The Fenway is the hottest development zone in Boston and maybe even the Northeast right now, with new apartment towers jostling for a piece of the city’s skyline.
And it’s a boom that rests in part on the shoulders of a rather unlikely figure, Stephen Mindich, the pony-tailed publisher of the sadly soon-to-be-defunct Boston Phoenix.
Longtime Red Sox boss John Harrington and his advisers were in the home stretch about this time 13 years ago in the spring of 2000, closing in on state and city approvals to flatten a big chunk of the Fenway to build a massive new baseball stadium.
It was the ultimate Boston insiders’ deal, with political strategist John Sasso leading the lobbying, a former City Hall development chief plotting the real estate, and Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Beacon Hill preparing to pony up hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to pay for it all.
And the only thing standing in the way of a plan that would have turned the Fenway into a stadium dead zone was Mindich and a small group of disparate activists.
“I thought it was a horrible idea from every point of view, except for those who were on the inside,” Mindich told me last week as he wrapped up affairs at the Phoenix. “They stood to make gazillions.”
Standing Up Instead Of Stewing
Now let’s not get too carried away here – Mindich freely admits he had his own business interests at stake.
After all, the Phoenix publisher owned a pair of buildings in the path of the new ballpark that Harrington, now long gone from the Sox, was pushing.
But Mindich makes clear his decision to stand up and publicly oppose a plan backed by all the powers that be, chief among them Boston’s powerful mayor, was no simple dollars and cents calculation.
After all, Harrington and the Sox, backed by city and state taxpayers, would have had to eventually pay to clear Mindich and the Phoenix out, potentially for a handsome sum, even if he went down kicking and screaming.
Rather, the whole deal rubbed Mindich wrong way – it was the kind of monolithic, insider-driven development plan the publisher had cut his teeth on years ago, battling Mort Zuckerman’s push to build a mega project at Park Plaza that would cast dark shadows across Boston Common.
“It was like being back in the early protest days,” Mindich reminisced about the Fenway fight.
But Mindich also did something very atypical in Boston, where the business community, from small business owners and developers to corporate big wigs, would rather stew in silence than anger Menino or hurt their standing among the bosses of Beacon Hill.
Instead of trying to cut himself a sweetheart deal with the Sox or the mayor, Mindich fought back publicly, helping form the Citizens Against Stadium Subsidies.
The Phoenix also went to town as well, reporting on the Red Sox and their development machinations as well and helping expose the potential risk and cost to taxpayers.
That said, it was hardly an even battle, with State House leaders tripping over themselves to shower dollars on the Sox, eventually ponying up hundreds of millions for a new stadium.
Menino also prepared to do his part, with plans to spend up to $140 million buying out the businesses and property owners on the site, and, if deals could not be reached, seizing the lot through eminent domain.
Even the local media had a hand in it all, with one key reporter following the stadium talks dating the team’s political strategist, while coming up with all sorts of “scoops” about how swimmingly the new stadium plans were going. (Something I experienced first-hand as the Herald’s beat reporter on the deal and missing out on all the after-hours pillow talk.)
But despite all this grotesque nonsense, Mindich and opponents had far more of the truth on their side than the highly-paid boosters hired by the Sox to push the team’s stadium plans. (One PR maven, who will go unnamed, spent a half hour screaming at me that it was physically impossible to renovate old Fenway could – and she had engineering studies to prove it!)
The stadium proposal was bound to be a loser for taxpayers, while also killing an entire neighborhood in the process.
Harrington and his cronies eventually wound up getting what they wanted from Beacon Hill and the city, lining up, after marathon talks that went right up to the end of the legislation session that long ago July, with hundreds of millions in potential city and state subsidies for their schemes.
"The Red Sox have mounted a tight inside game and the opponents have developed a good outside hand," observed Lou DiNatale, senior fellow of the McCormack Institute, told the Globe at the time. "But I think in the end it’s a development deal, and that tends to favor insiders."
It seemed all was lost, yet it wasn’t.
After lining up all that public pork, Harrington and his cronies needed to fill out the stadium deal with cash from private investors.
And here they struck out – smelling a turkey of a project, investors were not eager to ante up.
Getting nowhere financing the deal, Harrington announced in the fall of 2000 that he was putting the whole team up for sale, effectively ending the stadium nonsense.
The rest is history, with hedge fund magnate John Henry buying the team, shredding the stadium plans and deciding instead to renovate 1912 Fenway.
The new owners turned the antique ballpark into a cash cow and twice won the World Series, forever shattering the curse of the Bambino.
With the Sox finally locked into place at Fenway after years of various stadium schemes, developers rushed in to buy the neighborhoods rundown old buildings and parking lots, putting up new apartment and condo high-rises.
Mindich benefited himself from this real estate gold rush, selling one building and a big stake in the other, now converted to retail.
For this and many other reasons, Mindich and the Phoenix will be sorely missed.
Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
