by Neil deMause
One taxpayer in particular was especially displeased. “Whoa, that’s disgusting,” said Lukas Herbert upon learning the news. “So basically the city has allowed the Yankees to hire lobbyists for free on the city’s dime?” He considered this, then added: “I should be able to deduct the hours that I spent working to save the parks in my neighborhood from my city income tax.”
The Two New Yorks
In December 2000 the New York Post’s Richard Wilner penned a column on New York’s “$3 billion sports stadium crisis.” The city, wrote Wilner, was “facing the possibility of having to build five sports palaces in the next five years,” counting new buildings for the Yankees, Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers. It was, he concluded, a daunting task, especially given New York’s history of allowing the new-stadium craze to pass it by: “Will fans ever get to experience a home game at a state-of-the-art stadium?”
Within Wilner’s five-year time span, though, New York would find itself in the midst of the greatest—and most expensive—sports-facility frenzy the world had ever seen. Barely four years after Bloomberg’s “it’s not practical” speech, the city had considered three new stadiums and two arenas (Cablevision was proposing a new Madison Square Garden inside the landmark post office building across the street from the current one), not to mention a NASCAR track on Staten Island. The Jets stadium may have died an ignoble death, but the Yankees and Mets received their new parks in record time; and the Nets’ move to a new Brooklyn arena, as 2007 dawned, remained on track. The total cost: close to $3 billion, with well over $1 billion of that to be borne by taxpayers.
What broke New York’s stadium logjam, and why were the Jets left out? It certainly wasn’t about need—New York’s teams were all unfathomably rich, even by the standards of sports franchises: The Yankees and Mets ranked first and third, respectively, in Forbes’s rankings of most valuable baseball teams, and the Yankees had brought in an incredible $277 million in revenues the year before, $70 million ahead of the second-place team, and more than the Toronto Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Devil Rays combined. None of the ballclubs could legitimately threaten to leave town: The baseball teams’ values, in particular, were tied to the immense cable television revenues that flowed from their presence in the nation’s largest urban area. And public opinion was likewise unmoved: Both the Jets and Nets projects were unpopular in polls, especially when New Yorkers were asked if they’d support using public money for construction; the Yankees’ and Mets’ projects sped to approval before anyone had run a citywide poll. One New York Times poll in the summer of 2005 revealed that when residents were asked to name “the worst thing [Bloomberg] has done since he became mayor,” the top-ranked item was “new stadiums.”
Why, then, were the Yankees’ and Mets’ owners looking ahead to new stadiums, while the Jets were left to work on sharing a new building in New Jersey with the Giants, a building to be paid for mostly with team and league funds, and why had Ratner’s Nets’ project languished for years in limbo? One difference, certainly, was Cablevision, whose ready cash turned the issue of public spending on sports stadiums into a front-page debate—and a bone of contention in the halls of power. “We would never have had the access in Albany that this campaign got without the Garden’s lobbyists, and that’s the reality of politics in New York,” Hudson Yards/Hell’s Kitchen Alliance spokesperson Anna Levin admitted after the Jets’ stadium was finally defeated. Moreover, because the Jets’ plan targeted Manhattan, it was both primed to receive more-prominent media coverage—the Daily News had its editorial headquarters in a building slated for demolition to make way for Hudson Yards—and opposed by better-connected politicians. (West Side assembly member Richard Gottfried, in particular, was a vocal opponent with strong ties to assembly speaker Silver.) As for the Brooklyn opposition, although it may have lacked a corporate sponsor, it did boast elected officials critical of the plan, and a well-connected populace: Actors Steve Buscemi and Rosie Perez would become frequent speakers at anti-Ratner rallies, and novelist Jonathan Lethem brought national attention to the Brooklyn arena battle with an open letter to architect Gehry in the Web magazine Slate.
