by Neil deMause
Larry Lucchino, who had served as Werner’s CEO in San Diego and would take on the same role for the Red Sox, raised hopes when in his inaugural press conference he promised, “We will preserve all that is good about Fenway Park and take that experience to new levels.” Save Fenway, always eager to exploit any opportunity, wrote up a 110-page report called “Home Field Advantage” that included both arguments for renovation and the proposals that had been drawn up at the previous summer’s charrette. Tarlin hand-delivered it to the Red Sox offices on a Friday afternoon, she says, and “got a hand-written note back on Monday from Larry Lucchino: ‘Thank you for taking the time.’” She adds, “And that April we were chatting with Janet Marie Smith.”
Janet Marie Smith had first rocketed to fame in the late 1980s, when Lucchino, then president of the Baltimore Orioles, picked her to oversee design and construction of that team’s new stadium at Camden Yards. At the time, both she and Lucchino had been explicit in crediting Fenway with inspiring them to demand that designers HOK turn their generic plans for an Orioles stadium into something with a sense of history. Now, her old boss had brought her in to run stadium operations for the Red Sox—but would that mean preserving Fenway, or building a modern facsimile?
In late 2002 Boston got its first hint of what was to come, as Smith revealed that the team was considering adding seats atop the Green Monster and the right-field roof, and moving food-preparation facilities to an adjacent building to create more concourse space under the bleachers. While she dismissed these as “just plain, old-fashioned fix-ups,” she also said ownership felt “optimism” about staying at Fenway for the long term. When the new seating proved a huge hit, the team moved ahead with more renovations, getting approval from the Boston Landmarks Commission to increase capacity by 3,700 fans by expanding the existing roof boxes from four rows to eight and adding more standing-room tickets; as part of the construction work, the original pillars holding up the roof would be removed and replaced. The team also applied to have Fenway put on the National Register of Historic Places, which would make it eligible for a federal tax credit equal to 20 percent of the team’s renovation costs.
All were adaptations of ideas that had been introduced in the Save Fenway Park! charrette. One of his team members, says Bess, likes to quip that Henry “should be happy that the Save Fenway Park! charrette produced about $500 million of value for the Red Sox—for free.” Mostly, though, those involved were pleased just to have helped influence the park’s future; as Kim Konrad says, “We aimed to put the ideas in their heads so that they would think they were their own.”
On March 23, 2005, Red Sox execs gathered in the soon-to-be-remodeled .406 Club behind home plate to announce that “the Red Sox will remain at Fenway Park for the long term.” Declared John Henry: “It is an honor to have the opportunity to protect and preserve Fenway Park. We see how its history and charm attract people from all over the world, and how it helps connect generations within families. We will continue to listen to our fans and make improvements inside the park, at our own private expense, as we have done over these past three years.” Lucchino called it a “no-strings-attached commitment” to stay at Fenway indefinitely.
It was as close to a declaration of victory as Save Fenway and its allies were likely to get. “For those of us who’ve been beating our heads against the wall for fifteen years about neighborhood ballparks, this is as much of a success story as we’ve been able to muster.” says Bess. “I think we’ve won the argument that ballparks can be parts of cities. What we haven’t won is the idea that they should be neighborhood ballparks instead of parts of entertainment zones. The victory is that we’ve gotten the ballpark back into the city; the continuing problem is that the city itself is still not viewed by Major League Baseball and developers as being not only a place where people are entertained, but as a place where people live and shop and go to school and go to church.”
The Winning Recipe
Looking back, many factors conspired to save Fenway from what once appeared to be a near-certain wrecking ball. If city councilors hadn’t balked at additional $212 million in city money; if a subsidy foe hadn’t been in command of the state legislature; if Menino hadn’t raised the ante on city subsidies just enough to spook the team’s bankers; and if John Henry hadn’t been baseball’s choice to own the team, things could have turned out very differently.
Then there were the pivotal moments that turned on mere chance. The charrette might not have come off if Tarlin hadn’t had contacts at Simmons College’s library program and if Save Fenway member Randy Divinski hadn’t gotten a last-second $4,000 donation out of the blue from someone on his softball team. Wilson also stresses that the importance of Save Fenway’s getting the Hagenah plan out first can’t be overestimated. “If John Harrington had gotten his plan out three days earlier than he did, we were dead in the water. It would have always been about ‘what color do you want the seats in the new stadium, should they be blue or red?’” Instead, he says, “from that moment on, it really was about renovating or building new, and everybody in the Boston area knew that there were two alternatives.”
