BOSTON - Janet Marie Smith vs. the Green Monster.
If it sounds like an idea coming out of left field, that's because it is. Smith, one of the country's noted baseball park designers and a creative force behind Oriole Park at Camden Yards, is tackling her latest project: the revamping of Fenway Park and its stark green left-field wall that looms as a monster in a city obsessed with baseball.
"Sometimes we stop and say, 'It's Fenway, can you believe it?' It's cloud nine just to be here," Smith says in a spare moment during a 15-hour workday at the Boston ballpark, the latest city icon entrusted to her for a makeover.
It's here, on this 90-year-old diamond where Babe Ruth and Ted Williams played their first big-league seasons and "Smokey Joe" Wood dominated the mound, that Smith, 44, is looking to blend Boston's baseball past with the marketing demands of today's big-money sports.
There is a historic 37-foot- high wall to be kept, but there is luxury seating to be added. There is a cozy and intimate feel to be preserved, yet there is the financial pressure to increase the size of a roughly 34,000-seat park, the smallest in major-league baseball. Smith and others are even considering whether they dare add more seats behind the fabled Green Monster to, as she puts it, "make it behave like a new ballpark."
Big decisions for someone who isn't a baseball fanatic. For Smith, a mother of three who lives a hectic but family-oriented life in her adopted hometown of Baltimore, the project is less about baseball and more like polishing a piece of Americana.
"It's not about the sport," says Smith. "It's about being a meaningful part of the city, sometimes harking back to an earlier era. It's good for baseball and much better for the soul of a city."
More than with any other pastime, baseball parks were meant to be civic crossroads and places where common memories are made. That idea inspired Smith to work on Camden Yards when the original concepts for Baltimore's new ballpark were being drafted in 1989.
Strong sense of past
It's familiar territory for Smith. Boston and Baltimore have more in common besides being old Eastern waterfront cities composed of close-knit ethnic enclaves. The cities are nearly the same size, with Baltimore ranked in the 2000 census as the nation's 17th-largest city and Boston as the 20th. Both have a strong sense of their sports pasts, particularly with their baseball teams.
It was Smith who came up with a host of Oriole Park touches - ornithologically correct birds, sun-baked bricks, and the preserved warehouse wall. She also insisted that Baltimore's ballpark be cast in steel rather than concrete, a decision made to reflect Baltimore's character as an industrial town.
Smith has had a creative hand in shaping other city landscapes across the country - Battery Park City in New York, Pershing Square in Los Angeles, and Turner Field in Atlanta, to name a few. Some of the ideas embedded in the cozily retro Camden Yards, which opened a decade ago, set the standard for the new generation of ballparks set squarely in cityscapes, from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Milwaukee to San Francisco.
In Boston, a town suffering from not having won a World Series since 1918, the decision still hasn't been made whether to renovate or replace Fenway. Many are leaning toward renovation, but the question is the source of debate among Bostonian zealots - civic and baseball alike.
Red Sox President Larry Lucchino said that he and the new owner, John W. Henry, are counting on Smith to help them make up their minds. In a link between Smith's past and present, it was Lucchino as the then-Orioles president who took her pitch for the Baltimore project more than a decade ago and hired her to realize the vision of an old-fashioned ballpark with modern amenities.
Life in Baltimore
When she's not traveling three days a week, Smith leads a decidedly Baltimorean life. She shops at Eddie's and attends Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Cathedral Street. Her home in Roland Park is a rambling sky-blue shingle house filled with three children - Jack, 4; Nellie Grace, 6; and Bart, 8. Her husband, whom she met on a blind date, is F. Barton Harvey III, chairman and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation, which builds housing for the poor.
When they married in 1992, they held their reception on the newly finished baseball field.
"Well, that's perfect, we thought," Smith says. "We romanced here and had friends coming from out of town, and we put guest names on the scoreboard."
These days, when they throw their annual holiday party, the couple serves Maryland oysters and Mississippi tamales in a meeting of their home states' cuisines. Smith orders hundreds of tamales to arrive fresh by FedEx.
Harvey describes his wife as an architect's daughter who grew up in racially polarized Jackson, Miss., before leaving to see the rest of the world.
"Very few people leave Mississippi, and not many whites stayed in the public schools," Harvey said. "She did both."
When Smith first saw New York City as an architecture student at Mississippi State University, she said it was settled in her mind that she would live there and that the city itself would be the best teacher she could have in the study of urban design.
While studying for a master's degree in urban planning at City College of New York, Smith got her first in-depth look at Baltimore - academically speaking - during a case study of city waterfronts revitalized in the 1970s.
"What impressed me about Baltimore is that it used the tools of government to reinvent itself," she said. "Baltimore wrote the book."
She first came face to face with Baltimore years later when, on a whim, she went to a baseball game by herself at Memorial Stadium, curious to see the one team that was losing more than the team her family followed - the Atlanta Braves. In that season that many fans in the two cities would love to forget, the Braves lost 106 games - compared to the Orioles' 107.
"That was the year, 1988, somebody was doing worse than the Braves," she said. "And somebody in the stands told me they were building a new ballpark. All of a sudden, a month later, I had an idea that would be a fun thing to work on. I sent a letter on December 13, my birthday, and I remember thinking, this is a good omen."
The letter helped convince Lucchino that Smith had the skills to put together the design elements for a new kind of ballpark. Before long, Smith was packing her bags for Baltimore, looking forward to helping create a baseball park from scratch.
Smith refers to it all as "a great good luck story."
Her husband says Smith has more than just luck.
"If she thinks something's right, watch out," Harvey said. "She ain't going to quit. There is constant striving."
Now Smith has the chance to live a tale of two cities closely akin in baseball spirit, as her career arcs back and forth between Boston and Baltimore, where she is a vice president at Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse.
Speaking to a group assembled at the Algonquin Club of Boston, Smith said there is a symmetry between Boston and Baltimore. When Camden Yards was built, she said, the idea was to erect a new park with a feel for the old style of baseball. Now, 10 years later, the mystique of Fenway is about to be infused with a new ballpark feel.
"For us, Fenway is like Camden Yards in reverse," she said. "Then, it was art imitating life. Now, it's life imitating art."
'Reflection of the city'
Underneath all the effort is Smith's passion for creating a sense of closeness and identity within a city - some of which she used to hear on the radio when her father listened to baseball games.
"I love the camaraderie of 30,000 people," Smith said in her Red Sox office after a standing-room-only game on a clear summer night. "It's such a reflection of the city, literally shaped by the streets.
"It's the city in miniature."
But changes are coming soon. Lucchino says that any renovation of Fenway must include greater seating capacity. It would also need new ideas.
Next month, for starters, turnstiles will be put in two hours before game time to create a vendor concourse along Yawkey Way, on the edge of the green-steel-and-red-brick ballpark. Berklee College of Music students will be invited to play outdoors to enhance the street atmosphere.
That experiment echoes one of Smith's signatures on Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the promenade along Eutaw Street where lemonade, beer and barbecue at sidewalk stands attract walkers and create clusters of activity.
"Yawkey Way and Eutaw Street are kissing cousins," Smith said. "The parallels of the places are fascinating."
She likens her work on Camden Yards and Fenway Park to that of a director on a movie set, whose eye looks at all the angles, action, light, scenes, drawings and fine print to orchestrate a production.
The magic of baseball seems to follow Smith wherever she goes. This season, while her family and her parents were visiting Boston, they watched the first no-hitter at Fenway in 35 years.
"The kids got to run the bases afterward," she said.