Free Fenway Park by John Powers

to play a lucrative exhibition game in Connecticut, Frazee said, “It would have been impossible for us to have started the next season with Ruth and have a smooth working machine, or one that would have had any chance of being in the running.”
    Baseball historians have spent the past eight decades debating the incident. Was Frazee in serious debt? Did he really, really need the $450,000 he received from the Yankees (there was also a $350,000 loan involved, with Fenway Park as collateral) in order to finance a Broadway musical called No, No Nanette ? Or was he to be taken at face value when he said he had made a decision based on what he honestly believed to be in the best interests of the team? One thing is for sure: the musical in question didn’t open until 1925, so it wasn’t the catalyst for the trade.
    Still, Frazee is hard to defend. Ruth was a handful, but rather than spend the Yankee money to acquire more talent, as he promised, all Frazee did was sell, sell, sell. The record is clear. The Red Sox hung on with fifth-place finishes in both 1920 and 1921, but in 1922 they took up what was almost permanent residence in the league basement for the next decade, as the Yankees, utilizing all the aforementioned Red Sox stars, were winning pennants in 1921, 1922, 1923, 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1932.
    Despite his future success in New York, Ruth fondly recalled most of his time in Boston, where he first lived in Mrs. Lindbergh’s rooming house on Batavia Street (now Symphony Road); where he met his first wife, Helen Woodford, in a Copley Square coffee shop; where he bought an 80-acre farm in Sudbury in 1916; and where he became established as a star and a World Series hero.
    As for Frazee, he left town on the midnight train for New York, a gesture of infinite symbolism for millions of Sox fans not yet born.
    CHAOTIC KENMORE SQUARE
     
    When the Red Sox play a home game, Kenmore Square is the conduit for the lion’s share of the more than 35,000 fans who converge on the ballpark. And like the Fenway neighborhood itself, Kenmore Square didn’t exist until the late 19 th century.
    The land the square sits on was then called Sewall’s Point, and it was pretty much surrounded by tidal salt marsh. Sewell’s Point was connected to downtown Boston by a narrow road (later to become Beacon Street) that ran atop a dam along the Charles River. When the Back Bay was filled in the late 19 th century, the former dam road became Beacon Street, which connected to Brookline Avenue. A short time later, Commonwealth Avenue was constructed, and the three roads converged at what became known as Governor’s Square.
    Governor’s Square (renamed Kenmore Square in 1932) became an important local transportation hub. The Peerless Motor Car Building on the west side of the square now houses Boston University’s Barnes and Noble Bookstore, but its main claim to fame is the Citgo sign on its roof; it was born in the 1950s as a Cities Services billboard, and it became the landmark neon beacon in the 1960s.
    Because of the local college-student population, Kenmore Square and the streets close to the ballpark feature plenty of restaurants, cafes, and music venues. The most famous jazz club was Storyville, which was located at the Hotel Buckminster starting in 1950. Legends such as Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan played the club, which was in the ground-floor space of the Buckminster now occupied by Pizzeria Uno. The legendary rock club The Rathskeller, a.k.a. “The Rat,” played grimy host to some of rock music’s great bands in the 1970s and 1980s as they paid their dues, including The Police, the B-52s, R.E.M., U2, the Ramones, Tom Petty, Blondie, and Sonic Youth. It closed in 1997, and its site is now occupied by the Hotel Commonwealth, which opened in 2003.
    On Patriots Day, more than 20,000 official runners pass through the square on the home stretch of the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual