Free Fenway 1912 by Glenn Stout

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