Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  Unfortunately, such a grand structure was not practical in Boston. The construction time frame was too narrow to allow the erection of such a large building, and the shape of the lot, the orientation of the field, and the fact that the parcel did not sit on a square corner made the construction of a building like the one in Philadelphia impossible. Yet McLaughlin still managed to make part of the ballpark look like a building.

  His solution was to create an illusion. Only a portion of the structure, a triangular-shaped wing that housed the team offices, would look like a building when viewed from the street. The remainder would look, well, like the grandstand of a ballpark, albeit one faced with brick and featuring open arches behind the upper stands. The wing containing the offices would also be off-center to the larger structure, not evenly balanced behind home plate but down the third-base line, essentially parallel to that side of the infield. The ballpark's front door, in effect, would actually be a side entrance.

  It was not a particularly elegant solution, but then again, given Taylor's requirements, there was very little room for elegance. Still McLaughlin tried to come up with an aesthetic response. The only other area where McLaughlin could express any real creativity was on the facade of the office wing that faced Jersey Street.

  Beginning in 1901, the influential furniture maker Gustav Stickley, a proponent of the Arts and Crafts style, began designing homes. The designs of the Wisconsin-born child of German immigrants, who probably never attended a professional baseball game in his life, would nonetheless prove to be an inspiration for Fenway Park.

  Stickley featured his designs in his magazine, The Craftsman, and these homes soon became known by an architectural style of their own—Craftsman. Craftsman-style homes were usually built with materials native to the region, and their decorative details often depended on the exposure of structural elements. The variety of these structural elements, combined with the various building materials, created textures that were revealed under changing light conditions, creating interest in surfaces that might otherwise appear bland.

  Over the course of McLaughlin's early career the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement became more and more pronounced, for even as he built structures that can correctly be identified as Georgian Revival and, later, as in the Commonwealth Armory, Gothic Revival, his materials and ornamental use of texture on the Jersey Street facade echo the Arts and Crafts and Craftsman aesthetics.

  For the veneer of the office facade McLaughlin chose Tapestry Brick, a patented, rough-faced red brick design made by Fiske and Company of New York, and a Stickley favorite, but one rarely used on the exteriors of his homes. Not only did the dark red brick provide a nice contrast with lighter-colored building materials, but the rough face was inviting, changed under differing light conditions, and could be treated like a mosaic and arranged in design patterns, either alone or in combination with concrete.

  When the park was first built, it is important to recall, there were no buildings across the street or trees to block the sun. The building faced southward and thus was exposed to an ever-changing display of light as the sun crossed the sky every day. The face of the building was designed to take advantage of these changing conditions.

  Although it would be incorrect to say that Fenway Park is a Craftsman building—its architecture is far too eclectic and utilitarian to fall easily within a single definition—it nevertheless exhibits elements and echoes of the Arts and Crafts and Craftsman movements. McLaughlin might also have been inspired by the nearby Fenway Studio Building, artists' studios and residences built in 1905 at 30 Ipswich Street, an influential building whose ornamentation architectural historians have determined is derived from the Arts and Crafts movement.

  It was a fortunate choice. The facade, while handsome, does not call attention to itself, yet by incorporating such forward-looking design elements, it has aged without becoming dated. In contrast, Shibe Park's French Renaissance facade, even when new, looked like a product of the previous century. Fenway, even today, seems merely quaint.

  McLaughlin used one more sleight of hand in regard to the scale of the park that has helped preserve the charm of Fenway Park over time. When Jersey Street was first laid out, the roadbed was raised to keep it from flooding, leaving land on both sides of the street—including the plot upon which Fenway Park sits today—approximately ten feet lower than the street. Rather than see the difference in elevation as an obstacle, McLaughlin used it. The Jersey Street office facade rises only thirty feet above street level, capped with a three-foot-high false wall that increases in height to nearly nine feet at the top of Fenway Park's "nameplate" on a cement panel above the park's main entrance.

  Yet inside the park the roof of the original grandstand was forty feet above field level—one enters the park and travels ten feet down to the field. It seems impossible from outside, but the office floors on the second floor of the team offices are at the same exact level as the wide promenade at the top of the grandstand. The effect helped maintain an exterior scale that appears in tune with nearby neighborhoods, evoking a nearly residential feel, and is much smaller than the scale of the grandstand itself. Moreover, moving from the street through the gate and into the park feels like entering a completely new space, one far different in scale and dimension than that of the surrounding streets outside (see illustration 1).

  As McLaughlin sat at his desk early in the fall of 1911, however, his ballpark was still nothing more than a pile of drawings. Now that the ownership issue had finally been decided, the task was to turn those plans into reality. The Taylors had already hired the Osborn Engineering Company of Cleveland and civil engineer L. Kopczynski of the Concrete and Expanded Metal Construction Company of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, to provide engineering and other needed technical expertise. Osborn had worked on several other concrete-and-steel ballparks and was an obvious choice to help translate McLaughlin's sketches into sound and detailed plans. Kopczynski was familiar with local contractors, and his company's workers were among the most experienced reinforced-concrete workers in Boston. The New England Structural Steel Corporation of Everett, Massachusetts, was already at work fabricating steel and would provide the ironworkers needed on the project.

