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
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
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