Breaking down an old photo of Kenmore Square on Red Sox game day

Tuesday 5/28/24

This is a photo I encountered. Not sure who took it, but it's from Kenmore Square sometimes in the 1960s.

Behind where the adult pennant seller is standing, was later a record store where I'd go in the 1990s and buy Oasis bootlegs. Further down the street--so heading into the photo--was the Rathskeller, aka, the Rat (actually, I have a bootleg of the Jam playing there in 1977)--but that didn't open until 1974. Just to give you an idea. Across the street is the Citgo sign, and if you stepped out of the photo and took a left, you'd pass in front of what was the jazz club Storyville. Heading back into the picture again, and going past what became the Rat, you'd come to the hotel where the Beatles stayed on their 1966 tour.

This was a vibrant, exciting neighborhood until this century. It's very bland and homogenized now, as I've written in these pages. The architecture has changed. Buildings that once looked differently have been made to conform to the same style. You know the idea of a McMansion? This is now a McSquare.

It's pretty depressing, if you know what it once was, and all the more so because everything in today's society is becoming this way or is this way already--corporate, bland, unexciting, homogenized, lifeless, soulless.

Of course, the sights and smells of a ballgame were a big part of Kenmore Square. This was, in a way, where you entered Fenway Park without entering it. You were still some blocks away. But your baseball experience for that day or night's game started here, and in earnest. Programs were hawked, and pennants, as this picture attests. Pennants were big through the 1980s, I'd say. Classic souvenir. They felt of a time and a place, but also timeless as an addition to your wall.

Think about the first season of Cheers and how authentic the bar is. If you've lived in Boston, it was very believable as a Boston watering hole because of the way the bar was kitted out. You had pennants. This was 1982, but think about Happy Days and Arnold's: 1950s, and you had pennants. They added a romance. A sports-based romance.

I'm not sure the adult in this picture was feeling the wonder of romance on this day. He looks less like someone who is glum and more as a man who has seen it all within this square of a city. He's doing work. The boys--they could be brothers--may or may not be his kids. They might also be upstarts horning in on the man's trade. Maybe he's thinking, "I'm getting too old for this shit."

If it wasn't 1967, the Red Sox were probably pretty bad. They would have had Carl Yastrzemski, so that would have been good. Perhaps Dick Radatz, also good. Very likely Tony Conigliaro, especially good for the locals given that he was a local boy having made good.

When my dad and I went to games, it was when we first got in sight of Kenmore Square--or, I should say, the Citgo sign which I knew to have Kenmore Square beneath it--that my heart beat a little faster. We came down Beacon, rolling past trees and hills that William Dean Howells would have recognized.

That's the old/original Hancock building off in the distance. The colors on the needle changed--and still do--depending on the weather. Boston kids before my time would have been able to recite this particular urban catechism: "Steady blue, clear view; Steady red, rain ahead; Flashing red, snow instead."

I get a chuckle out of the T sign overhead in the background, with its double boast of "rapid transit trains" and how they connect to all points. Sounds like something out of The Jetsons, which would have been more or less contemporaneous in terms of air date, not depicted time period, of course.