Fenway Park

In 1911, John I. Taylor was looking for locations to build a new ballpark for his baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. Later that year, his father purchased more than 365,000 sq feet (33,900 sq meters) of land in the neighborhood of Fenway-Kenmore. Naming the stadium “Fenway Park,” Taylor claimed the name was inspired by the location, though some suggested it promoted his family’s company, Fenway Realty. Regardless of its namesake, the oldest stadium in Major League Baseball was born.

The first baseball game at Fenway was played on April 9, 1912. This was during a time when Boston was a dominant team in the newly created Major League, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series in 1903 and winning four more championships by 1918.

However, after their dominant years, the Red Sox went into one of the longest championship droughts in baseball history. In one of the most famous lopsided trades in sports history, the young pitcher Babe Ruth was traded to the rival New York Yankees. Ruth went on to firmly place himself in the pantheon of all-time greats, and Boston’s star would fade with him. “The Curse of the Bambino” would be an anguishing 86-year wait for Red Sox fans before the team’s next World Series Championship win in 2004.

Due to the park’s age and constrained location, it has been renovated and expanded many times. This has resulted in some quirky features, including the 37.167-foot (11.329 m) left field wall in the park, nicknamed “The Green Monster.” Depending on which team is batting, it can be viewed as a friendly monster to the home crowd.

April 20, 2012 marked the park’s centennial, and the following month, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. One of the most well-known sports venues in the world, it’s thankfully now longer cursed. Wearing Yankees jerseys within its walls is a practice still frowned upon.