Still, one of Save Fenway Park!’s strengths was that it had the skills and the diverse membership—and the sheer gumption—to take advantage of every opportunity. “Go down the list of the board members, and every person brought something unique to the group,” says Tarlin. “You had Kim Konrad, who lives in the neighborhood, totally into working hard to keep this really besmirched community alive. And she’s a historic preservationist. Albert Rex was the director of the Boston Preservation Alliance—they gave birth to Save Fenway Park! by providing the seed money for the first box of bumper stickers, our most powerful tool. Andrew Pate: New Yorker, Yankee fan. Loves Fenway Park. Loves baseball. Telegenic—he was a good spokesperson. Unlike Paul Shannon, ponytail down his butt, headband. But he worked for American Friends Service Committee and knows about organizing.
“Randy Divinski, huge baseball fan, understands numbers. He could make charts for us. Once we got the numbers in 2001 when they had to release the earnings of Major League Baseball teams, that was key for us. Doug Rotundi, huge baseball fan, was our treasurer, kept our books, kept us legal. I’m a librarian, so I keep things organized, I’ve got the archives. Christine Fry: absolutely meticulous with numbers. Passionate baseball fan, had worked with the Tiger Stadium Fan Club, member of the Society for American Baseball Research. When Doug couldn’t keep up with being treasurer and doing the merchandise, Christine stepped in. Jeffrey Harris, another founding member, worked at the time for the National Trust, so he knew how the world of preservation worked, and is a beautiful writer. When we were thinking about nominating the ballpark for national historic landmark status, he and Kim knew how to do it.
“John Valienti, signmaker. Passionate fan. Rallymaster. Who better than the guy who makes signs to make your banner? Michael Governor, another historic preservationist. He did all the press releases in the beginning—he is sharp as a tack, and hilarious. Dan [Wilson] just has the brains and the passion for baseball. His bringing people in, bringing different groups in is what made the whole thing work. Steve Wojnar has got a brain for marketing and presentation—he’s someone you can walk into a meeting with the Red Sox, and you don’t feel so much like you look like a circus. And because he’s a season ticket holder, they would listen to him.”
Asked to estimate how many person-hours went into saving Fenway, Tarlin says, “It’s immeasurable.” Weekly meetings alone ran for four to five hours every Monday over the course of several years—“How many people are doing that once a week, unless they’re being paid?” Dan Wilson recalls that when he first joined the BPA’s nascent opposition to a new stadium, “I said, ‘I’ve got like five hours a month to put into this cause.’ And then of course I wound up spending 60 hours a week.”
Mostly, though, the Save Fenway activists had something that no other community opposition group did. “It was Fenway Park,” says Wilson. “I sai
d early on, ‘The park is going to save itself.’ If it had been Three Rivers Stadium, obviously, this never would have happened.”
New York vs. Boston
But could the lessons of Fenway be applied elsewhere? In particular, how did Fenway end up saved, when Yankee Stadium, its near-equal in both baseball history and popularity as a tourist destination, was quickly consigned to the scrap heap? Tarlin, who closely followed the Bronx stadium wars, herself wonders: “There are so many parallels: historic stadium, storied team, neighborhood ballpark, eminent-domain issues, city council that has some power.” In both cases, the team owners had proposed to pay for construction themselves, while hitting up the public for land and infrastructure costs. There had even been a renovation plan proposed for Yankee Stadium, the 1998 proposal by Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer with an estimated cost of less than $200 million.
One big difference was that where Fenway had remained largely unaltered since the ’30s, Yankee Stadium had been extensively remodeled in the 1970s. This made preservationists far less willing to take up saving the House that Ruth Built as a cause. Bess says that “you could make a case that you could reconstruct Yankee Stadium, to make it economically up to date around the existing playing field.” But with a far more radical restoration needed, he notes, “They’d have to do now what they did in the mid-’70s, which is find someplace else to play while that was happening.”
