The stretch of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue from Kenmore Square to Packard's Corner has never been the same since its two primary historic landmarks and social magnets disappeared – one partially, the other totally. Braves Field and the Commonwealth Armory were legend-breakers and history-makers, now obscured by Boston University's "new uses" for their sites.They were built concurrently in 1914-1915, the former as the home of the Boston Braves National League baseball team (yes, Boston once had two teams!), the latter as a post and drill hall for the Massachusetts Army National Guard. Coincidentally, the Commonwealth Armory was designed by James E. McLaughlin, architect of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox American League team, which explained the armory's festively ceremonial and tastefully Bostonian design.
Like Fenway Park (built three years earlier), Braves Field was aligned in a northeastern direction, in the name of player safety and competitive fairness. Since most baseball games are played in afternoons and early evenings, this orientation of the field's central axis from home plate through second base kept the setting afternoon sun out of the eyes of the batter, catcher and home-plate umpire for ease and accuracy of tracking, catching and calling, say, a 95 mph fastball.
This arrangement also determined afternoon shadow patterns in the stadium. As the sun set in the west, the third-base seating was the first to catch a shadow, so its spectators received early relief from summer heat.
Also like Fenway, Braves Field's size, configuration and compass-points were governed by the established street-grid of its neighborhood, which set it within a similar square street pattern to that of the auto showrooms, service stations and Boston University buildings along its strip.
Yet, unlike Fenway, Braves Field was built on a foursquare parcel rather than the snugly skew block that morphed Fenway into a polygon, to allow the field more latitude for in-the-park home runs, per the wishes of Braves owner James Gaffney. This gave it ample foul territory, which favored pitchers over batters. Breezes from its Charles River location further impeded out-of-the-park homers.
But their city settings made Braves Field and Fenway Park truly urban ballparks that attracted crowds within walking and transit-riding as well as driving distance from all over the city, as handy alternatives to the far-off, isolated stadiums in other cities that are long walks (or long drives, in the case of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough) away, hence out of reach to many.
Braves Field and Fenway Park were thus some of the nation's most universally accessible ballparks. Furthermore, their dense urban settings did not stop them from being open, airy green oases from urban congestion with bountiful breathing space for all spectators.
On Braves Field's opening day, August 18, 1915, a 46,000-strong crowd saw the Boston Braves defeat the St. Louis Cardinals, and J. C. O'Leary reported in The Boston Globe that it was "the finest ballpark in the world. There is not another like it anywhere, and the probability is that it will stand preeminent for the next 25 years." It was also that era's largest baseball stadium, served directly by a streetcar system.
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| Braves Field, 1916 World Series. Courtesy of Library of Congress. |
Which attracted the Braves' sort-of rivals, the Red Sox, to Braves Field for the 1915 and 1916 World Series – and the gamble paid off: the Sox won both series 4 games to 1. (Craig Breslow, are you listening?) And, yes, it was a fair trade: while Braves Field was being built the Braves played their 1914 World Series at Fenway Park, sweeping the Philly Athletics in four games.
The breezy, open design of Braves Field (albeit with some obstructed views – tough noogies if you were stuck in the nosebleed seats, if that was all you could afford) allowed a few more nuggets of history to be made there, but "the finest ballpark in the world" – not to mention the "Miracle Braves" moniker sportswriters tagged the team with after their improbable World Series win – were stretching it a bit. It took until 1922 for a homer to be hit there (by New York Giants catcher Frank Snyder, clearing the left-field foul pole), inner fences on the field were built and shifted around several times, and the whole field was shifted clockwise toward right field. Something always seemed off about the design, perhaps due in part to the field's unusual location, and that it had been the site of the Allston Golf Club's golf course when Gaffney purchased it shortly after Fenway Park opened in 1912. Perhaps the river breezes were more favorable toward the flight of golf balls than baseballs.
Nonetheless, the Boston Braves won the 1948 National League Pennant before 1.5 million spectators. This was their first pennant victory since 1914, and it was timely with their cofounding of the Jimmy Fund, the cancer research arm now associated with the Red Sox. The Braves lost the World Series to the Cleveland Indians 4 games to 2.  |
Sam "Jet" Jethroe became Boston's first African-American major-leaguer in
1950, when he joined the Boston Braves. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library. |
In partial redemption of their weak record, the Braves became the second MLB team to break the color barrier, hiring outfielder Sam “Jet” Jethroe in 1950, a year after Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African-American major-leaguer. By 1952, the Braves had three Black players; one was George Crowe, Robinson’s old teammate on the Los Angeles Red Devils basketball team. |
Boston University graduation on the former Braves Field,
soon after its 1953 transfer to the university. |
After losing their final Braves Field game to the Dodgers 8-2 in 1952 (Roy Campanella socked in the deciding homer), the Braves moved to Milwaukee (followed by Atlanta in 1966), forever depriving Boston of a National League team. The next year, Boston University purchased Braves Field, beginning the process of depriving Boston of one of its baseball shrines.
After the newly named Boston University Field (renamed Nickerson Field in 1963, in honor of BU Trustee William Emery Nickerson, main inventor of the machinery that manufactured Gillette's first safety razor) was shrunk down in 1955 for campus housing at the parameters and football and soccer on the field (as that added freestanding row of bleachers in some images shows), the gabled, arcaded entrance, the under-bleacher concourse, and part of the old wall are all that remain of old Braves Field, as a monument to major-league majesty.