  To provide extra manpower and oversee construction Taylor selected Charles Logue and the Charles Logue Building Company to serve as the general contractor. Like McLaughlin, Logue was an immigrant, a native of Derry, Ireland. Stowing away at age thirteen, he landed in Newfoundland before making his way to Nova Scotia. While boarding there with a family, he tried to break up a dispute and was shot in the hand, losing a finger. He returned to Ireland, where he learned carpentry, and then immigrated again, this time legally, to Boston in 1882. He formed his own company in 1890, just in time to take advantage of the Irish takeover of Boston's political machine and the resulting flood of building contracts suddenly accessible to Irish firms. A large man with a thick beard and forearms that spoke of a life of labor, Logue did good work at an honest price and soon earned the trust of those who held the power in Boston politics.

  In recent decades it has become something of a cliché to refer to Fenway Park in religious terms, as a kind of shrine. Yet the observation is in some ways accurate, because to Charles Logue building was something he did in the service of God. The commissioner of public school buildings in Boston under his close friend Mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Logue and his wife had sixteen children, including two sons who became priests and two daughters who became nuns, and they were lauded by the Church for having such a large and exemplary family. Logue became close to Cardinal William O'Connell and was perhaps best known as a builder for the Archdiocese of Boston. He supervised the construction of dozens of churches in and around Boston, as well as many buildings on the campuses of the Catholic universities Boston College and Holy Cross in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts. A pious man, Logue attended Mass every day and died in a church, succumbing to a heart attack and passing away in the arms of his son while working on t
he scaffolding of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Dedham, Massachusetts.

  He may well have been selected to serve as the general contractor for Fenway Park owing to his close relationship with O'Connell—the archdiocese owned a sizable property almost adjacent to Fenway Park on Ipswich Street, and it was both good policy and good politics in Boston to stay on good terms with the Church. Although Sunday baseball was banned, the ball club lusted after these lucrative dates and at some point in the future would need the blessing of the archdiocese if the restriction was ever to be lifted. It just made sense to keep the Church happy.

  Logue and James McLaughlin got on well with each other, Logue providing the practical solutions to the structural and aesthetic demands of McLaughlin's design, while McLaughlin ensured that Taylor's wishes were reflected in the final product. Neither man was either hot-tempered or impatient, and from a construction standpoint Fenway Park was not overly challenging. It was like working on any other building.

  NEW HOME OF THE RED SOX; PLAN IDEAL IN EQUIPMENT AND LOCATION

  Baseball Park Will Contain 365,308 Square Feet Of Land With Stands Of The Most Approved Type

  As the days grew shorter in October McLaughlin spent less and less time in his office, at least during daytime hours. Most of his time was spent at the ballpark overseeing his project, huddled with engineers and foremen around a potbellied stove to stave off the seasonal chill in one of two cramped construction shanties built in foul territory between the fenced-off infield and the first-base grandstand.

  Boston's fans and players also prepared to spend the winter huddled around the stove, for as soon as the players made a final visit to John I. Taylor to pay their respects and pick up their final paychecks, the "Hot Stove League" began in earnest. The new ownership and a new ballpark were only the first changes that would take place before the Red Sox took the field to open the 1912 season.

  As soon as they collected their paychecks, most Red Sox players scattered. Not a single player called Boston home in the off-season. For some, like Duffy Lewis and Harry Hooper, it took nearly a week to travel to their homes on the West Coast.

  The last two players to leave Boston were Bill Carrigan and Tris Speaker. They had been left behind at Put's to convalesce. Carrigan's broken leg was still in a cast—he had not left the hotel in weeks—and Speaker was still laid up by the pitch he took off his lower leg in the season finale. It was awkward for the two men, who were forced by circumstances to share an apartment for about a week, but in the long run it may have been for the best. Without the other Masons and KCs to egg them on, the enmity between the two took too much energy to sustain, and with each man hobbled, they were dependent on one another. Carrigan finally had his cast changed on October 10 and was allowed to begin to move about on crutches, but it would be another three weeks until doctors would allow him to travel to his home in Lewiston, Maine. Speaker, meanwhile, recovered rapidly and was looking forward to the World's Series. The Globe had signed him up to ghostwrite a column on the series. In truth, that meant he had to do little more than watch the Series and nod in agreement with whatever the Globe man wrote under his name, but it was easy money.

  He was not the only Boston player for whom the postseason meant opportunity. With a week between the end of the regular season for the Athletics and the start of the World's Series, the American League champion Athletics wanted to stay sharp. Manager Connie Mack asked Jimmy McAleer to put together an all-star squad to scrimmage the A's, and McAleer asked both Larry Gardner and Joe Wood to play for a team that also included such luminaries as Tiger outfielder Ty Cobb, Yankee first baseman Hal Chase, and pitcher Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators.

