Fenway Park

Where it sits. Fenway Park occupies an awkward parcel at 4 Jersey Street in the Fenway-Kenmore district of Boston, about two kilometres west of the Common. The address changed in 2018, when the city renamed the old Yawkey Way after a long argument about the former owner's record on integration. The site is the reason the ballpark looks the way it does: it was squeezed into an existing street grid between Lansdowne Street, Jersey Street, Van Ness Street and Ipswich Street, and every irregularity of the playing field follows the property line rather than any theory of how baseball should be played. The Charles River is a short walk north, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are ten minutes south, and Kenmore Square with its Citgo sign — visible over the left-field wall from inside the park — is immediately east.

The oldest one left. It opened on 20 April 1912, five days after the Titanic sank, which pushed the event off the front pages. It is the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball by more than a decade and has been rebuilt in place several times, most substantially in 1934 under Tom Yawkey, who replaced the wooden stands with concrete and steel and clad the left-field wall in tin over railway ties. That wall is the Green Monster: 11.3 metres high, only 94 metres from home plate down the line, painted green since 1947 and topped with seating since 2003. Its manual scoreboard is still changed by hand from a passage behind it, and the vertical white stripes on its face conceal the initials of Tom and Jean Yawkey in Morse code.

The details worth finding. A single red seat sits in a field of green in the right-field bleachers — section 42, row 37, seat 21 — marking where a home run hit by Ted Williams on 9 June 1946 came down, measured afterwards at 502 feet and still the longest ever confirmed here. The right-field foul pole is Pesky's Pole, named for Johnny Pesky and only 302 feet from the plate. The deepest corner, the Triangle in right-centre, is 420 feet. A ladder is bolted to the face of the Green Monster, a survival from the days when balls had to be retrieved from the netting above it, and it remains in play. Capacity is around 37,700, the smallest in the league.

On screen. Fenway has been used properly rather than decoratively by three notable productions.

• Field of Dreams (1989) — Ray Kinsella and Terence Mann attend a night game here and read a message about Archibald "Moonlight" Graham on the scoreboard; the sequence was shot on location during a real game
• Fever Pitch (2005) — the Farrelly brothers filmed through the 2004 season and had to rewrite their ending when the Red Sox won the World Series, then filmed on the field during the celebration
• The Town (2010) — Ben Affleck staged the climactic armoured-car robbery inside the park itself, with the crew disguised as Boston police and the escape running through the service tunnels and out onto Van Ness Street

Good Will Hunting (1997) invokes the park without filming in it: Sean's account of giving up his ticket to game six of the 1975 World Series, the night Carlton Fisk waved his home run fair down the left-field line, is told over archive footage of the real broadcast.

Getting there and timing. Kenmore station on the Green Line's B, C and D branches is a five-minute walk, and Fenway station on the D branch is about the same from the other side; driving is impractical and parking prices on a game day are punitive. The season runs from late March or early April to the end of September, and April in Boston can be genuinely cold at night. Tickets are among the most expensive in baseball and the smallest supply, so the standing-room and bleacher tiers sell first. Hour-long tours run daily year-round and are the only realistic way to walk on the warning track, sit on the Green Monster and see the press box. On non-game days, Lansdowne Street behind the left-field wall is quiet enough to see how tightly the whole structure has been folded into the block.