BOSTON UNCOMMON
Heath Ledger is firing bullets and dripping face paint at roughlythe same clip. The movie screen is bright and the sounds are clearand you can hear every one of them. The chairs enfold you and rockwith your every motion, and there's a little table that swings infront of you like the ones that you see in the big lecture halls incollege. There are also menus. There is a menu in the movie theater.The menu's a substantial thing. Its pages are made of stiffcardboard and its cover is made of metal. There's a menu in themovie theater and its cover is made of metal and it shines silverythere in your lap in what little light there is.
It is midafternoon and there are only three of you playing hookyon this Tuesday at the Showcase Cinema de Lux at Patriot Place inFoxborough. The place has a huge lobby, and from its main floor, itseems to be a fairly conventional movie house, albeit a luxuriousone. But the balcony, the part of the theater where, traditionally,juveniles of all ages would repair to court, spark, and hurl Jujubesat one another, is a different place entirely. Its winding stairwayis guarded by a velvet rope. At the top of the stairs is not anusher, but someone at a maitre d's stand. There is another lobby,and this one has a bar and some armchairs scattered around fromwhich you can watch television while waiting for the movie to begin.It's as self-contained a universe as any ocean liner. For $18 athrow, on a weekday afternoon, this can be all yours.
'Can I get you more popcorn?'
You jump. The waitress is back again. There's a menu in the movietheater and there's a waitress in the movie theater who will get youmore popcorn if you want it and will put it on your bill. There's amenu and a waitress and a tab running for you in the movie theater.It takes a long while to get used to this, but, gradually, therealization dawns that you aren't really in a movie theater. You'rein a luxury box, just as if you were sitting back and watching oneNFL team knock another one around while people asked you if you'dhad enough to eat. You're in a luxury box at a movie theater.Something's out of place here - and you decide that, maybe, it'syou.
Everything is amalgamated. The great synergistic breeder reactorof commerce and culture has melted so many things together that whathas come out is a huge, undifferentiated, but quintessentiallyAmerican lump. Snippets of information - air, really - are convertedto tangible products. Mass entertainment no longer depends on masscommunication as a mere vehicle. They're both now pistons in thesame mighty engine. Las Vegas has always been family-friendly, butit seems today to be aimed at families named 'Brady' and not'Gambino.' What with amusement parks on the Strip, incongruity is aconcept long since burned away. There are water slides in baseballstadiums and casinos rising from the cotton fields of the Delta andfrom the deep Connecticut woods.
Professional sports is vividly affected by this. Sports is nolonger just the people who play the games, the stadiums in whichthey play them, and the people who watch the people who play them inthe stadiums. Sports is pure information, and pure product as well.There are people who are fans only of the columns of statistics thatrepresent their fantasy teams, and there are people who are fansthrough the clothes they wear. A football team is a TV show, and itis a launching pad for commercial development. Everything isamalgamated. Everything is a part of something else. Nothing standsalone, and everything gets turned into product. It was only a matterof time.
The picture hangs on a wall not far from Robert Kraft's office,deep in the mahogany innards of Gillette Stadium. It's an aerialshot of Foxboro Stadium. There's a trailer park in one corner, andin the opposite corner, a few degrees above the stadium, there's abattered old racetrack and the battered old barns in which they keptthe battered old horses that raced at the battered old racetrack.There are woods surrounding everything and a brook runs throughthem. Everything around the stadium looks like the remnants of aprevious civilization unearthed an hour before the picture wastaken.
Today, the woods are trimmed back, and instead of racetracks andbarns, there are high-end restaurants, clothing stores, a sporting-goods store that has more to do in it than New Hampshire on a goodday, and a dining spot owned by a television network that's sorichly festooned with video equipment that it makes Mission Controlin Houston look like a Trappist monastery. This is Patriot Place,which shares its owners and its real estate with the New EnglandPatriots, a local professional football team of some renown. PatriotPlace is its own project, but without the improbable success of whatonce was a burlesque of an NFL franchise, horses might well still begrazing where the tourists now come to eat.
