F enway Park opened on April 20, 1912, the same day as Detroit 's Tiger Stadium and before any of the other existing big league parks. It held 35,000 fans then, and today it holds 34,218. The Red Sox fit 47,627 people into Fenway for a September 22, 1935, doubleheader against the New York Yankees. Fire laws in the 1940's ended that type of overcrowding and the biggest postwar crowd was 36,388 for a game against the Cleveland Indians in 1978.

F enway's clubhouses are small and modest. The tunnels which lead to the dugouts are usually wet, and the floorboards creak. Like most of baseball's other old parks, it's cramped and even a little bit uncomfortable. Those other old parks have disappeared, but Fenway is still there. Red Sox fans continue to crowd into Fenway's cozy confines, pushing the Red Sox average attendance to over 2.5 million into the 1990s. They've come to Fenway in great numbers ever since the park opened, back in the years when the Red Sox regularly appeared in the World Series. The Red Sox won the World Series at Fenway in the park's first year and won it three more times by 1918, but they haven't won it since. Some think the Red Sox were cursed when they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankess after the 1919 season.

T hey did win what was probably the most memorable game in World Series history, on October 21, 1975, when Carlton Fisk ended Game 6 against the Cincinnati Reds with a 12th-inning home run over the Green Monster just inside the left field foul pole. It would have been a dramatic shot in any park, but hitting it over the Green Monster made it that much better. It's 37 feet tall, with a 23-foot screen above it and includes a manually operated scoreboard that displays the line score and scores of other American League games. In Morse code down the side of the scoreboard are the initials of Thomas A. Yawkey and Jean R. Yawkey, who owned the Red Sox from 1933-93. The Green Monster also features a ladder that is in play. The sign says the Green Monster is 310 feet from home plate. It's 304.779 feet, high according to one measurement or 308, according to another. It has been green only since 1947. Before that, Fenway's left-field wall was covered with advertisements. The original 25-foot wall was made of wood, which burned along with the rest of the park in a January 5, 1934, fire. The second, 37-foot wall was tin over wooden railroad ties. The current hard plastic wall, also 37 feet high, was erected in 1976.

T he bullpens were moved from fair territory to right field in 1940, which made the right-field fence closer and, consequently, helped Red Sox star Ted Williams hit more home runs. The Red Sox became the third-to-last major league team to play home night games when lights went up at Fenway on June 13, 1947. A message board was installed above the center-field bleachers in 1976. Private suites were added to the roof in 1983, and a glassed-in seating section called the 600 Club (renamed the .406 Club in 2002) was built behind home plate in 1988. Even with all those changes, Fenway still looks very much as it did decades ago. For many years, the roof over the grandstand in right featured retired Red Sox uniform numbers in the order they were retired: 9, 4, 1, and 8, eerily reminding us of Sept. 4, 1918, the day before the Red Sox won their last World Series. However, the numbers have since been rearranged in numerical order and now include Carlton Fisk's number 27. The right-field stands are only 302 feet from home plate at the foul pole. That foul pole was once nicknamed "Pesky's Pole," because Johnny Pesky hit it so many times for home runs. Although the roof over the grandstand in right seems to invite home runs, no one has ever hit one over it.

T he Red Sox haven't always been the only tenants at Fenway. The AFL's Boston Patriots played there from 1963-68 and the Boston Redskins (later the Washington Redskins) played there before that. The Boston Yanks and the Boston College and Boston University football teams played there, too. Fenway once hosted a World Series that did not include the Red Sox. The Boston Braves won the 1914 Series at Fenway because Braves Field was still under construction.