Jay Wickersham Janet Marie Smith: The Architect as Client

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“Fenway Lessons,” Boston Globe, March 25, 2005

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Dan Wilson stood on the top step of the Red Sox dugout on Wednesday, as happy as if his team had just clinched the pennant. ''This is as good as it gets," said Wilson, president of Save Fenway Park! He was too polite to say, ''I told you so." But he had every right.

Fenway Park is saved, and it took an out-of-town ownership to understand its value. Six years ago the previous ownership, led by the luckiest accountant on the face of the earth, John Harrington, sold us a bill of goods, telling us renovating Fenway was ''economically and physically impractical." They knew the numbers; they had the engineering studies; and they told us in no uncertain terms the place was going to crumble; and there was no other option. The town's entire power structure -- the governor, the mayor, the chamber of commerce, the media, the Jack Connorses and the David D'Alessandros -- drank the Kool-Aid, too.

And they were all wrong. Instead, Wilson and the true believers who met Monday night after Monday night in his little law office over the Union Oyster House were right. But it took an ownership with vision -- and an extraordinary planner named Janet Marie Smith -- to see Fenway as not only a place that should and could be saved, but could be made much better ''with love, care and investment," as Smith put it on Wednesday.

There is much to be learned in the Fenway experience. We spend a lot of time talking about the New Boston and the Old Boston. We can't wait to get on to the New Boston. But in our rush to get there, we should take care not to bulldoze everything that makes Boston so special. Those who visit often understand that better than those of us who live here. John Henry & Co. understood that about Fenway even if official Boston didn't.

When they weren't being ignored, the Save Fenway Park! bunch took an incredible pounding in this town. They were dreamers and Don Quixotes and worse. ''Anyone who wanted to take care of something was backward looking," says Erika Tarlin, a board member. ''We were going to put 
bubble wrap around Fenway and make it a museum. No, we were looking to the future. It had so much potential."

People like me are part of the problem; we got rolled, too. ''The media has to do a better job of covering both sides of an issue," says Wilson. ''That was a big problem. We could not get the message out that Fenway could be saved."

If a treasure like Fenway, New England's number one tourist attraction, could almost be declared surplus, then anything could be. Right now the 96-year-old Gaiety Theatre on Lower Washington Street is about to be demolished; whether it should be I don't know. But I do know I have never bothered to even go inside and take a look for myself, and precious few other reporters have, either. We've been told it is economically and physically impractical to renovate. Smith, the Red Sox senior vice president of planning and development, said the management got to yes by listening to all comers. ''Even the folks who are the complainers helped a lot," she said, a very un-Boston attitude to say the least.

Everything can't or shouldn't be saved, of course. But neither do we have to destroy the Old Boston to build the New Boston. The Red Sox gave us a signature lesson in what a little love, care, investment -- and vision -- can do.

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Brian MacQuarrie  

“A League of Her Own,” Boston Globe, August 13, 2006

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Janet Marie Smith, the architect transforming Fenway Park, works in an office that, at first glance, could be confused with a large storage closet. But look again, past the clutter and the mementos, and a few telling tools of Smith's trade lie scattered about this room overlooking Yawkey Way. Slightly unrolled blueprints lean in one corner. Architectural renderings of future changes at the hallowed ball yard hang from the opposite wall. A hard hat is set by the window.

If this unkempt cubbyhole of a workplace is meant to impress, the impression is not one of complacent corporate power. It's an impression of a work in progress, and Smith - the architect who jump-started the retro-revolutionary movement in American ballpark design and the mind behind the renovations that have saved, improved, and polished what might be Boston's most recognizable landmark - insists she has no timetable for completion. "I guess it's hard to know what 'finished' means," Smith says, the words drawn slowly with a lyrical accent that speaks of her native Mississippi. For 2007, Smith says, there's a plan to build a new batting tunnel for visiting teams. For 2008, there's a plan to extend the left-field pavilion along the third-base line toward the Green Monster, providing more amenities and space for fans. And although Smith, 48, won't reveal the team's closely held hand, it wouldn't be a surprise if its owners were to add to their growing real estate portfolio in the neighborhood.

In Smith's view, part of what makes Fenway Park special is its neighborhood, where many of the buildings are as old as the oldest ballpark in the major leagues. And although Fenway is fundamentally a baseball park, Smith says, its significance transcends the game. What fascinates her about this work is the challenge to make space where a city can breathe, interconnect, and share experiences. "I like seeing how people use a place," she says, whether it's a city sidewalk, a small urban park, or a river filled with boats.

Smith helped make that vision of common public experience a stunning reality on a shabby piece of Baltimore waterfront, where the 1992 opening of Camden Yards ushered in an era of aesthetically pleasing and fan-friendly ballpark design. Later, she helped convert the main stadium for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics into a home for the Braves. And when new ownership bought the Red Sox in 2002, Smith was lured north to rethink Fenway by Larry Lucchino, her old mentor in Baltimore who had become Sox president. Almost immediately, the new team - whose owners include the parent company of The Boston Globe - began turning on its head the generally accepted notion that Fenway was outdated, unsafe, and overdue for a wrecking ball. The changes, which have ranged from new seating atop the left-field wall and the right-field roof to the demolition of the glass-enclosed .406 Club behind home plate, have won raves from fans, many of whom had previously been clamoring for a new park.

Ticket prices at the small park remain the most expensive in the major leagues, making them a financial stretch for all-important younger fans, whose support will be critical for future teams. An upper-box seat at Fenway costs $85, compared with $45 for a field box at Camden Yards and $38 for a terrace box at most Chicago Cubs games at Wrigley Field, the second-oldest ballpark in the major leagues. But the Red Sox, on pace to sell out every game this season for the third consecutive year, have maintained their torrid love aff air with the fans.

Despite the team's popularity, Smith is able to sit in the stands unrecognized. During the dozen or so games she watches as a fan each season, Smith is sometimes joined by her husband, F. Barton Harvey 3d, and their three children - Bart Harvey 4th, Nellie Grace, and Jack, respectively 12, 10, and 8. Sox games are a test of allegiance for the family, which lives in Baltimore and has season tickets to the Orioles. "At least the Red Sox and Orioles have a hatred of the Yankees in common," Smith says with a laugh. While she's in Boston, usually Tuesdays to Thursdays, Smith lives in a hotel. Then she shuttles back to Baltimore to help her husband, the president of a nonprofit foundation that funds affordable housing, with domestic responsibilities and to share the children's activities, including Bart's baseball games.

"His baseball is really starting to look like baseball, and that's refreshing," says Smith, who recalls being drawn to games at Mississippi State University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in architecture. In an aside, she states with pride that all her education came at public schools, including those in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s and early 1970s, when many other white families were fleeing forced integration. After Mississippi State University, she received a graduate degree in urban planning from City College of New York, where she selected Baltimore as an urban case study.

"Why would you run from something that's been so good to society?" she says of her family's decision to keep her in public schools in Jackson. "I think it made me aware of a bigger world." Forging a connection with a piece of that larger world, Smith says, is what continues to motivate her. "What I really like about architecture is what I like about planning - the fabric more than the individual pieces," she explains. "It's the public realm that really makes things special."