MLB | The Ballpark That Opened While Boston Read the Titanic Lists (Fenway Park)

Opening Day was meant to be 18 April 1912. It rained. The Patriots Day doubleheader on the 19th was rained out too. So the first official game at Fenway Park was played on Saturday 20 April, and when the Red Sox beat the New York Highlanders 7-6 in eleven innings, with Tris Speaker driving in the winning run, Boston newspapers ran it below the fold. The Titanic had gone down on 15 April, and the survivor lists were still being printed.

Mayor John F. Fitzgerald threw out the first pitch. His grandson would be president. Some 27,000 people came, by the club's own reckoning; eleven days earlier the park had been broken in quietly with an exhibition against Harvard, won 2-0 in snow flurries.

The park went up in a little over six months in concrete and steel, for a reported $650,000. That construction method is why it is still here. Detroit's Navin Field opened the same afternoon, and for the same reason: both openers had been set for 18 April, and it rained in both cities. Fenway's own architect was James E. McLaughlin, with Osborn Engineering of Cleveland carrying the structural work and the stands; Osborn designed Navin Field outright. The same Cleveland firm also did League Park, Griffith Stadium, the 1911 Polo Grounds rebuild and, eleven years later, Yankee Stadium, and came back to rebuild Fenway in 1934. Its work runs through most of this collection.

Now the wall, and the thing almost everyone gets wrong about it. The Green Monster is much younger than its nickname suggests, and much younger than the wall. In 1912 the left-field barrier was a wooden fence, built tall for a commercial reason rather than a sporting one: the buildings along Lansdowne Street looked straight into the park, and owner John I. Taylor wanted people to pay. In front of it ran a ten-foot embankment called Duffy's Cliff, after left fielder Duffy Lewis, who learned to play a ball rolling down it.

A fire on 5 January 1934 tore through work already under way for new owner Tom Yawkey. The rebuilt park opened that April with the cliff levelled, the fence replaced by concrete and tin at 37 feet 2 inches, and a hand-operated scoreboard set into its base. The wall stayed tall partly to make up for the lost embankment. What it did not do was stay green: it was covered in advertising until 1947, when the ads came off and it was painted a single dark green for the first time. The nickname followed the paint.

The scoreboard fitted in 1934 is still worked by hand from inside the wall, and it is the reason the numbers change a beat late.

Fenway is a working ballpark at 4 Jersey Street. Tours run daily and do not require a game ticket. Coordinates are the ballpark itself, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: Fenway Park being prepared for the World Series, Bain News Service, 1912. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 92513261. No known restrictions on publication. Second image: Fenway Park before the 1914 World Series, Bain News Service, Library of Congress, LCCN 2014690838.