  It was quite an honor for each player to be selected for the team, which had the added benefit of giving McAleer a chance to get to know each man a bit better heading into the 1912 season. Each player made the most of it. Gardner more than held his own at third and knocked a series of hits off the champions, and even though Joe Wood was defeated, 3–2, in his only pitching appearance, he held the champions to only five hits, a performance that seemed to underscore his late-season surge. After the A's beat the Giants in the World's Series, four games to two, Wood's stock rose even higher, since his effort compared favorably to those of the Giants' pitchers in the Series, even the great Christy Mathewson.

  The A's six-game victory was no upset, but the Giants, behind combative manager John McGraw, had usurped the Cubs as the National League's best club, and baseball reporters considered them to be a team on the way up. The Red Sox, however, were not overly impressed. Speaker, Wood, pitchers Ray Collins, Charley Hall, and Eddie Cicotte, and a few other Sox had faced the Giants in 1909 in a postseason series that Boston had won handily, four games to one. Although Wood had been Boston's only losing pitcher, he had actually earned a draw with Mathewson in the first game, giving up only six hits to the ten Boston earned off Mathewson, and he lost only because of Boston's porous defense. Speaker had been particularly impressive, hitting .600 for the series and battering Mathewson as if he were a rank amateur. Murnane called him the "twinkling star" of the contests and offered that the Sox had outplayed the Giants "in every department." Just as the Red Sox had believed that they were better than the Athletics at the end of the regular season, Speaker let his teammates know after the 1911 Series that the Giants were intimidating in name only.

  As the last leaves dropped off the trees, the attention of Red Sox fans, management, and players now turned to other matters. Charley Hall had fallen for a Roxbury girl, Marie Cullen, and they married in mid-October. At the reception at the bride's home the guests were entertained by the Red Sox Quartet, a barbershop singing group made up of Buck O'Brien, first baseman Hugh Bradley, and pitchers Marty McHale and minor leaguer Bill Lyons, who were filling in for occasional tenor Larry Gardner, already back home to Vermont. Later that fall the quartet played the New England vaudeville circuit, including B. F. Keith's theater in Boston, where a receptive reviewer noted that "if they wish to foreswear baseball as a livelihood there is a rosy career awaiting them as singers."

  While the players whiled away the winter, Red Sox management was focused on building—both the ball club and the ballpark. Shortly after the end of the World's Series, McAleer traveled to Chicago, a trip that served two purposes. There was that annual hunting trip with Johnson and about three other baseball big shots, which always included attending to a bit of baseball business beforehand. But Chicago was also the home of Jake Stahl, the man McAleer wanted to manage his ball club. Before leaving for Wisconsin McAleer met with Stahl and tried to convince him to sign on.

  McAleer wanted Stahl both to manage the team and to play first base. In theory Stahl was not averse to either proposition, but he demanded some extra incentive to leave the cushy and cash-rich confines of his Chicago office. Namely, he didn't want to be McAleer's employee as much as he wanted to be a partner—he wanted a piece of the team. His father-in-law was already on board to be a part owner, and Stahl knew that McAleer was still a bit stretched financially. Besides, if Stahl's father-in-law backed out for any reason, the whole deal could fall apart. In this negotiation Stahl was the hammer and McAleer the mere nail.

  In theory McAleer was receptive to the notion. Stahl was willing to invest as much as $15,000 of his own money in the team. But in addition to sharing in the profits, the banker also wanted a hefty salary as player-manager. McAleer balked at his price.

  Stahl had McAleer by the short hairs, however, and he knew it, for with each passing day it became more and more important to have a manager in place. Although no contracts could be sent out until the team was formally reorganized after the first of the year, Stahl would have a big say in the makeup of the team and his input was vital.

  When McAleer left Chicago for the north woods he claimed to have Stahl all signed up, but when word of that got back to Stahl he denied it, saying, "Matters stand where they did three weeks ago." The two men remained at odds after McAleer returned to Chicago, and in early
November he headed back east, still without Stahl's signature on a contract.

  But McAleer was more Red Sox figurehead than the final answer. Ban Johnson still pulled the strings, and soon after McAleer boarded his train Johnson apparently got involved.

  He knew McAleer needed Mahan's investment, and on November 10 he delivered player-manager Jake Stahl—and $15,000 of his money, representing a 10 percent stake in McAleer's ownership group. Even though Stahl would receive much of his investment back in salary, the agreement made his father-in-law happy and kept the sale from falling apart.

  While McAleer was trying to build his team, the Fens echoed with the sounds of construction—hammers and steam engines, saws and steel rivets. Opening day was a little more than five months off, but there had already been a great deal of progress. Ever so slowly, a ballpark was starting to take shape.

  It was important to prepare the playing field as quickly as possible, both in order to allow the ground to settle and to begin seeding before winter set in, and much of the first phase of construction focused on these goals. Even before Jerome Kelley relocated the infield sod from Huntington Avenue, engineers and surveyors had laid out the dimensions of the grandstand and crews had already been at work bringing the field to grade. The property sloped downward from the northwest corner to the southeast, and workers first had to excavate earth from the northwest and northern edge of the property to level the field. Then, before Kelley laid out the infield, a network of drainage ditches had to be put in place beneath the playing field.