Fenway 1912 (56 page)

After
Charles Logue's
death, his son, Emmitt, took over the company and ran it until 1949, when his son, Emmitt Jr., took over as president until closing the company in 1972. Charles Logue's great-grandson, Jim Logue, started the construction firm Logue Engineering three years later in 1975, and in 2006 he was joined in the business by his son, Charles Logue's great-great-grandson, Kevin Logue. They are Red Sox fans.

After helping with the addition of seats to Fenway Park for the 1912 World's Series, architect
James E. McLaughlin
apparently was never called on by the Red Sox again in regard to Fenway Park. He continued his successful career as an architect focusing primarily on public buildings. His crowning achievement—apart from Fenway Park—was probably the Commonwealth Armory on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Other notable buildings he designed include the Quincy State Armory, Watertown High School, Dorchester High School, Boston Latin, and the Woburn Armory. In 1918 he also designed 256 houses for the U.S. Housing Corporation to provide housing for wartime shipbuilders in Quincy, Massachusetts. In 1920 McLaughlin took on a partner, G. Houston Burr, and the two went into business as McLaughlin and Burr, with offices at 88 Tremont Street. McLaughlin and his wife Mary lived on Reservoir Road in Chestnut Hill and had no children. Over the decades his contribution to Fenway Park was little noticed, and when he died in February 1966 the passing of the man who designed Fenway Park went unnoticed in Boston newspapers.

By opening day of the 1913 season the temporary seats that ringed the outfield of
Fenway Park
had been removed, as had the bleachers on Duffy's Cliff, but other seats added to accommodate the 1912 World's Series, such as the third-base stands, the right-field bleachers, and the gigantic press box, remained as permanent fixtures, even as the evolution of Fenway Park continued.

The ballpark was pressed into service for the World's Series once again in 1914, this time hosting the "Miracle" Boston Braves, who abandoned the South End Grounds for the roomier confines of Fenway Park. They swept the Series in four games and, for the first and only time, made Fenway Park the site of a no-holds-barred world championship celebration.

Although the Sox won the AL pennant in 1915 and 1916, they played the World's Series each time at Braves Field, which had a greater seating capacity than Fenway Park. It was not until 1918 that Fenway Park hosted the World's Series again. Although the Red Sox defeated the Cubs in six games, the finale at Fenway Park was not unlike the finale in 1912: the Sox won the final game, but it was played to a park at only half-capacity because a threatened players' strike had left fans disgruntled.

By then, the remaining wooden stands were beginning to show their age. Although ownership of the team had passed from Joseph Lannin to Harry Frazee, the park remained the property of the Taylor family and in its first decade was the beneficiary of very little maintenance. By the time Bob Quinn acquired both the ball club and the ballpark in 1923, the wooden portions of the park—the third-base stands, both bleacher sections, and the pavilion—were already past due for some work, the ten-year usable life of white pine having been pushed well past its limit. Quinn, although well intentioned, was underfinanced from the start, and under his ownership the decay of Fenway Park increased dramatically. The ballpark was barely ten years old and already starting to fall apart.

On May 7, 1926, two small fires broke out beneath the third-base stands but were rapidly extinguished. One day later, just after the end of the game, the wood structure, dry as tinder after more than a decade of exposure to the elements, caught fire again under suspicious circumstances. This time it burned to the ground, and if not for the heroic efforts of area workers, who ran garden hoses to the grandstand roof and doused it with water, the grandstand roof probably would have caught on fire and that might well have spelled the end of Fenway Park. The structure was saved, but instead of rebuilding, Bob Quinn used the insurance money for operating expenses. For the rest of his tenure the ground along left field beyond the grandstand sat empty, just as it had when Fenway Park was first built. Ever so slowly, the park was returning to its original April 1912 configuration.

By 1928 Quinn, desperate to stay afloat, wanted to sell Fenway and was making overtures to the Braves, proposing that the two clubs share their field in Allston, but the National League club turned him down. By then, a decade of bad luck, bad decisions, and lack of money had buried the Red Sox in the second division. Apart from holidays or visits by Babe Ruth and the Yankees, attendance at Fenway Park rarely topped more than a few thousand fans a game and sometimes was even less. No one was extolling the virtues of the park, singing its praises, or waxing nostalgic about being taken there by their father or anyone else. The ballpark was a dump.

