted that, “it was neither too warm nor too cool. . . . This and the splendid music made the parade enjoyable for even the women, about 400 of them.”
Ruth had spent much of the season playing in the outfield so that his bat could be in the lineup every day. After blanking the Cubs, 1-0, on September 5 in the road opener of the Series, he held them scoreless until the eighth inning of the fourth game, running his postseason scoreless streak (including his 1916 appearance) to 29⅔ innings, breaking Christy Mathewson’s record.
Since attendance had tumbled, the Series was back at Fenway instead of Braves Field and the fifth game almost wasn’t played after both teams initially refused to take the field as a protest against their reduced shares. “The players have agreed to play for the sake of the public and the wounded soldiers in the stands,” Mayor Fitzgerald told the crowd after a settlement was reached. Although the Cubs prevailed, 3-0, the Sox took the championship a day later as Mays, who’d won both ends of the August 30 doubleheader against the Athletics that all but clinched the pennant, mastered the visitors, 2-1, on three hits.
The victory left a bitter aftertaste. “With many minds wandering in serious channels, it can plainly be seen that it was a fatal mistake for baseball men to argue over dollars,” the
Globe
observed, “creating a situation that should have been diplomatically squelched in its infancy.” In retribution the national commission that oversaw the sport deprived the players of the diamond lapel pin that was the precursor to the championship ring.
It also was the last hurrah for the Sox, who didn’t reach the Series again until 1946 and didn’t win it again until 2004. It wasn’t until 1934 that Boston even finished in the first division again. The 1919 season was a dismal downer. Mays, who’d won 72 games for the Sox in five seasons, left the club in mid-July and was dealt to New York just before the August trading deadline. Ruth, whose rambunctious roistering had become a clubhouse problem, squabbled with both Frazee and Barrow. But if he frequently acted as if he was above the team, it may have been because he was its colossus. Even as the club tumbled into the second division, eventually finishing fifth with its worst record (66-71) in a dozen years, the Big Fellow was its top drawing card.
It was clear to Ruth, if not his employer, that he was worth twice as much as the $10,000 per year he was earning. “Frazee knows what I want,” Ruth declared as he flew off to Los Angeles to make a movie called
Headin’ Home
. “And unless he meets my demands I will not play with the Boston club next year.” But the thought of paying $20,000 to an ungovernable, if inimitable, man-child was anathema to the owner, who decided that he could make a far better deal with a certain gentleman in New York.
A panoramic view of Fenway Park in 1914.
IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
BY RON DRISCOLL
When the team’s popularity outgrew the Huntington Avenue Grounds (now the site of Northeastern University), the Red Sox built their new ballpark. With the same directness with which he baptized the team, John I. Taylor, whose family also owned the
Globe
, said, “It’s in the Fenway section, isn’t it? Then name it Fenway Park.”
The astute Taylors would not be hurt at all by this choice, as they also controlled the Fenway Realty Trust and were poised to directly benefit from development around the ballpark.
The Fens section of Boston was the centerpiece of the “Emerald Necklace” of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, a planned environment of babbling brooks and green vistas, a design that held out a peaceful vision for urban America. But the stronger influence upon Fenway Park, wrote the
Globe
’s Marty Nolan in 1986, was the unplanned, anti-pastoral engine of haphazard growth that butchered Boston’s landscape: the railroad. Lansdowne Street necessitated the improbable left-field wall because the street was squeezed by the multi-lined pathway of the Boston and Albany Railroad.
“In some ways, the Fenway is Boston’s secret little neighborhood,” said Michael Ross, its longtime city council representative, in 2009. “You might not even notice it if you’re not looking for it.”
The Fenway begins where the Back Bay leaves off, at Massachusetts Avenue, and contains some of the city’s landmark cultural, medical, and academic institutions: Symphony Hall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard Medical School, Children’s Hospital, Northeastern University, and the Boston Latin School.
