AS SOMEONE WHOSE home borders Boston’s historic Franklin Park, Olmsted’s jewel in the Emerald Necklace, I am grateful to Chris Dempsey for his leadership in stopping the Boston 2024 Olympics, which would have irreparably harmed our beloved park through an ill-advised plan to transform White Stadium into an equestrian center.
So I was dismayed to see him author an opinion article for CommonWealth Beacon in support of the equally ill-advised plan by the City of Boston and a group of private sports investors to redevelop White Stadium in Franklin Park into a much larger professional sports and entertainment complex.
As a neighbor of Franklin Park, I have attended meetings about the project, reviewed countless pages of preliminary plans, and talked to many neighbors about the pros and cons of the redevelopment proposal. I feel that Dempsey overlooked some major deficiencies in the plans for White Stadium.
Let’s look at the six points he makes, and evaluate the proposal to redevelop White Stadium by those criteria.
“The process to redevelop White Stadium has been open and transparent.”
Not true. Dempsey is right that the local community was deeply involved in the drafting of the award-winning Franklin Park Action Plan, which outlines much-needed investments in the park. But he presents a revisionist history. That plan didn’t envision a professional sports venue in Franklin Park.
In January 2023, a group of private sports investors won the right to bring a professional women’s soccer team to Boston in spring 2026, and found themselves in need of a stadium — fast. After the investors approached Boston Mayor Michelle Wu with a proposal to use White Stadium, the City of Boston released a request for proposals for “a public-private partnership to reimagine and reinvest in White Stadium,” and received only a single response – from the soccer investors. Hardly an open or competitive process in my opinion.
Dempsey states that the Boston 2024 Olympic bid “was hatched behind closed doors, and the boosters refused to share bid documents with the public.” That is equally true of the plans for White Stadium. The soccer investors’ full response to the RFP has never been shared with the public, and the lack of transparency doesn’t stop there.
The proponents still haven’t released the 30-year lease between the city and the soccer investors, divulged what rent the soccer team will pay for their lease, or shared a detailed construction cost breakdown, including how much of the projected cost is due to elements like beer gardens, luxury boxes, merchandise stores, and a jumbotron that won’t do anything to help Boston Public School students, but will solely benefit the private soccer team.
While Dempsey claims the process has been “open and transparent,” the project appears to have been rubber-stamped by a series of mayoral-appointed city boards, and received its only organized support from the leaders of the Franklin Park Coalition, a nonprofit that relies on city funding. No one other than one of the project’s two proponents — the City of Boston — has conducted any review of the $100 million real estate project. And in project meetings where public comment is strictly controlled and regularly shut down, residents’ input and concerns have been largely dismissed.
“White Stadium needs to be renovated.”
On this point, I have no argument with Dempsey. The stadium does need to be renovated. White Stadium is in desperate need of renovation after years of neglect by multiple city administrations. The City of Boston is primarily responsible for the terrible condition White Stadium is in, and it’s the city’s responsibility to fix it.
My neighbors and I are glad that Wu has identified $50 million in taxpayer funds to renovate White Stadium, and we would enthusiastically support a public renovation that enhanced the facilities and improved access for Boston students and the community. Lowell’s 6,000-seat Cawley Stadium, beautifully renovated for just $8 million, with many of the same features envisioned at White Stadium, offers a great model Boston could follow.
But that is not what’s being proposed.
“White Stadium will remain a public asset.”
White Stadium is a public stadium, located in a public park. At a time when more and more of our public spaces are being privatized and closed off, public parks should be open to all.
But the White Stadium redevelopment proposal would grant the for-profit soccer investors exclusive, private use of much of White Stadium during key time periods and impact dozens of acres of surrounding parkland — for the next 30 years. Boston Public Schools football teams would be kicked out of White Stadium, their home for decades, because the women’s soccer team won’t allow their cleats on the grass field until the end of the regular football season.
And, on 20 annual game days, 20 annual practice days, and an undetermined number of days for concerts and other large-scale events, the soccer investors would have total control over all of White Stadium and surrounding parkland, setting up fences and security perimeters to keep out anyone who isn’t a paying customer.
