Best of Boston
Fenway Park Boston: America's Most Beloved Baseball Stadium Guide
Fenway Park is America's oldest and most beloved Major League Baseball stadium, a 1912 ballpark that has been home to the Boston Red Sox for over a century and that exerts a gravitational pull on sports fans, architecture enthusiasts, and cultural tourists that goes far beyond baseball. The park is a living museum of American sporting history and the physical embodiment of Boston's most passionate and complicated sporting identity.
The defining features of Fenway are immediately visible from any seat in the park — the Green Monster, the 37-foot left field wall that has bedevilled opposing pitchers and created some of baseball's most famous moments, the hand-operated scoreboard embedded in the monster's face, and the intimate scale of the park that puts every spectator close enough to the action to genuinely feel part of the game in a way that the vast modern stadia built in subsequent decades rarely achieve.
Attending a Red Sox game at Fenway is one of the great sports experiences available anywhere in America, but even visiting during the off-season on the excellent stadium tour is deeply rewarding — the tour accesses areas of the park normally closed to spectators including the press box, the Monster seats atop the Green Monster, and the warning track on the field itself. The Fenway neighbourhood surrounding the park has been transformed by the stadium's success into one of Boston's liveliest entertainment districts, with excellent bars, restaurants, and music venues that fill before and after games with the enormous crowds that the Red Sox consistently attract.