The even greater obstacles in the Bronx, though, were tactical and economic. When starting their new-stadium campaign, the Red Sox had tipped their hand, giving the opposition three solid years to organize before the team’s stadium plan ever came to a legislative vote. In New York the Yankees devoted years of behind-the-scenes lobbying to ensuring that elected officials had signed off on the plan before local residents even knew what was being proposed. Moreover, in a compact city like Boston, Save Fenway activists who worked in central Boston could visit both their city and state legislative offices on their lunch hour; for Bronx residents, on the other hand, it was an hour’s subway ride to City Hall, and a four-hour train trip to Albany.
Mostly, though, the Yankees had targeted a very different neighborhood, one with plenty of outrage and dedication but neither lobbying expertise nor, crucially, the time to devote sixty hours a week to combating a well-heeled stadium push. “We didn’t have the luxury of coming out to every single meeting, and to come out to protest, or to stay on the phone trying to get our elected officials what we want them to do,” says Anita Antonetty of Save Our Parks. “If you’re working two or three minimum-wage jobs just to put food on your table, you really don’t have the time.”
How to Fight City Hall
It has now been almost twenty years since SkyDome opened in Toronto, ushering in the era of the modern publicly funded sports facility, loaded with luxury boxes, club seats, ad boards, and food courts—the “mallpark,” as ESPN.com baseball columnist Rob Neyer dubbed it. Every week, it seems, brings another news story about how economists see no benefits to using public money to build sports stadiums for private use—no benefits, that is, except for the owner of the team that will play there. Yet the windfalls available from the stadium game are simply too lucrative for any team owner to give up on, even if it takes a decade, as in Minnesota, to find a way past popular opposition.
And popular opposition to stadium subsidies does remain the norm. During the time that Pennsylvania was planning to build four new baseball and football stadiums in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, one state representative told stadium researchers Kevin Delaney and Rick Eckstein, “Ninety-five percent of the calls we get on this issue are against it.” Yet the response among legislators, he continued, was not to respond to constituents’ opinions, but to find a way to circumvent them: “For dynamic issues like these that are wildly unpopular, the legislative leaders decide it will happen; and then they decide how many votes each side [Republican and Democratic] will give up and which representatives are least vulnerable—so they don’t get taken out.”
It was a process, noted Delaney and Eckstein dryly, that “seemed to have little in common with democracy as we conventionally define it.”
Jeanette Mott Oxford saw a similar dynamic at work in St. Louis, where she helped lead the Coalition against Public Funding for Stadiums in its battle to prevent the Cardinals from tapping the public purse for a new baseball stadium. A veteran campaigner on welfare and poverty issues, Oxford says that the stadium fight was “the most popular thing [she’d] ever worked on.” Fifty-five percent of St. Louis voters approved a referendum in November 2002 requiring a public vote before any city money could be spent on a facility for a private sports team; two years later, 72 percent of St. Louis County voters approved a similar measure for the use of county funds.
Yet Oxford’s group ended up winning the battle but losing the war. Since the state legislature had gone ahead and approved funding for the Cardinals stadium in the weeks before the city referendum, state courts ruled, the new law didn’t apply to them, and construction moved forward on what would become the third building to bear the name Busch Stadium. Public opposition did force team owners to put up a greater share of construction costs themselves, but hidden subsidies—such as a county loan that the team can effectively forgo repaying—meant taxpayers would still end up footing the bill for about one third of the total cost.
In 2004 Oxford was herself elected to the Missouri state legislature, in part thanks to her popularity for leading the charge against stadium subsidies. Her experience there has only deepened her belief that it’s best to avoid putting decisions in the hands of elected officials, whenever possible. “If your city has a petition initiative process, get going on that and put things on the ballot through the power of the people rather than spending a whole lot of time lobbying elected officials,” she advises would-be stadium activists. “They’re too swayed by the gun held against their head saying, ‘We’ll move the team if you don’t participate.’”
Of course, as the saving of Fenway shows, even without recourse to a voter referendum it’s possible to fight off a stadium juggernaut—sometimes. “Save Our Sox lost in Chicago, the Tiger Stadium Fan Club lost in Detroit,” notes Bess. “And the Save Fenway Park! people and those of us who worked on the charrette, we were beneficiaries of having witnessed those previous losses.” That Save Fenway won, Bess agrees, was due to a combination of factors, but it was mostly that “the Save Fenway Park! people were just tenacious—it’s an amazing group of people.”
That certainly didn’t hurt. Nor did the fact that, as it turned out, they were right in arguing that a renovated Fenway would be best not just for taxpayers, but for fans and the team as well. But as Dan Wilson concludes after seeing his group succeed where so many others failed: “It’s not quite enough just to be right.”
