Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium are two of the oldest ballparks in baseball. That they have survived this long was hardly a given.
BOSTON — So often in sports, the stage is simply that — the theater in which players perform. Sure, a stadium allows for atmosphere, but only in the sense that the audience has to sit somewhere, and if teams can park fans into gilded suites, ply them with $15 beers and assault their senses with bright lights and thumping music, well, all the better.
But this World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers is different. The enduring stars are the ballparks themselves, idiosyncratic Fenway Park and idyllic Dodger Stadium, rejuvenated old gems that not only present a yin and yang of ballpark design but stand as proxies for the eras and areas in which they were built.
If one is a model of Calvinist restraint, the other is an illustration of space age aspiration.
“Fenway is contained and small,” said Brenda Levin, a Los Angeles architect who earned her degree at Harvard and worked on the recent renovations at Dodger Stadium. “When I go back to Boston, that’s how the city feels: contained and small. Los Angeles is the opposite. It’s expansive, and Dodger Stadium is still an incredible representation of where Los Angeles was in 1962 and what it wanted to become and has become.”
The quirks at Fenway, baseball’s most intimate park, are not confined to the field. Walking through the ballpark, with its angled seating, old wooden seats, iconic Green Monster and labyrinthine pathways that mimic the city’s streets, is like walking back in (imperfect) time. All that seems to be missing are cobblestone streets, gas lamps and flannel uniforms.
Meanwhile, Dodger Stadium — perched on a hill at the confluence of two major freeways and with a sublime view of Elysian Park and the San Gabriel Mountains — is a paean to midcentury modernity with its symmetry, soothing color palette and an enormous, laborious-to-navigate parking lot.
This World Series, which the Red Sox led 2-0 as it shifted to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Friday night, is the first to be held in two ballparks that are at least 50 years old. Fenway was built in 1912, before fans used cars to get to the ballpark, and Dodger Stadium opened half a century later. They are among the three oldest facilities in baseball, along with the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field, which started hosting baseball games in 1914.
That they have survived this long — and have been revitalized through hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements — was hardly a given. The future of Fenway Park was in doubt as long ago as 1967, when Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner at the time, told The Boston Herald: “We’ve been losing money. It can’t go on forever. It’s got to stop somewhere. I don’t intend to bankrupt myself.”
By the late 1990s, baseball was experiencing a modest renaissance after a series of work stoppages. It was stimulated by the steroid-fueled surge in home runs but also by a stadium-building boom that tapped into the nostalgia of quirky, prewar ballparks that came with the trappings of modern stadiums: luxury suites, broad concourses and concessions that expanded beyond hot dogs and beer.
As much as Boston clings to its deep history, there was growing sentiment that, as with the revered Boston Garden, which had shuttered in 1995, it was time to move on from Fenway. By 2000, the Red Sox chief executive, John Harrington, was pushing for a new ballpark next door that included a replica of the Green Monster, but with 10,000 more seats. Two years later, when the Yawkey estate put the team up for sale, virtually every bidder had plans for a new ballpark.
The only ones who were open to preserving Fenway were the eventual buyers: John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino.
In 1998, Dodger Stadium had its own moment of truth when Peter O’Malley — whose father, Walter, had brought the Dodgers west from Brooklyn and built the ballpark — sold the team to Fox Group for a then-record $311 million.
While the O’Malleys ran the Dodgers as a family enterprise, Fox, which bought the team to secure its TV rights, saw opportunities for untapped revenue: There had been no advertising on the outfield walls, and all ticket prices were the same on each level. Instead of pursuing a new stadium, Fox settled on enhancements, adding suites and the Dugout Club, a restaurant behind home plate.
“You had a building at a crossroads,” said Mark Langill, the Dodgers’ team historian. “I think what helped is that it wasn’t a ballpark that was just there; it was beloved, and there was so many institutions still within the ballpark.”
Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrin were the team’s beloved English and Spanish announcers; Tommy Lasorda was still managing the team. And Dodger Stadium — through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, from Sandy Koufax to Steve Garvey to Kirk Gibson — is where the team had reached the World Series eight times, winning four.
At the center of both ballparks’ revivals has been Janet Marie Smith. An architect, she had been hired by Lucchino to spearhead the building of Baltimore’s Camden Yards, which kicked off a wave of ballpark construction that sought distance from the cookie-cutter, multipurpose stadiums of the 1960s and early ’70s.
Lucchino brought Smith to Boston in 2002 to lead a series of renovations of Fenway Park. The changes included placing seats on top of the Green Monster, adding a beer garden atop the second deck in the right-field corner and cordoning off Yawkey Way (now Jersey Street) on game days.
Smith joined the Dodgers in 2012 shortly after the investment firm Guggenheim Partners bought the team. She has directed extensive stadium enhancements, including wider concourses, an enlarged modern clubhouse, overlooks above the bullpens and a return of the hexagonal scoreboards in the outfield.
“Maybe the setting is as important as the architecture itself. That’s why these parks are still with us,” Smith said. “Cities change, growth patterns change, transit changes. Ballparks don’t move, and sometimes the pattern of growth has left them behind.”
At Fenway Park this week, Smith pointed out the measures that had to be undertaken to renovate it. The seats above the Green Monster had to be cantilevered so they did not encroach on Landsdowne Street. The city agreed to close an alleyway beyond center field so that a building the Red Sox owned could be used for restrooms and concessions.
These moves needed approval from the city, state and the National Park Service so that the ballpark would qualify for National Historic Landmark status, which offered tax breaks that would help fund the renovations.
Smith said the goal at older ballparks was to be respectful of strictures but not bound by them.
“How do we keep it alive as it is?” Smith said. “It doesn’t just mean the usual current codes for bathrooms and egress and expectations for food service, but what about sponsorship and television? There’s a need to recognize that the economic viability is as important as the structural integrity.”
Though the conservation ethic is less restrictive in Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium presented its own challenges.
