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Sweetheart deal: Billionaire John Henry’s Red Sox convert streets next to Fenway Park into pricey outdoor food courts - and pay nothing to the city

By Colman M. Herman

Now and forevermore, the City of Boston gets not a red cent from the Boston Red Sox when team officials close off the strip of Jersey Street abutting Fenway Park and use it to operate an extremely lucrative outdoor food court.

And likewise, the Red Sox, part of billionaire John Henry’s sports, media and real estate empire that includes The Boston Globe and NESN, concurrently enjoy another nearby sweetheart deal with the City of Boston — this one just around the corner on Lansdowne Street. Here the city gets zip from all the revenue the team rakes in selling pricey tickets for $500 apiece and more to sit in the storied Green Monster seats situated up in the Lansdowne air rights owned by the city.

For ten years, the City of Boston had been getting something — albeit a relative pittance of $750,000 a year — from the Red Sox for the Jersey and Lansdowne Streets deals. But those deals have ended, and the Sox now pay nothing to the city in perpetuity, or as lawyers like to say, from now until the end of time.

Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

What’s more, the deals apply not just to the 81 home games the Boys of Summer play at the “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark” that John Updike called Fenway Park; they also extend to the slew of concerts that go on there year-round.

Not bad for a team that’s currently worth $4.8 billion, making it the third most valuable team in all of Major League Baseball.

And now for the backstory that’s never before been told.

The year is 2013. Larry Lucchino, then the Red Sox president and CEO, along with team lawyer David Friedman, frequently head across town to the ninth floor of City Hall to huddle with Peter Meade, Mayor Tom Menino’s hand-picked choice to run the Boston Redevelopment Authority and a former radio talk show host. They, and they alone, negotiate the Jersey Street/Lansdowne Street deals, with not a bit of input from the public — not even from the residents who live near the park.

Many argued at the time that the city should get a percentage of the food court sales and Green Monster ticket sales, not a flat rate. But that was not to be.

As a result of the secret meetings between the honchos, the Sox wound up with the deal for the ages in which they paid the city only $734,039 a year for ten years and then no more, forever and ever.

And get this, sports fans. A year before the deal was struck, Meade got an enticement of a lifetime from the Red Sox. At the invitation of Lucchino, he got to do what those in Red Sox Nation can only dream of: Meade was allowed to sit in as the public address announcer at Fenway Park for a full nine-inning game as the Red Sox took on the Toronto Blue Jays.

Imagine being able to proclaim, while looking down at the panoramic view of America’s Most Beloved Ballpark, “Now batting, the designated hitter, number 34, David Ortiz.” As Meade’s further luck would have it, he got to watch Big Papi whack one of his 541 dingers.

Our MBTA scoop: Contrarian Boston first to report that parts for new Red and Orange Line trains stuck at the border

The Trump administration is holding up train shells and other key components for the T’s new subway cars at ports on the U.S. border, citing potential use of forced labor by the Chinese contractor, as Contrarian Boston reported on Thursday.

Kudos to Jeremy Siegel at GBH News, who prominently cited our story in his piece on the mess, which potentially threatens to shut down production at Beijing-based CRRC’s Springfield plant as early as this August.

Now here’s another piece of the story that has not yet been reported: The decision by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to seize train car shells and other parts CRRC was attempting to import also threatens to derail L.A.’s plans to upgrade its own fleet of subway cars.