Tuesday, April 08, 2008

New Year's Day

The Fens 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 — and of its literary destiny — was the unplanned, antipastoral engine of haphazard growth that butchered Boston’s landscape, the railroad.

Lansdowne Street necessitated the improbable Wall because Lansdowne Street was squeezed by the multilined pathway of the Boston and Albany railroad, the tracks that transported Boston’s wealth and innocence westward. These roaring lines (now hemmed to a modest ribbon by the Massachusetts Turnpike) defined “the other side of the tracks.”

Fenway Park is funky because of an odd circumstance of geographical neglect. The Late George Apley explains why the Back Bay historically has lorded over the South End (and Fenway). Although South End houses were as grand and substantial as their counterparts in the Back Bay, Apley discovered a man sitting in shirtsleeves on a South End stoop. He sold his property, and the South End was degentrified for almost a century. Had Fenway not been on the other side of the tracks, it might have been bulldozed and replaced with boutiques. Fans would not have sat in shirtsleeves in the bleachers, the team would have fled to suburbia, and would the Framingham Red Sox have as much appeal?

-Martin F. Nolan, The Boston Globe, October 6, 1986.
(Courtesy of The Red Sox Reader.)

4/8/2008 10:40:30 AM by Mike Miliard | Comments [0] |

Comments are closed.