America's Iconic Stadiums and Arenas
Why Some Venues Become Landmarks
Most stadiums are simply places where games happen. A few become landmarks in their own right, buildings fans plan road trips around and remember long after the final score has faded. What they tend to share is age, character and a list of moments that could only have happened there. This guide looks at some of the most famous venues in American sports, from ballparks that have stood for more than a century to a pair of lost classics that live on only in photographs. If you have been to any of them, you can log the visit in our Stadium Chaser, which tracks every ballpark, stadium and arena you have seen in person.
Baseball's Oldest Parks: Fenway and Wrigley
Fenway Park in Boston is the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball. The Red Sox played their first official game there on April 20, 1912, beating the New York Highlanders 7-6 in 11 innings, just days after the sinking of the Titanic had dominated the front pages. Squeezed into a city block, it is still one of the smallest and most irregular parks in the majors. Its signature is the Green Monster, the 37-foot left-field wall that turns routine fly balls into doubles and hard line drives into long singles. The wall was painted green in 1947, and seats were added on top of it in 2003. In 2013 the Red Sox clinched a World Series at home for the first time since 1918.
Chicago's Wrigley Field opened on April 23, 1914, as Weeghman Park, home of the Chicago Whales of the short-lived Federal League. When that league folded, the Cubs moved in for 1916, and the park took the name of owner William Wrigley Jr. in 1926. Its best-known features arrived in 1937, when a young Bill Veeck had ivy planted along the brick outfield walls and the hand-operated center-field scoreboard went up. Wrigley was the last major league park to install lights. The first night game, on August 8, 1988, was rained out in the fourth inning, so the first official one came the following evening.
Lambeau Field
Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is widely cited as the oldest continuously operating stadium in the NFL. It opened on September 29, 1957, as City Stadium and was renamed in 1965 in honor of Curly Lambeau, the Packers' founder and longtime coach, who died that year. It is home to the only community-owned franchise in the major American professional leagues.
Its most famous game was the Ice Bowl, the NFL Championship Game against Dallas on December 31, 1967. The air temperature at kickoff was about 13 degrees below zero, with a wind chill near minus 48, and Bart Starr's quarterback sneak in the final seconds won it 21-17 and sent Green Bay to the second Super Bowl. The stadium's best-known tradition is younger. On December 26, 1993, safety LeRoy Butler scored a touchdown against the Los Angeles Raiders and jumped into the stands, and the Lambeau Leap has been part of every Packers touchdown celebration since.
Madison Square Garden
The name Madison Square Garden has belonged to four different buildings. The first two stood beside Madison Square Park, opening in 1879 and 1890, and the third opened on Eighth Avenue in 1925. The current Garden opened on February 11, 1968, atop the rebuilt Pennsylvania Station. Its construction required tearing down the original Penn Station, a grand Beaux-Arts terminal whose loss helped spark New York's historic-preservation movement.
Billed as "The World's Most Famous Arena," the Garden is home to the Knicks and the Rangers and has hosted everything from college basketball to championship boxing. On March 8, 1971, Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali there by unanimous decision in the "Fight of the Century," a bout between two undefeated heavyweights that sold out the building. The Knicks won their 1970 title in Game 7 at the Garden after an injured Willis Reed limped onto the floor before tip-off, and the Rangers ended a 54-year Stanley Cup drought with a Game 7 win there in 1994.
The Rose Bowl
The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, was built in 1922 and dedicated on January 1, 1923, when USC beat Penn State 14-3 in the Tournament of Roses game. That game, nicknamed "The Granddaddy of Them All," is the oldest of college football's bowl games, and the stadium has also been UCLA's home field since 1982.
Few stadiums have hosted a wider range of championships. The Rose Bowl staged five Super Bowls, in 1977, 1980, 1983, 1987 and 1993, and it hosted the final of the 1994 FIFA World Cup, in which Brazil beat Italy on penalties. Five years later it held the 1999 Women's World Cup final, where the United States beat China in a shootout clinched by Brandi Chastain's penalty, a landmark moment for women's sports in America.
Yankee Stadium, Old and New
The original Yankee Stadium opened in the Bronx on April 18, 1923, and Babe Ruth homered in the first game, cementing the nickname "The House That Ruth Built." Few buildings in American sports saw more history. Lou Gehrig delivered his "luckiest man" farewell there on July 4, 1939, Don Larsen threw his World Series perfect game there in 1956, and the Colts and Giants played the 1958 NFL Championship Game, the first to go to sudden-death overtime, on its field. After an extensive renovation that sent the Yankees to Shea Stadium for 1974 and 1975, the old park hosted its last game on September 21, 2008, and was later demolished.
Its replacement, the current Yankee Stadium, was built across 161st Street and opened for the regular season on April 16, 2009, against Cleveland. It borrows heavily from its predecessor, reproducing the famous frieze along the roof and keeping Monument Park, and the Yankees christened it by winning the World Series in its first season.
Lost Classics: Ebbets Field and Boston Garden
Some of the most beloved venues survive only in memory. Ebbets Field in Brooklyn's Crown Heights opened in April 1913 and was home to the Brooklyn Dodgers for 45 seasons. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier there on April 15, 1947, and the "Boys of Summer" teams of the 1950s gave Brooklyn its only World Series title in 1955. The Dodgers played their last game there on September 24, 1957, before leaving for Los Angeles, and demolition began on February 23, 1960, with a wrecking ball painted to look like a baseball. Apartment buildings stand on the site today.
The Boston Garden opened on November 17, 1928, as the Boston Madison Square Garden, built by promoter Tex Rickard. Cramped, hot and beloved, it was home to both the Bruins and the Celtics, who won 16 championships while playing there on a parquet floor famous for its dead spots. Bobby Orr's flying Stanley Cup-winning goal on May 10, 1970, happened on its ice. The Garden closed in 1995 and was torn down in 1998, next to the arena that replaced it, now called TD Garden.
Seeing Them for Yourself
What links these places is not luxury or size but continuity: generations of fans sitting in roughly the same spots, watching the same rivalries, adding new chapters to old stories. Fenway and Wrigley can still be visited on a summer afternoon, Lambeau and the Rose Bowl each fall, and the Garden nearly any night of the year. Even the lost classics can be honored by visiting their sites. However many you have already seen, add them to your Stadium Chaser map and start planning the next one.