Dempsey echoes Wu’s talking point that students and the public will have access to most of the hours White Stadium is open. But there’s a big difference between a Saturday afternoon in July, and an early morning in January. Under the redevelopment proposal, the soccer team will take over the most-used public section of Franklin Park during the most desirable times: three-quarters of all warm-weather Fridays and Saturdays.
On those prime days, we will be unable to use much of our park for music and cultural festivals, basketball and tennis games, walks, picnics, and other activities because of the traffic and disruption caused by professional soccer games and concerts. Families taking their children to the playground or the zoo, seniors going for a walk or to play golf, and youth trying to play a pick-up game or ride their bikes will be met with a cacophony of traffic, fences blocking off access to the park, guards checking tickets, deafening noise, and restrictions on travel and parking.
A publicly renovated White Stadium would provide all the public benefits included in the private redevelopment proposal, from improved student facilities to expanded access, at a fraction of the cost — without curtailing the public’s ability to use our beloved park and stadium.
“The transportation plan for the stadium works.”
Perhaps the most absurd part of Dempsey’s piece is his claim that “the transportation plan works.” As a professional transportation expert, he should know that no formal transportation plan for the 11,000 spectators expected to attend soccer games and concerts has been released, and that the tentative plan described by proponents, involving no on-site parking, is deeply flawed and unworkable.
Unlike Fenway Park and TD Garden, which Dempsey uses as a comparison, White Stadium is almost a mile from the nearest transit station. Even the shortest walking routes twist and turn through narrow neighborhood streets and park paths, with more than 100 feet of elevation gain.
The team investors and city contend that 40 percent of spectators will travel to the stadium via public transportation. They claim that 10 percent will walk or bike, and that most of the rest will take shuttle buses from one of several yet-to-be-identified remote parking lots.
But at Fenway Park, which is within 0.3 miles of a T station, and just steps from the commuter rail, barely 23 percent of attendees use transit. Project backers would be lucky if even 20 percent of White Stadium event attendees arrive by transit.
The result will be traffic gridlock. Properly analyzed, it is likely that game days will result in more than 4,000 new vehicle trips.
The narrow neighborhood streets surrounding Franklin Park, as well as nearby Department of Conservation and Recreation parkways and state roads, will be congested with thousands of Uber and Lyft vehicles, jamming up traffic and spewing pollution. Numerous private cars will illegally park on neighborhood streets, willing to pay any tickets as the cost of convenience. Our neighborhoods will experience traffic gridlock, air pollution, and potentially life-threatening delays to EMS and fire response.
These enormous traffic impacts trigger mandatory state environmental reviews under the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act, but no such reviews have occurred, and the proponents are using wildly unrealistic traffic projections in an apparent attempt to evade them.
“There is little risk to Boston taxpayers.”
Without any independent state review, Boston taxpayers are being asked to spend $50 million in public funds to help construct an overbuilt, gold-plated professional sports complex to benefit private sports investors, when that money could be better used for a more modest, truly-public stadium renovation designed solely around the needs of Boston’s youth and the residents who use the park.
As Dempsey’s colleague Andrew Zimbalist observed in a previous Commonwealth Beacon piece, a brand new high school soccer and football stadium should not cost more than $20 million, and “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Boston taxpayers are subsidizing a professional sports stadium on public recreation land in Franklin Park to the tune of $30 million or more, at a time when municipal revenues are under strain.”
Unlike with the Olympics, Boston’s taxpayers aren’t being asked to take a risk with this proposal. They’re being fleeced.
“Franklin Park remains a public asset.”
Franklin Park is the largest green space in the city of Boston. It’s where generations of Bostonians learned to ride a bike, fly a kite, throw a football, or, yes — play soccer.
Public spaces like Franklin Park should be for the public. But the plan to replace White Stadium with a private sports and entertainment complex is designed to generate profit for private equity investors, at the expense of Boston’s students and the local communities around Franklin Park.
If this proposal was about helping Boston kids, the proponents could donate their money to charity. They could partner with the city to help fund a renovated public stadium, with no strings attached. But it’s not about helping kids; it’s about making a profit.
Franklin Park — and the generations of children who have played in and around White Stadium — deserve far better.
Jessica Spruill, a nurse, lives in Dorchester. Her backyard directly faces Franklin Park.
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