The Bronx, by contrast, was run by a tightly controlled Democratic political machine that threw its weight behind the Yankees’ project—even Helen Diane Foster, who ultimately came out against the deal, had initially co-sponsored the initial home-rule message to endorse decommissioning the parkland. Led by powerful state assembly member José Rivera, whose son Joel chaired the city council committee that authored the home-rule legislation, the Bronx machine swiftly closed ranks and gave the cold shoulder to local concerns; when community board member Antonetty asked to have a Save Our Parks delegation meet with José Rivera, she says he quickly brushed her off. Unlike in the other boroughs, the only organized political opposition in the Bronx came from Community Board 4, and it paid a high price: After the stadium deals were done, borough president Carrion moved to purge several longtime board members who had been vocal in their opposition to the Yankees’ project.
“The discussion will always come back to the fact that this project was in the South Bronx,” says Steinberg. “That matters in terms of the resources that they had, it matters in the extent to which public officials weren’t overly concerned with the project, it mattered that so many people who participated were single mothers or had obligations and could show up to a hearing, but couldn’t dedicate the type of time that you see from community board members in other areas.” It also mattered in terms of media attention, which was hard to come by for a borough that few middle-class white reporters frequently visited, let alone lived in. “Several times there were meetings that drew over two hundred people, where you’d have two or three reporters,” recalls Steinberg.
“There’s clearly a double standard here,” says Herbert, noting that council member Christine Quinn, who was at the forefront of the campaign to stop the Jets’ stadium in her Manhattan district, pushed for quick approval of the Yankees’ and Mets’ plans once she was elected council speaker. Herbert concludes: “Stadiums are bad in middle-class or upper-middle-class white neighborhoods, but they’re wonderful economic development opportunities in black or Hispanic neighborhoods where everybody is poor. There are a lot of middle-class people that live in this neighborhood. But there’s also a lot of poor people here. And we were just told to shut up and take the project because it’s good for us.”
“In no other community would they accept a stadium across the street from where people live, and accept parking garages to replace parkland,” says Antonetty. She, like other Bronx residents, had not forgotten the Yankees’ official who, a decade earlier, had explained the team’s reluctance to contribute to neighborhood improvements by complaining about the “monkeys” playing in the local playgrounds. “That disdain has always been there,” she says. “And that’s the reason that they could look across the street and not see a park; they could see an empty lot where they could build a stadium.”
As 2007 dawned, Brooklynites were still fighting over Atlantic Yards. The project had received its final approval from the PACB, the same three-men-in-a-room board that had eighty-sixed the Jets’ stadium but faced several lawsuits from Develop Don’t Destroy’s legal team. In the Bronx, meanwhile, residents watched as construction crews excavated what had been Macombs Dam Park, a pile driver pounding beams into the ground with a steady beat that shook the surrounding buildings. “When you walk out of the building, you get hit with the dust,” said Donna Johnson, a resident of an ornate art deco apartment building that sits across from the stadium construction site. “There was one point, I felt like I had a shard from the rocks in my eyes—it didn’t come out for a couple of days.” Other Jerome Avenue residents complained of noise from trucks rumbling in day and night, and giant rats attracted by the garbage blowing around the former park site.
Hogi, at least, consoles herself with the fact that she and her neighbors fought back. “This thing was going down if we had walked around naked,” she s
ays with good-natured resignation. “My peace with all of this is that we fought it, and hopefully raised the awareness of people. I would be really upset with myself had I done nothing, and just buried my head in the sand.”
16
Saving Fenway
If there isn’t a new ballpark by 2006, there more than likely won’t be any Boston Red Sox. —Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan, April 11, 2000
On a Sunday in May 1999, the Boston Globe ran a special section titled “Fenway: A New Pitch.” Inside, the Globe detailed the Boston Red Sox’s plans to tear down Fenway Park, the team’s home of eighty-seven years, and build a half-billion-dollar replacement across the street. This, the Globe coverage made clear, was all for the best. “Proposed $545m ballpark to retain cherished details,” read the lead headline; the accompanying story, by reporters Gregg Krupa and Meg Vaillancourt, raved that the new stadium “mimics so many characteristic details of the beloved current stadium that the team even plans to dig up some of the old turf and play on it in the new facility.” Another story described neighborhood response to the new ballpark proposal as “quiet admiration for the proposal’s aesthetic dimension,” despite some “fresh questions over how ordinary life in the area would be affected.” Those who argued in favor of keeping the old ballpark were described as expressing “nostalgic melancholy that a legendary institution would be irreparably altered.”
