‘The largest museum in Boston’: A walking tour to appreciate Fenway Park (2024)

For 108 years, Fenway Park has been sandwiched into the same eight-acre parcel of land in the middle of Brookline Avenue and Jersey, Van Ness, Lansdowne and Ipswich Streets. The oldest ballpark in the country has undergone changes over the past century, but the structure itself has remained the same.

In a way, it’s a time capsule. When you step inside the gates of Fenway Park, you are in the same building where Babe Ruth played more than a century ago. Many of the features that greeted fans in the first days of the park remain there today.

The Red Sox have fielded some terrific and terrible teams along the way. Many of those rosters, from the Dead Ball Era to the Steroid Era, have little in common beyond playing their home games in that same Fenway Park every year since 1912.

As part of The Athletic’s architecture series, we’d be remiss not to explore the long story of the most historic park in the country. We spent a recent rainy afternoon touring the exterior grounds of Fenway with Richard Johnson, the curator of The Sports Museum in Boston, for some insight into Fenway’s enduring legacy.

The land upon which Fenway is built

The Red Sox spent their first decade-plus playing home games at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, which was less than a mile from where Fenway Park would eventually be built. The new park would be sited on the outskirts of the Back Bay section of Boston, an entire area raised from literally nothing, as the city filled in sections of the Charles River to create new neighborhoods in the 1800s. The land for Fenway Park itself, however, was not landfill.

“The thing about the land itself, and you have to go back to the very start: This eight-acre parcel was never part of the filled-in land of the Back Bay,” Johnson said. “Even as far back as the 1700s, it was on the maps as dry ground. So from a geological and construction standpoint, this was an ideal place to build a ballpark. And when the Taylors (who owned the team) built it in 1911-12, they owned a company called the Fenway Realty Company and they were building apartment blocks around here.

“You can see them, these old brick, five- or six-story places. And they were trying to sell apartments and get folks to live here. So the Fenway name, yes, it’s the neighborhood, but it also helped to sell real estate for them, too.”

Fenway nameplate on Jersey Street

When they were building their new park, the Taylors wanted continuity with the Huntington Avenue Grounds. They hired 37-year-old James McLaughlin, one of Boston’s leading architects at the time, who positioned home plate at Fenway closest to the Brookline Avenue and Jersey Street corner of the park, creating the right-field sun effect that still plagues outfielders today.

McLaughlin’s touch is also on many other noticeable pieces of the park, including the brick facade on Jersey Street and the Fenway Park nameplate above the team offices.

“If you want to go back to 1912, it’s the facade of the park here,” Johnson said. “The inside is really 1933, 1934 and (other changes) since the new (John Henry) ownership came in.”

The exterior bricks and physical structure of Fenway are the oldest parts, dating back to the construction in late 1911 and early 1912. The words “Fenway Park” created by red bricks and white limestone and granite embedded atop the park along Jersey Street are from those very first days.

“The facade really brings you back to Smoky Joe Wood and Tris Speaker,” Johnson added, recalling two of the best Red Sox players when Fenway opened.

Fenway Park exterior a few days before its first ever game, 1912. #RedSox⁠ ⁠ pic.twitter.com/c5h5Vp21Kl

— MLBcathedrals ⚾️ (@MLBcathedrals) October 5, 2018

Johnson noted that prior to a renovation that added more premium seating and a new press box in the late 1980s, fans inside the park could look out above home plate and see a treetop on Jersey Street.

“You could see this tree rising above the back of this edifice here,” Johnson said, pointing to one of the trees outside the Red Sox offices on Jersey Street. “I’m guessing that tree, I bet, goes back to 1912, which is pretty cool.”

In the earliest photos of the park, there are indeed three trees on Jersey Street along the front of the park that are likely the same knotted ones still providing shade to vendors and fans alike today.

“Just in terms of the actual history of the bricks here, you put your hand on the bricks (and) it’s sort of like putting your hands on the bricks of the Old South Meeting House or the Old North Church,” Johnson said, referring to two of Boston’s most famous colonial sites.

Gate A ticket booths

Another original feature still intact — though repurposed — is the Gate A ticket booths. For 91 seasons, fans streamed through Gate A booths just as they had in 1912. But in 2002, the Red Sox brought the ticket turnstiles onto Jersey Street in a bid to enliven the game-day atmosphere outside the park.