It also has plenty of sports history besides Fenway Park, as the place where the Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics all played their first home games. About one-and-a-half miles from the ballpark, the first-ever World Series game was played in 1903 at the Huntington Avenue Grounds. Boston Arena, now called Matthews Arena and home to Northeastern athletics, hosted the Bruins from their 1924 inception through 1928, when Boston Garden opened. The Celtics debuted at Boston Arena in 1946.
“Fenway Park, unlike other sports venues, is not an aloof stadium surrounded by a desolate tundra of parking. It’s surrounded and hugged by real city streets. People and buildings, lights and signs seem to swirl and crash into one another in a visual metaphor of city vitality. This is the kind of urbanism that feels spontaneous, not like something overly planned.”
—Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker,
Globe Magazine
, August 2004
You can find a statue of baseball’s winningest pitcher, Cy Young, in front of Northeastern’s Churchill Hall, positioned about where the pitcher’s mound was on the old diamond. Young threw the first modern perfect game here for the Red Sox in 1904.
Across Lansdowne Street from the Green Monster is the House of Blues, which inherited the space that was long occupied by Avalon. The latest incarnation of the music club chain got off to a rollicking start in 2009 when the hometown Dropkick Murphys played six sold-out shows around St. Patrick’s Day. The venue is but one of several restaurants and nightspots within a long fly ball of the Fenway bleachers.
A short distance from Fenway Park’s clamor, you enter an area of three- and four-story walk-ups known as the West Fenway. “There are days when you could be in the West Fenway and not know there’s a ball game going on a block away,” said Ross. “It’s somewhat tucked away, a little bit of an enclave.”
At the end of the West Fenway’s Kilmarnock Street are Park Drive and the Fens. More than just open space, the area includes the Fenway Victory Gardens, originated in 1942 as part of the war effort, and Roberto Clemente Field for athletics. Across the way is Simmons College, which straddles Avenue Louis Pasteur beside Emmanuel College.
Emmanuel, founded in 1919 as the first Roman Catholic women’s college in New England, has benefited from a partnership with Merck, and it’s impossible to miss the gleaming 12-story lab building that opened in 2004 on campus. Simmons has also built on its legacy as a women’s college founded in 1899. In 2009, it opened one of the first green college buildings in the area, the $17 million, five-story School of Management and Academic Building.
A bit farther down Avenue Louis Pasteur is the Boston Latin School, the oldest school in the United States, having been founded in 1635. The current building dates to 1921, with an addition in 2000. Part of school lore is that Harvard University was founded so that Latin’s first graduates would have a college to attend. Alas, Benjamin Franklin was a dropout.
Harvard is represented in impressive fashion at the avenue’s end, where it meets Longwood Avenue. Harvard Medical School was founded in 1782, making it the third-oldest in the country, and it moved to the “great white quadrangle” of five marble buildings and a center quad in 1906.
Northeastern had a goal: to crack the top 100 in the
U.S. News & World Report
college ratings, and it embarked on that decade-long quest in the mid-1990s. It became more selective, strengthened its faculty, and spent more than $400 million on buildings and campus enhancements. Nowhere is NU’s transformation more striking than in the area of Centennial Common, just off Huntington Avenue.
The Museum of Fine Arts began in 1876 on the site of what is now the Copley Plaza Hotel in the Back Bay, and it moved to Huntington Avenue in 1909. For its centennial, the MFA embarked on a $500 million expansion and renovation that started with the reopening of its entrance on The Fenway.
Long known as one of Boston’s most beautiful spots, the Gardner Museum’s courtyard remains an idyllic setting for contemplation. The Gardner came into being in 1903 as one of the first buildings on the Fens, the vision of Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Lately, reminders of what is missing—13 priceless works stolen in March 1990 in the largest art heist in history—have overshadowed the 2,500 works that remain. Many of the frames still sit empty, and though dozens of leads have been tracked, the whereabouts of the stolen art, by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet, remains a mystery.