Baseball columnist Dan Shaughnessy, coauthor of a Fenway Park “biography,” wrote: “Leaving Fenway isn’t going to be easy for a lot of us, but if the Sox can do what they say they’ll do, it’ll be their best move since they brought Babe Ruth to the old ballpark when the old ballpark was the new ballpark in 1914.” So certain was the Globe that a new ballpark was a fait accompli that it ran a special “Thanks for the memories” section featuring staffers’ reminiscences of Fenway.
This public showcasing of the Red Sox’s new stadium plans was no accident. John Sasso, a former ad exec and chief of staff to Governor Michael Dukakis, had been hired by the team to stage a series of “informational meetings” with local business, political, and media leaders around the stadium proposal. Among those met by Sasso’s “small army of consultants, architects and image-buffers,” as Boston Globe business columnist Joan Vennocchi would later describe them, were the editorial board and staffers of the city’s largest newspaper.
“That first week was remarkable, really, in its favorable press coverage,” Vennocchi later recalled. “It was a very coordinated effort, in the newspapers, television—they got a great sendoff. Then they came in here immediately afterward to answer questions and make us feel that we were part of the process.”
For anyone reading the Globe’s coverage, the overall effect was of a stadium that was on the way, no matter what the hopelessly nostalgic—the “zealots,” as they would soon became known on the Globe sports pages—might think. Veteran sportswriter Bob Ryan summed up the mood of the day by writing that “there is nothing contradictory about loving Fenway and pining for something new and efficient. Put me down with the progressives. I’m looking forward to sitting in Son of Fenway, and sooner, rather than later.”
Those picking up the Globe that day might have easily missed the news that, three days earlier, a small group of historic preservationists, neighborhood residents, and baseball nuts had issued their own call for the Red Sox to improve Fenway Park, not replace it. And certainly no one could have predicted that in the end, the zealots would win.
The Fenway Factor
When Fenway Park opened on April 20, 1912—the day, as generations of Sox fans were later to memorize, that word of the Titanic sinking first reached the mainland—it was just another of the many steel-framed ballparks that were then springing up across the country to meet baseball’s rising popularity. Red Sox owner John Taylor had chosen to wedge his team’s new home into an irregularly oblong block in the Fenway section of town, necessitating some odd concessions to geometry: Both the field and the bleachers bulged out into the ample space available in right field, while down the third-base line, Lansdowne Street cut so close to the action that a thirty-seven-foot-high wall had to be erected to keep every line drive from becoming a cheap home run. In 1933 new owner Tom Yawkey had the park expanded and its remaining wooden bleachers replaced with brick and steel, but aside from a handful of “roof seats” added following World War II, Fenway remained an old-fashioned single-deck ballpark into the modern era.
The first rumblings that the Red Sox might seek to replace Fenway came in the mid-1960s, when there was talk of a then-fashionable domed stadium to boost attendance, but nothing came of it. By the 1990s, though, as the first wave of new “retro” stadiums like Camden Yards and Jacobs Field came on line, there was again talk that Fenway’s time could be running out. “Fenway is a wonderful ballpark,” said John Harrington, the Red Sox’s chief executive officer. “But the sad truth is it’s economically and operationally obsolete. It just doesn’t allow us to compete like teams with modern ballparks do.” As Fenway prepared to host the 1999 All-Star Game, the Globe quoted one Boston business leader with ties to the team as saying: “The All-Star Game is a great opportunity for everyone to celebrate Fenway—and say a gracious goodbye.”
