CultureNOW - Fenway Park at Lansdowne Street : James McLaughlin and Osborne Engineering Corp.

Fenway Park at Lansdowne Street
Cultural Landmarks

Original Architect
James McLaughlin

Structural Engineer
Osborne Engineering Corp.

Dates

Constructed, 1912

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Fenway Park - Robert Dermody

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Description

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ABOUT FENWAY PARK
Fenway Park is home of the Boston Red Sox and famed for its irregular dimensions and high left-field wall called the "Green Monster." It is the oldest sports venue still in use in the United States and is considered one of the most famous in the world.

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"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. We're looking east along Lansdowne Street in the new photograph, made during a Red Sox game on July 7. The ballpark is on the right. 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.

Poking out over Lansdowne is one of Fenway's newest additions. This is the grandstand that sits atop the Green Monster, the ballpark’s legendary 37-foot-high left-field wall. The grandstand is one of numerous recent improvements to the park by Sox owner John Henry and his talented architect, Janet Marie
Smith. After years of talk about replacing Fen way with something bigger and more up to date, the legendary ballpark’s future now seems safe.

In the foreground stands a group of staffers of Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities). We borrowed the 1909 photo from them. That view, made from the same spot, depicts a dreary and almost rural setting. On the left is a blank-walled garage, and on the skyline, looking surprisingly close, is the dome of the Christian Science Mother Church, completed three years earlier.

Fenway Park arrived to enliven this scene on April 20, 1912, a date when newspapers were still filled with accounts of the sinking of the Titanic five days earlier. The Sox won the opener and went on to earn four world championships in the first seven seasons in their new home. Two of those came with the help of a brilliant young left-handed pitcher named Ruth. In 1920, the Sox sold the Babe to the Yankees, who sensibly relieved him of his pitching chores. As all true Bostonians know, the Sox in the succeeding 84 seasons made a habit of coming agonizingly close, without actually winning. If they ever again triumph in a World Series, we'll probably all be on the phone to our therapists. The trusted order of the cosmos will have been violated.

Fenway suffered a major fire in 1934, and it's been altered many times. But it retains the intimacy of a bygone era. It's now the oldest and smallest park in the majors and has the narrowest foul areas, thus bringing the fans closer to the action. Despite its size, it regularly draws one of the highest annual attendances. It has magnetized a whole neighborhood around it, with Lansdowne now Boston's liveliest nightclub scene. Without Fenway Park, one feels, Boston would cease to be Boston."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Field of Dreams," Boston Globe, 29 August 2004

map not available at this time.

Location

4 Yawkey Way
Boston, MA
United States

Nearby Items

Fenway Park		447 feet
Dream Catching: Phil David Phine Memorial		926 feet
Boylston Street		0.2 miles
The Viridian		0.2 miles
Kenmore Square at Commonwealth Ave		0.3 miles
Kenmore Square		0.3 miles
Fenway Cultural District		0.3 miles