Re: South Station Tower - Full Steam Ahead!
I can't seem to dig out a plan for the South Station football stadium.
There was a conceptual drawing floating around on the pages of the Traveller, Record American, maybe even the Globe. It showed a generic donut shaped stadium, similar to the type being built in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc. at about the same time. The stadium would have held a little more than 50,000, and was to be placed up on stilts over the site of the current head house and tracks. This was the first "air rights" development proposal for South Station of which I am aware.
Billy Sullivan, the Boston Patriots owner (and a very, very nice guy) had a couple of problems in the late 60's. First, although he was a talented businessman, he didn't have the deep pockets f.u. money that guys like Lamar Hunt had. Of more pressing concern were the terms of the merger between the AFL and NFL. All 26 owners agreed that every team would have a stadium that could hold at least 50,000 seats by 1970. The Pats had previously bounced around between Braves Field, Alumni Stadium, Fenway Park (end zones by 3rd base and the bullpen, temporary grandstand in left and left center field: hey, it was a pretty good place to watch football!) and Harvard Stadium. None of them held 50k; when Harvard tore down the wooden grandstand at the end of the horseshoe, capacity dropped into the 30's.
Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey listened to Bill's idea about permanently reconfiguring Fenway Park by tearing down the left field wall and putting permanent bleachers out there. But Yawkey had inherited buckets of money 35 years earlier, and after the Sox won the A.L. pennant in 67, the average game attendance rose from about 4000 a game to 25,000. Yawkey and the Sox never looked back, and Bill had to look elsewhere for a solution.
In 68, Bill got a group in Birmingham, Alabama to host a "home" game at Legion Field against local hero Joe Namath and the Jets. (Jets won.) Bill then leveraged the threat of a move to Dixie into draft legislation authorizing the Commonwealth to take Harvard Stadium by eminent domain. Simultaneously, Bill got the city interested in the "modernizing" idea of either an air rights stadium at South Station, or a stadium to be built on the open burn dump at Neponset (now "Pope John Paul II Park"). This "progressive" idea had a side benefit: with a donut stadium, you could move the Red Sox into it, tear down that embarassment, Fenway Park, and everything would be up to date like Kansas City (to paraphrase the showtune.) All those crap donuts are being torn down now, because they were o.k. for football, but poor for baseball.
Luckily for us, it all came to naught. But Bill was the winner: he got the capital to build Schaefer ("the one beer to have") Stadium for what, $3 million? And that $25,000 franchise fee he paid for a lowly AFL franchise (I think Hunt loaned it to him) turned into a gain of millions for an NFL franchise.
As for us, nothing more than a bus station over the air rights yet! But the park in the Neponset dump is perfect if you need a transportation friendly mob burial site or dig that whole open space thing.