Red Sox and city officials first discussed a new “megaplex” along the waterfront near South Station to host baseball, football, and conventions, but that idea died quickly amid opposition from local landowners and South Boston’s famously insular political establishment. Instead, the team began to focus on a fifteen-acre plot of land immediately south of Fenway that was occupied by a mix of low-rise commercial buildings, including auto repair shops, fast-food restaurants, and souvenir stands. There, the team made plans for a new stadium with Fenway’s field dimensions but a modern, double-decked grandstand seating forty-four thousand; the famed Green Monster left-field wall and old infield grass would remain as tourist attractions outside the gates, while the rest of the ballpark would be demolished and redeveloped. Announced Harrington: “What we want to do is to preserve the old site, and move the sod and the spirits of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski a hundred yards down the street.”
This notion of “preservation” didn’t win many fans among actual historical preservationists. In 1997 the Boston Preservation Alliance (BPA) began running public service announcements insisting that saving the stadium made sense not only for the city but for the Red Sox: What the group dubbed the “Fenway factor” had helped the team sell out games even in years when the team was out of the pennant race, and the Sox themselves had touted the ballpark as the state’s most popular tourist attraction. The Boston franchise, meanwhile, according to Financial World magazine’s annual calculations, ranked a respectable sixth in baseball in revenues ($88.4 million) in 1996.
By the summer of 1998, recalls Dan Wilson, then a volunteer working with BPA on its Fenway preservation efforts, “it became clear that this was going to be too hot to handle” for the BPA, which wasn’t in a position to challenge the city’s power brokers head-on. And so, one night in September 1998, as Mark McGwire chased Roger Maris’s single-season home-run record on TV, nine people met at the Fenway apartment of Kim Konrad, a former staffer with the Boston Landmarks Commission who was also a volunteer on BPA’s Fenway campaign. The group included a mix of preservationists and Sox diehards who didn’t want to see their team’s home park meet the wrecking ball; its first president would be Konrad, who was a baseball novice but an expert in historic-preservation issues. The group filed for nonprofit status and, with the help of a $5,000 loan from the BPA, placed an order for white-on-green bumper stickers bearing the new group’s name: “Save Fenway Park!”
The experienced political campaigners in the group knew that they needed to move fast, before the Sox could present the stadium as a done deal. “They were moving slowly, but we could see it coming,” says Wilson. “If we had waited until they had a concrete proposal, we would have been dead in the water.”
The activists’ first break came in January
1999, when they were approached by Charles Hagenah, an architecture professor at Roger Williams University who wanted to do a project with his students on the possibility of renovating Fenway. Did Save Fenway Park! have any such plans? No, the group admitted; perhaps Hagenah and his students would like to design one? The Save Fenway activists put together a list of the team’s stated demands for seats, luxury seating, restrooms, and so on, and passed them along to the architect with instructions to find a way to fit them into the existing site.
“The whole point was to create alternatives,” says Erika Tarlin, a lifelong Sox fan who was on her way into the last home game of the 1998 season when she was handed a bumper sticker, and soon after found herself a Save Fenway regular. “You can’t just stand there and say, ‘No, don’t do it.’ So you had to take what their alleged needs were and show how you could satisfy them.”
The Hagenah plan was presented to the public on May 13, 1999. It was a double-decked model with the same number of club seats and luxury suites as the Sox plan, but built atop the base of the existing ballpark, with the field and Green Monster intact. A new upper deck, seating ten thousand, would be cantilevered over adjacent streets, while buildings alongside Fenway would be pressed into service for such uses as team office space and food preparation.
Even as the press conference was under way, recalls Wilson, the Red Sox issued their own press release announcing that they would present stadium plans two days later. “But we had beat them to the punch,” he says. “And from that point on, this was an issue of you are either for renovation or for the new stadium. There were two alternatives.”
“It’s Just Unrealistic”
According to the Red Sox proposal, a new stadium would come with an initial price tag of $545 million, including $350 million for the building itself, plus additional expenses for new garages, land acquisition, and other infrastructure. (The city would also need to use its power of eminent domain to seize a bit more than ten acres of private property—another five acres would come from closing existing streets—to make way for the new structure, which would take up 50 percent more ground than the old ballpark.) Beyond indicating that they would roughly split the costs with the city and state, team officials were unspecific about how the project, which would be the most expensive sports facility in U.S. history, would be paid for.