That began to change on February 21, 1933, four days after Tom Yawkey celebrated his thirtieth birthday and received control of his family inheritance of more than $7 million. He celebrated the occasion by dropping $1.2 million on the Red Sox, buying the team and the ballpark. Over the next few seasons, as he tried to buy a championship by acquiring players like Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, and Joe Cronin, Fenway Park did not miss out on his largesse.

After the 1933 season, even as the NFL's Boston Redskins played their home games at Fenway, Yawkey embarked on a renovation of the ballpark. Duffy's Cliff, which had been greatly diminished in 1926, was dug up entirely and hauled off. Lansdowne Street was held back by a concrete barrier, leaving only a subtle rise to serve as a warning track in front of a new left-field fence made not of wood but primarily of concrete and tin. As soon as the football season ended reconstruction proceeded to other areas of the park, particularly the outfield bleachers, which were torn down and rebuilt in steel and concrete.

But on January 5, 1934, a fire broke out in the wooden falsework beneath the new bleachers when "salamanders," gas-fired heaters used to help concrete cure, sparked a fire, possibly a case of arson to create a diversion for a planned payroll heist. The payroll was saved, but the fire destroyed the new bleachers.

It was the best thing that could have happened. Tom Yawkey responded with an even more ambitious renovation plan. He renovated the entire ballpark, and over the next three months more than one thousand workers toiled around the clock to ready the park for opening day.

By then Fenway Park had taken on much of the look it would retain for the next fifty years. The ballpark was painted "Dartmouth green," the facade was sandblasted, the press box and grandstand roof were rebuilt, a new scoreboard was built into the left-field wall, and the new concrete-and-steel bleachers, pavilion, and third-base stands were integrated into the main grandstand, which received a near total facelift.

Over the next few decades most changes to the park, with only a few exceptions, were incidental. Following the 1939 season, bullpens were built in right field, a move that cut down the home run distance by twenty-two feet and was widely believed to have been done to make it easier for Ted Williams, a rookie in 1939, to hit more home runs. In 1946 "skyview" seats were added on either side of the press box, and lights were installed in 1947, making it possible to play night games in Fenway Park for the first time.

In 1952 the Braves abandoned Boston for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the benefits of a new ballpark, built by Milwaukee County. In Boston and elsewhere major league fans and owners alike began to feel that they, too, deserved new ballparks with expansive parking lots underwritten by taxpayers—or at least some help with renovations and infrastructure. To that end, in 1958 the Red Sox asked the city to cede Lansdowne Street for expansion purposes, but they were turned down. Soon plans for a new ballpark were being floated, the most common idea being a multipurpose stadium that could also serve as a football field, to be built in either the Fenway, the South Station area, or the western suburbs. But the timing was not right: Boston's weak city government, a stagnant local economy, and anti-Boston bias at the state level left all such plans on the drawing board—and saved Fenway Park. If such a stadium had been built, Fenway would undoubtedly have been torn down.

Instead, Fenway Park was again left to deteriorate, and only the most basic maintenance took place. By the mid-1960s Tom Yawkey, frustrated with the performance of his team and the lack of financial help from local officials, began speaking openly of moving the Red Sox from Boston and abandoning Fenway Park. Sox fans yawned. On the final day of the 1965 season the smallest crowd in the history of Fenway Park, 487 fans, bothered to show up.

Then came the "Impossible Dream" season of 1967. The moribund franchise rose from the dead and won an improbable pennant. Just as older ballparks elsewhere were beginning to be introduced to the wrecking ball, a new generation of baseball fans were reintroduced to Fenway Park. Almost overnight Fenway Park went from an anachronism to an asset, and it was soon deemed worthy of preservation. As the Red Sox remained competitive into the early 1970s and attendance surged, the team began to revitalize the park, building a workout area for the players beneath the center-field bleachers, installing plastic seats in 1974, and in 1975 adding a new scoreboard and replacing the facade of the left-field wall. When the Red Sox played the Cincinnati Reds in a classic World Series that fall, the contrast between Fenway Park and the Reds' super-stadium, Riverfront Field, was obvious. Fenway was a treasure and the super-stadium an abomination. For the first time in Boston history "going to Fenway," as a trip unto itself, became at least as important as going to see the Red Sox.