The same cannot be said for its most immediate neighbor...
...the Commonwealth Armory. Built for Troops A, B, C, and D of the First Squadron Cavalry, Battery A of the Massachusetts Field Artillery, and the Field Hospital, Ambulance, and Signal Corps, it had to be a vast, spreading arena to accommodate all those guardsmen, with a commanding presence on the avenue. So James E. McLaughlin dressed up its sandstone-trimmed brick edifice with a sequence of segmental arches like those on Fenway Park to visually emphasize the building's wide reach along the street and far-reaching space inside. To give it the castle-like regality worthy of its occupant, he fronted it with a Jacobethan headhouse and buttressed tower, accessible drawbridge-style by a gated, arched entry bridge over a "moat." The broad springing arcs of these arches and the elliptical dome roof seemed to signify the broad-jump spring of the vaulted elliptical ceiling inside the drill hall, structured to create the widest open space possible for the drills of the growing National Guard troops, living quarters for 700 officers and men, stables for 250 horses, storage for armaments, and more.
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| Mounted State Police training on horseback at the Commonwealth Armory, c.1925. |
Troops stationed there were called to action on the Mexican border in 1916, and later deployed to France during World War I. The Armory also hosted a myriad of public events, including the Boston Auto Show, sportsman's shows featuring Ted Williams, dog shows, international food festivals, an address by President John F. Kennedy at a celebration of his 44th birthday on May 29, 1961, and the |
President John F. Kennedy (center) introduces his brother, Massachusetts
Senator Edward M. Kennedy (right), at the "New England Salute to the
President" on October 19, 1963, at the Commonwealth Armory in Boston.
Photo courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. |
"New England Salute to the President," a Democratic fundraising dinner honoring Kennedy on October 19, 1963. "I must say it is a constant source of pride to me that I come from this State, that I represented Massachusetts, that I am identified with this State. It has the longest and, I think, most distinguished history. But I think in 1963 as well as the last 30 years, as well as the last 150 years, this State and the people in it have been willing to meet their responsibilities, and particularly those who are Democrats," he said – a month and three days before his assassination.
On March 13, 1969, less than a year after the assassination of civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his widow Coretta Scott King spoke at the Armory at the Boston University Founders' Day Convocation upon receiving an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree from BU, where her husband had received his Ph.D. Also accepting a posthumous award on his behalf for his service to humanity, she addressed her determination to advance her late husband's legacy of nonviolent social change, structural injustice, and global human rights, tying it in with the critical need to address the "triple threat" of society – namely the interlinked crises of institutional racism, poverty, and militarism, specifically pertaining to the ongoing Vietnam War. She also explored the transformation of her husband's philosophy from the dream and mission of one individual to a structured, organized social movement, in her promotion of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change she founded in 1968 in Atlanta to provide research, education and training programs on the principles, philosophy and methods of the nonviolence her husband advocated passionately.
On October 10, 1969, The Who performed at the Armory as part of the North American leg of their Tommy Tour, in support of that year's release of their seminal rock opera Tommy. They performed the full opera to a cheering audience that packed the space.
In the wake of the killings of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration on the campus on May 4, 1970, ironically the Commonwealth Armory became a site of vehement antiwar protests in its own right.
The State's reactionary law-and-order wing struck back with a GOP gala dinner there on October 31, 1972. While First Lady "Pat" Nixon spoke, about 8,000 protesters assembled outside with chants of "Sign it now!", insisting that President Nixon sign the nine-point peace program the North Vietnamese had offered. Of course, the protest did not stop Nixon's landslide reelection a week later. But nor did the GOP gala stop Massachusetts from being the only state to vote for Senator George McGovern. Which famously gave rise to the bumper-sticker slogan "Don't Blame Me, I'm from Massachusetts" after Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace on August 9, 1974, in the aftermath of the Watergate break-in cover-up.
The Armory's enormous space also suited it for many public services, including college registrations, Certified Public Accountant and Nursing Board exams, ROTC physical training, and even a makeshift morgue following the tragic Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston on November 28, 1942.
(It might have come in handy as a temporary hospital for COVID patients during the pandemic had it still been around then.)
All those historical events and community services, plus its quintessence in progressive drill-hall engineering, should have been reason enough to preserve the Armory as a Boston landmark. But no. In 2002 it made way for BU's Agganis Arena, which the Armory would have fit comfortably... ...as the curves, roof ellipse, and size of its replacement suggest, being not much bigger than its predecessor. As designed by Cannon Design in its typical hack corporate style, Agganis Arena shows that the Commonwealth Armory's crumbling into the trashbin of oblivion was unnecessary, and is yet another blemish on BU's bland, bric-a-brac, chockablock campus.
A cast-iron gate and lantern, refurbished by Ryan Iron Works, are the sole mementos of the intricate craftsmanship of their castle, which crowned its neighborhood regally and served its community nobly as a convention hall, political arena, concert venue, and much more. Now it has solely a private function for BU, robbing Boston of another community asset and historic landmark. So that's how we remember two vanished venerable institutions where baseball, political and social history were made: by their gates, not their buildings.
Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!
Sources:
Derby, Samantha, and Clio Admin., "Commonwealth Armory," Clio: Your Guide to History, May 14, 2018, accessed October 12, 2026, https://theclio.com/entry/49102
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