Fenway-Kenmore Beyond the Ballpark: Marshes, Museums and a Famous Sign

Most people know the Fenway for one thing: the ballpark. But the neighborhood’s name comes from a park, not a stadium, and its history includes landscape architecture, great museums and a community garden that has been growing since the Second World War.

The Fens

In the late 1800s, the area west of the Back Bay was a polluted salt marsh where the Muddy River and Stony Brook drained into the Charles. Flooding and sewage made it unpleasant and unhealthy. The city hired Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park, to fix the problem.

Olmsted’s solution, the Back Bay Fens, was both a park and a piece of engineering. It controlled flooding and improved water quality while creating a naturalistic landscape of winding paths and reeds. It became the first link in the Emerald Necklace, the chain of parks that runs on to Jamaica Plain and Franklin Park.

Once the Fens existed, institutions moved nearby:

• The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened in 1903 in a building designed to look like a Venetian palace. Gardner arranged the collection herself, and it remains largely as she left it.
• The Museum of Fine Arts moved to its Huntington Avenue home in 1909.
• Symphony Hall, opened in 1900, is renowned for its acoustics and is home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
• The Longwood Medical Area grew into one of the world’s leading centers of hospitals and medical schools.

The ballpark

Fenway Park opened in April 1912, which makes it the oldest ballpark still in use in Major League Baseball. Its odd shape, including the tall left-field wall known as the Green Monster, comes from fitting a stadium into a city block. The surrounding streets have changed many times, but the park remains the neighborhood’s best-known landmark.

Kenmore Square and the sign

Kenmore Square, where Commonwealth Avenue, Beacon Street and Brookline Avenue meet, has been a crossroads for more than a century. Above it glows the Citgo sign, first lit in the 1960s. Bostonians grew so attached to it that efforts to protect it have come up repeatedly. For runners in the Boston Marathon, it signals that the finish is about a mile away.

The Victory Gardens

Along the Fens, the Fenway Victory Gardens began during the Second World War, when residents were encouraged to grow their own food. They are often described as among the oldest continuously operating wartime victory gardens in the country. Gardeners still tend hundreds of small plots there each season.

A winter visit

In winter, the neighborhood is a good place to spend a cold day indoors. Pair a museum visit with a walk through the snowy Fens, then head to Kenmore Square. Check each museum’s website for hours, admission and any free days before you go.