Some renderings at the link above and in the tweet below
I don't think that matters too much. Fenway is going to bang out 2.5M people this year despite an April $15 ticket which is a lot of foot traffic. Residential real estate in the area will sell and sell for good money. Maybe there are a few behind the scenes incentives to upgrade the streets and pedestrian space to help defray some of the $1.6B cost?
Isn't the idea of development like this to generate income even if nobody buys any game tickets for those 81 days from April through September?
Not to mention during the other six months of the year when the park isn't occupied by the baseball team.
Yeah, real estate development around the park/stadium/arena is the next big money maker for franchise owners. Everyone is envious of what the Atlanta Braves and Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Rams have done. You're going to start seeing team owners demanding new stadiums with real estate adjacencies just like how 20 years ago it was "we need a stadium with luxury suites."
Sure, but if their profits from this project aren't put into the team on the field for results, it's going to leave an extremely bad taste in my mouth. Atlanta is doing this now with The Battery, but at least the team is good.
Completely agree. I got into an internet argument over that $15 ticket (I felt it was a meaningless data point) and couldn’t resist.
It's not just Fenway-Kenmore. Artists are no longer welcome anywhere in Boston. City leaders would be happy if the population were nothing but childless biotech workers making $100,000+.
Seriously, how would you gauge that? Spend to the cap every year? Spend above it? If so how much? Also, look at the responses here when people accused FSG of funneling Red Sox profits into other ventures. Aren't all of these stand alone businesses under the umbrella of FSG.
I don't think Mookie is worth quite $1.6B, is he?!? Speaking of which, does LaBron still have a stake in FSG?
I always have mixed feelings about upgrading the park and the area around it. Growing up going to my first games in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the shitty concourse, the piss-drenched bathrooms with the troughs, and run-down places like Golds gym or club Avalon/citi-club on Lansdown felt very authentic, but the place was still kind of a dump.
It is not but that new building looks like it is on the same lot, next to what is now a parking lot.
These are some of the silliest takes. Not yours but the one you’ve quoted.
And sure, if my tongue accidentally gets jammed into a light socket, it's gonna hurt. But I'll wait til it happens before I complain about it.
If I was an investor, I'd stay far away from this project if I felt profits were not going back to investors but to help the baseball team. I tend to doubt FSG operates it this way and will have development division with their own budgets and profit targets if not already established.
I get this, and agree with it. With that said, the area right outside Fenway is kind of a piece of shit. After a block or two it peters out into not much. There is a demand there that is not being met. What efforts they've done to improve the experience outside of your seats, thus far, has been amazing. I hope that they do some work getting public transportation more funneled before and after games as part of this improvement.
It certainly looks like that building in the rendering is smack on Landsdowne St and will be right up against the Wall. Which would be less than ideal.
Yep. That said, like many others here, I think it’s probably a net positive overall to make things nicer but I do wish that modern architecture and design of these places didn’t feel so cookie-cutter. At least with Fenway park itself, you still have the general footprint mostly unchanged.
The Fenway was semi-affordable as a neighborhood in the 90's when I was living near there. It was a lot of college kids, some artists, and gay men with small dogs. But even by the time I graduated in 2000, the place had gotten expensive, at least in terms of buying a condo, there were still some cheap apartments. Then maybe 10-15 years ago you got all of the larger buildings starting to go in and the place developed very quickly. Now there are pricey restaurants, etc. It's getting redeveloped, and the few blocks directly around Fenway park are not any different, they are right in the middle of the area being redeveloped. FSG is getting in on that? Fine by me, it won't have much impact on the neighborhood "feel" because The Fenway of the 90s is gone already, that grit was washed off years ago. A lack of affordable housing in major cities is a massive nation wide policy problem that is also not caused by FSG, so we really shouldn't blame them for that either.
When I was in college in the early 70s, most of the area was occupied by student renters and not those with trust funds. Can't imagine there are too many of that ilk around there any more. You could see the changes through the years walking to and from parking spaces.
Yes and it still echos here on occasion. Spending wildly is not the end all be all. We're seeing it now with the Mets and Padres. They are not getting the desired results from their investments and spending above various threshold levels has concerns other than the payroll dollars that have been committed.
Agreed that a lot of these forces are just happening "organically" anyway across most metro areas....and FSG might as well get in on the real estate boom because if they don't, someone else will. At least FSG will probably try and keep it compatible with the Fenway/Red Sox theme.
https://www.masslive.com/redsox/2023/07/boston-officials-approve-16b-fenway-corners-project-close-to-fenway-park.html
This isn't anything to do with the park itself, it's about developing the land around it. Because it's there and everything else in the neighborhood is getting redeveloped.
And it's not about 'fans' as much as it's about the rest of the year. It's non-baseball revenue.
W/S Development is the largest commercial/retail landlord in the Seaport, so yes, this is spot on. They also happen to be, IMO, one of the best private real estate developers in the United States (certainly New England) and their roots are here in Massachusetts and consider themselves sensitive (as much as real estate developers can be) to the concerns of the neighborhoods that they develop in. They're a great partner for Fenway. The D'Angelo family is in this for the money, pure and simple (and who can blame them), as is W/S and Fenway, but having W/S as the lead developer is a good thing.
One thing different about Seaport development is that there wasn't a lot of neighborhood character to preserve there.