Acknowledgments
This book contains research compiled over the course of nearly twelve years, from hundreds of interviews, dozens of governmental hearings, newspaper clippings arriving in packages from far-flung corners of the continent, and e-mail traffic on various generations of listservs and bulletin boards. Which is to say that any list of acknowledgments is going to be horrifically incomplete, and we apologize in advance to all those whose contributions will go unrecognized.
That said, among those without which this book would not have been possible:
The list of grassroots activists, academics, and researchers who generously shared their time, wisdom, and expertise with us just keeps growing: Hallie Amey, John Aranza, Roldo Bartimole, Philip Bess, Doug Bukowski, Michael Charney, Jon Commers, John Davids, Judy Davids, Dorothy Dean, Donna Donovan, David R. Elkins, John Fisher, Dan Goldstein, Dan Golub, Brian Hatch, Meryl T. Johnson, Dennis Keating, Bruce Kidd, Norman Krumholtz, Ed Lazere, Greg LeRoy, Bill Marker, Shabnam Merchant, Chris Michaels, Marge Misak, Jeanette Mott Oxford, Shawn Newman, Mary O’Connell, Kevin O’Brien, John Pastier, Frank Rashid, Sheila Radford-Hill, Ricky Rask, Tony Ross, Steven Rubin, John Ryan, Tom Sevigny, Janice Shields,
Kim Stroud, Newton Suwe, Hank Trenkle, Chris Van Dyk, and Chris Weiss; also Anita Antonetty, J. J. Brennan, David Gratt, Lukas Herbert, Joyce Hogi, and everyone at Save Our Parks, and Kim Konrad, Albert Rex, Erika Tarlin, Dan Wilson, and everyone at Save Fenway Park! And given that we began this project with just one entry-level economics course between us, we are forever indebted to the numerous economists who have selflessly given their time to school us in the nuances of fiscal number crunching, especially Robert Baade, Tim Chapin, Rod Fort, Roger Noll, Philip Porter, Allen Sanderson, Andrew Zimbalist, and Dennis Zimmerman.
We are extremely fortunate to have as friends a large number of extremely talented people who were willing to provide their services at small-press rates. (Read: for free.) Jim Naureckas and Mindy Nass, who read every page of the original edition and provided invaluable editorial guidance, returned to reprise their roles for this version. Other friends and colleagues who provided invaluable editorial and research help with specific chapters include Margot Abel, Beth Cagan, Steve Cagan, Pete Cenedella, Stacy Cowley, Eileen Mullin, Nancy Nisselbaum, Andrew Ross, Wendy Roth, Anne Savarese, Christopher Tate, and Michele Tepper. If this book reads smoothly, you have them to thank, far more than us.
This book grew out of our work as journalists, and if writers are nothing without readers, they’re also nothing without editors who believe in their work and keep it on the printed (or, these days, electronic) page. Our Village Voice editors Miles Seligman, Ward Harkavy, and Laura Conaway never failed to encourage us to stick to the stadium and arena beat, helping make chapter 15 the most extensively researched (and, not coincidentally, the longest) one in the book. Likewise, the gang of baseball smart guys known as Baseball Prospectus enthusiastically turned Neil loose to explore stadium deals both for their Web site and for their excellent book Baseball between the Numbers—thanks begin with Maury Brown, Steven Goldman, Derek Jacques, Jay Jaffe, Christina Kahrl, Jonah Keri, and Joe Sheehan, but everyone who’s a part of BP deserves a round of applause. Nina Ascoly, Max Freund, Kurt Gottschalk, Bernie McAleer, and Michelle Phipps of the late, lamented zine Brooklyn Metro Times helped shepherd our very first investigations into the stadium game to print; Deidre McFadyen, then of In These Times, gave our work its first national exposure. We will forever be indebted to Greg Bates of our original publisher, Common Courage Press, who had the vision to give two young journalists a contract to write a book on the doings of the sports industry, even if he admitted that his only exposure to sports was having been to a hockey game once. And, of course, this newly revised and expanded version of the book would not have been possible without the tender loving care of Rob Taylor, Chris Steinke, Jackie Doyle, and everyone at the University of Nebraska Press, whose enthusiasm, professionalism, and attention to detail make us wonder if they perhaps wandered in from some industry other than book publishing.