“It used to be in the old days they’d have the ticket stands in there,” Johnson said, pointing toward the brick archways underneath the Gate A sign. “They’re now a museum display, but you’d buy a ticket and just show up. You can’t really do that now.”

Those ticket booths just inside the green gates have been turned into mini-museums with photos and memorabilia from Boston’s championship seasons.

Fire and reconstruction

Along Jersey Street, a bronze plaque recognizes one of the most significant moments in the park’s history: its 1934 reconstruction.

Tom Yawkey had just bought the team in 1933 and was seeking to spruce up the park with an overhaul that included reinforcing the wall in left with concrete and tin. His all-union reconstruction project was the second-biggest contracting project in Depression Era Boston after the building of the Tobin Bridge (then the Mystic River Bridge), according to Johnson. But a massive five-hour, five-alarm fire in early January 1934 wiped out the newly constructed left-field grandstand and center-field bleacher seating sections. There was a mad dash to finish the project before the start of the season in April.

“Two fires during the reconstruction meant they had to work triple shifts,” Johnson explained. “So what did they do? They built a house, an actual wooden house on the infield with a wood stove and a kitchen in it and bunk beds so the guys could work around the clock. Basically, it was like a military operation. There’s only one picture I’ve ever seen of it. But it’s a house on the infield; they had crews working around the clock even though they could have played some games at Braves Field (across town).”

The second deck of bleacher seats that never was

Fenway has gone through many renovations, but one thing that’s never been added is a second deck of bleacher seats, even though that apparently was in consideration as far back as 1912.

In Glenn Stout’s book about the park’s beginnings, “Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Year,” he noted that contemporary press reports said the park was built to support a second deck.

Construction of Fenway began in late September 1911 and was done by Opening Day in April. Stout wrote that since Taylor was in the process of selling the Red Sox, he wanted construction to focus on the most expensive seats around the infield. A second deck wouldn’t have been as cost-effective. It’s for that reason, too, that the grandstand in left field stopped awkwardly at what would now be Section 27, while in right field the stands stopped at what is currently Section 14. During the 1912 season, more seats were added to Fenway.

“When they were doing so well in the 1912 season, at one point in early September, they had a three-week road trip,” Johnson said. “Knowing they were going to the World Series, they built new stands for a portion of the bleachers and the left-field area.

“So the ballpark used to be probably a section or two over from the third-base dugout before the stands ended. It used to be open space. So they built a wooden stand there up to the wooden left-field wall, and then they built seats in the bleachers. They must have added 15,000 seats. At that point they weren’t going to spend the money to put in an upper deck, but could they do it? I’m sure they could.”

Fans during the 1912 World Series along the third-base line at Fenway. (Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

In the 1980s, private suites were built atop the left- and right-field stands, and later the addition of the right-field roof deck was added as well as the now-famous Monster seats in 2003, but that upper deck of seats still hasn’t been added.

The Wall

Speaking of the Green Monster, it wasn’t always known by that name and certainly didn’t look like what it does now.

When the park was built in 1912, the wall sat atop an earthen embankment that ran parallel to Lansdowne Street. (The awkward hill was later dubbed Duffy’s Cliff after center fielder Duffy Lewis played the hill so skillfully.) The roughly 25-foot-tall wooden wall on top of the small hill helped block the view of unpaid spectators at the garage across the street on Lansdowne.

Later in the 1912 season, the wall would be plastered with advertisem*nts, a feature that would remain until 1947 when light towers were installed and the wall was painted “Dartmouth green” to match the rest of the park.

For as much as the wall is part of Fenway’s storied history, there was brief consideration of expanding the park out toward Lansdowne.

“Tom Yawkey wanted to buy Lansdowne Street at one point,” Johnson said. “But he couldn’t get the political powers that be to agree to let him do it because he knew the dimensions of the park made it harder to win.”

There have been threats to Fenway over the years. Yawkey in the 1960s threatened to move the Red Sox because he wanted a new stadium built. In the early 1990s, Boston leaders explored plans for a “Megaplex,” a multiuse stadium for baseball and football. And in 1999, former Red Sox owner John Harrington unveiled plans to build a new Fenway, which would have been a replica of the original, next door.

None of those plans ever panned out. And when the Henry ownership arrived, they committed to preserving and renovating the park for now and the near future.

“It is such a charming place,” Johnson said. “Every time I come, I just want to put my hand on it to absorb some of the history by osmosis.

“(The Red Sox) basically have turned the park into the largest museum in Boston.”

(Top photo: Paul Rutherford / USA Today)