Tom Yawkey died in 1976, and his wife, Jean, took over. In 1980 the team embarked on a long-overdue, multi-year plan to refurbish and modernize the park while remaining relatively sensitive to preserving its unique personality. Pilings and foundations were reinforced to support new luxury boxes on the roof, the clubhouse was refurbished, the lighting was upgraded, and the grandstand got a new roof. The plan culminated in 1988 with the construction of the "600 Club" on the grandstand roof behind home plate, which also resulted in the relocation of the press box to the structure's roof.

The 600 Club was arguably the worst addition in the history of Fenway Park. Apart from the aesthetic issues it raised—the structure changed the scale of the grandstand completely and for a time made the entire structure appear somewhat top-heavy and out of balance—it put well-heeled fans behind a massive shield of Plexiglas. It also changed the wind patterns in Fenway Park, adversely affecting home run totals. Although it would take a number of seasons before team management realized it, the new structure subtly changed the ballpark from an offense-minded park to one much more neutral. The addition of the 600 Club had one more deleterious effect as well—its construction precluded the construction of a full and complete second deck. Logistically, it became just too difficult to deconstruct the 600 Club structure and reconstruct a complete second deck during the off-season. Fortunately, however, the most egregious and aesthetically offensive feature of the structure, the Plexiglas barrier, was removed before the 2006 season.

Jean Yawkey died in 1992, and control of the team passed to the Yawkey Trust, administered by John Harrington. Even as Fenway Park began to inspire a new generation of "retro" ballparks, such as Baltimore's seminal Oriole Park at Camden Yards, before long team officials were extolling what Fenway Park was not instead of what it was. They again began to beat the drum for a new ballpark, preferably one financed on the backs of taxpayers. The team was floating the notion that Fenway Park was obsolete and irreparable, that the park made it financially impossible for the team to compete, and that any kind of renovation plan was unfeasible. The Sox proposed a new park, to be called New Fenway, a double-decked park with the same footprint to be built adjacent to the existing Fenway Park.

Although these plans got farther along than most other schemes—the local media fell for the plan with little scrutiny—when everyone crunched the numbers and came up with nothing but red it fell apart. The Yawkey Trust finally decided to quit while they were ahead—and the stock market was high—and put the team up for sale, effectively killing any plans for a new ballpark.

On March 1, 2002, the Red Sox were purchased by a group led by investor John Henry and television producer Tom Werner. At a total cost of $286,000,000, during the subsequent decade the team embarked on the most ambitious changes at Fenway Park since the renovations of 1933–34. Behind the wind of a winning team and an aggressive public relations program, the Red Sox were able to obtain cooperation from city officials that had been withheld from previous owners. This included the taking of Yawkey Way before, during, and after games and permission to construct, alongside Lansdowne Street, the "Green Monster" seats atop the left-field wall, a feature every Red Sox fan over the age of three had always thought should be built and wondered why it had not.

Under the direction of former senior vice president of planning and development Janet Marie Smith, nearly every expansion plan that had been deemed impossible by the ball club's previous administration was now found to be not only possible but affordable. A host of changes were undertaken at the park, including a reinforcement of the foundations that would make them sound, according to team president Larry Lucchino, "for another forty years." In April 2002 two rows of "dugout box seats" on the infield side of both dugouts to the backstop were built, seats that essentially mimicked those created by James McLaughlin for the 1912 World's Series. That September, Yawkey Way was turned over to the Red Sox during ball games, and the gate A concourse was expanded. In April 2003 the Green Monster seats were added, and two rows of box seats were extended from the end of the dugouts to the outfield. Later that year another large concourse was opened in right field, and in 2004 right-field roof seats were added. Nearly every year since, the park has seen some additional change—seats added here, a restaurant there—as the ballpark's exterior footprint has increased. When the "Jeano" Building, the former site of NESN on the corner of Brookline Avenue and Lansdowne Street, was annexed and renovated, more of the park itself could be turned over to seats and other contemporary amenities, and the capacity of the ballpark increased by more than five thousand spectators.