Fenway Park

Fenway Park is the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball — opened on April 20, 1912 (the same week the Titanic sank, which buried the sports page coverage), and still hosting Red Sox games in a venue that was designed for the dead-ball era and has been accumulating character ever since. The park's defining feature is the Green Monster — a 37-foot-high left field wall that turns routine fly balls into doubles and has been terrorising pitchers since 1934.

The Monster exists because of real estate, not design. When Fenway was built, the left field boundary was determined by Lansdowne Street behind it, and the wall was the solution to a short outfield. Over the decades it acquired seats on top (added in 2003), a manual scoreboard that is still operated by hand from inside the wall, and a status as the most famous structure in American sports. The seats atop the Monster are the most coveted tickets in baseball.

Fenway's age means everything about it is slightly wrong by modern standards — the seats are narrow, the sightlines are obstructed in places by support columns, the concourses are cramped, and Pesky's Pole in right field is only 302 feet from home plate. None of this matters. The park's imperfections are what make it feel alive — you're watching baseball in a place that has hosted Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, and David Ortiz, where the dimensions force a style of play that exists nowhere else, and where 37,000 people singing 'Sweet Caroline' in the eighth inning is a communal experience that no modern stadium can replicate.