The stadium BPS deserves
Who speaks for the community that uses White Stadium?
To hear the Emerald Necklace Conservancy tell it, everyone with a conscience opposes the city-private partnership to renovate the 75-year-old stadium in the heart of Franklin Park.
To the members of the Franklin Park Conservancy — another community group devoted to the care of this cherished public space — the idea has substantial public support, however vocal the opposition.
In case you are entering this dispute midstream, a group called Boston Unity Soccer Partners has cut a deal with the city to bring a professional women’s soccer team to White Stadium for the 2026 season. (Globe CEO Linda Henry is among the group’s investors.)
The team’s sponsors have pledged to commit an estimated $50 million to the renovation and future maintenance of White Stadium and a three-acre area around it, under a 30-year lease. The city, meanwhile, would spend $50 million on renovating the stadium.
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy has sued Mayor Michelle Wu, as well as the other trustees of the George Robert White Trust, which built the stadium in the 1940s and continues to own it, claiming that the proposed deal is illegal.
That suit is currently in the hands of a Suffolk Superior Court judge, who has pledged to rule this week on whether a planned demolition of part of the stadium — the first step in the planned renovation — can proceed. The suit argues, among other claims, that the city doesn’t own the stadium and can’t lease it to a private entity.
Mayor Wu has been adamant that the city’s commitment to renovating White Stadium only stands if the soccer deal does — otherwise, she says, the city and the Boston Public Schools have other priorities for its $50 million stake. She’s been accused of playing hardball — as if that isn’t what effective mayors often do. But if renovating White Stadium is worth doing, she should find a way to make it happen, whether it’s this way or another.
I’ll leave the legal issues to the court. But I’ve been inside White Stadium recently and can tell you this: It’s the most run-down, dilapidated public facility I’ve seen in years.
The School Department somehow was entrusted to maintain the place in 1949, and that might be the last time it saw a fresh coat of paint. The locker rooms, such as they are, are a mess. The field is terrible, even for winter. The track is even worse.
When I wrote about the lawsuit a few weeks ago, I received a torrent of communications about the place. A lot of it went like this email from a former colleague: “I ran in White Stadium at the State Track Championships in the early 1970s, and it was a dump then. I can only imagine how bad it is now.”
Mayor Wu has insisted that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix the place, hence her aggressive moves to ram the proposal through. Critics say it gives the soccer team — which would have priority from March through October — far too much control of a public asset. It would also mean shutting out the two high school teams that use it for much of football season, which I don’t love. But it would open up the stadium for many other things — like more outdoor track and afterschool programs — that it is too run-down to support now.
I don’t really have a dog in the fight between the two community groups suddenly mired in a muted but strong dispute over the stadium.
But after years of watching plans for White Stadium evaporate shortly after being floated, the prospect of another missed opportunity feels painful. For years, people have paid lip service to this stadium — and the park in which it sits — while conditions have only deteriorated..
This conflict pits against one another people who all profess to care deeply about White Stadium, as well they should. But it isn’t enough to proclaim concern for the young people of Boston. It’s time to give them what they deserve.