Ahead of you sits the oldest Major League Baseball park still in use, home to a team whose bond with its city has no real match in American sports. Fenway Park opened on April 20, 1912 — the same week the Titanic sank — and has been in continuous use ever since. The Green Monster, the 37-foot left field wall that defines the park's character, was built because Fenway's irregular lot left almost no room between the left field line and Lansdowne Street; the wall was covered in hand-operated scoreboards until 1976 and green seats were added to the top of it in 2003.
For eighty-six years, between 1918 and 2004, the Red Sox did not win a World Series, a drought so long and so painful that Boston fans believed in the Curse of the Bambino — the idea that selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 for $100,000 had condemned the franchise to failure. The 2004 championship, won after the Sox became the only team in Major League Baseball history to come back from a three-games-to-none deficit in a playoff series, and against the Yankees, was treated in Boston like the end of a war. The park holds 37,755 people; tickets are among the hardest in baseball to obtain.
Walk the concourse; the park is smaller and older than any place baseball is played today.