BOSTON'S FENWAY PARK - AN IRISH-AMERICAN LANDMARK
By Michael P. Quinlin

Fenway Park - home of the Boston Red Sox is the nation's enduring symbol of baseball, America's favorite pastime. Officially opened on April 20, 1912, the park has outlasted all other major league baseball parks, becoming a shrine for baseball lovers everywhere.

Writing in the New Yorker Magazine in 1960, John Updike described Fenway Park as "a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg."

The contractor who built this lyrical ballpark was Irish immigrant Charles E. Logue (1858-1919), one of Boston's renowned builders of Irish descent. Logue (pictured above) arrived from Co. Derry in 1881 at age 23, and quickly gained a reputation as a skilled carpenter and ambitious young man.

Logue's timing was perfect when he formed the Charles Logue Building Company in 1890. The Boston Irish had finally begun to wrestle control of the city from the recalcitrant Yankees with the election of Hugh O'Brien, Boston's first mayor, in 1884.

According to Boston historian Dennis Ryan, Charles Logue became major contractor in the Irish community, building Boston College's campus as well as churches for the Boston Archdiocese. Mayor Patrick Collins appointed Logue to the Schoolhouse Committee in 1904, citing the need for a practical builder, and Mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, President John F. Kennedy's grandfather, relied on Logue to build a "busier, better Boston."

But Fenway Park would become Logue's enduring landmark.

Ground was broken for the park in September1911, and the stadium was finished the following spring, a considerable achievement given the harsh New England winters. Continue here .....