'Where we're sitting right now,' Kraft says, 'this was theracetrack. The trailer park was right out there.'
In 1985, Kraft acquired more than 300 acres of land in and aroundthe area of what was then Foxboro Stadium. He bought the stadium outof bankruptcy court four years later. In 1994, for $172 million, hebought the team itself. From the beginning, though, it was clearthat he didn't plan simply to build a new a stadium surrounded by22,000 parking spaces, all of which would be used 20 to 25 days ayear. Besides the stadium facilities, the defunct horse track, itsbarns, and the trailer park, the rest of the property wasundeveloped woodland and wetland. At that point, Kraft found himselfin a position most of his fellow NFL owners would envy. He owned ateam, a stadium, and enough land to build another stadium. After arocky attempt to build a new stadium in South Boston, and a briefflirtation with a fantastical offer in Hartford by which the stateof Connecticut seemingly offered to give him the keys to the statetreasury, Kraft ultimately built his own stadium on his own landwith his own money.
Gillette Stadium itself was designed with conference facilitiesand special-events amenities. But it was the empty land around itthat brought real value to the property.
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ltimately, the Krafts would more than double their stake inFoxborough to 800 acres - for some perspective, a football field isabout 1 acre in size. Now the Krafts have spent some $350 million tolaunch a singularly ambitious retail and entertainment projectunlike any seen anywhere else around the league, a 1.3 million-square-foot development that eventually will include at least 15restaurants, a luxury hotel and spa, and a healthcare facility. Thenext phase likely will be the development of commercial office spaceelsewhere in the property. (The Krafts also own mostly wetlandsbehind what is now the south end of the new development and theparking lots on the west side of Route 1 that serve the crowds atGillette.)
'We knew that, with the attitude toward public financing aroundhere, if you're rooted here and you care about your legacy here, youhave to have a way to make things stand on your own,' Kraftexplains. He adds that to build a stadium with no public money andwithout personal seat licenses - one-time fees charged to fans forthe right to buy season tickets, a tactic many teams use - and tojustify paying back the state for infrastructure improvements aroundthe stadium, 'we always had a plan to do something special andunique.' Besides branching out in Foxborough, the Krafts recentlysigned an agreement that makes them the title sponsor of the IsraelFootball League.
It has helped, of course, that Kraft's football team prospered,on and off the field. Having won three Super Bowls in five years,and having nearly won another one last season, the Patriots turnedtheir stretch of Route 1 in Foxborough into a national destination.And they did so just as the National Football League wasexperiencing yet another in a series of financial booms. Accordingto a report published by Forbes in September, for the first time inthe history of any professional sports league, the average value ofan NFL franchise topped $1 billion. (For those of you keeping scoreat home, the Patriots were ranked third, at $1.3 billion, behind theDallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins.) The Patriots, once sobedraggled that they played a home game in Birmingham, Alabama,became the NFL's signature franchise.
Over the last year, however, the team's image has acquired somedents. Fans around the country - and not a few national media types -came to resent the team's success and loathe what they perceived asthe team's arrogance. Last season began with the embarrassingincident in which coach Bill Belichick got caught taping the NewYork Jets' signals and was assessed the biggest fine ever handeddown to an NFL coach, and it ended with the team's loss to the NewYork Giants in the Super Bowl, an upset just as profound as the onethe Patriots pulled off over the St. Louis Rams to start theirdynastic run in 2002. The off-season was enlivened by the arrest ofoffensive lineman Nick Kaczur on drug possession charges, and then,seven minutes into the first game of the season, the team lostquarterback Tom Brady, the living avatar of the team's success, forthe rest of the year when his knee got folded sideways.
The Patriot brand is still strong, but it's not as spotless as itonce was. Even so, Patriot Place is of a piece with everything theNFL believes about itself - the league has tied itself inexorablyinto the country's corporate class, especially those parts of thatclass that produce vehicles of mass entertainment. In fact, theproject seems to be pointing the way forward for many of the otherteams in the league. Given the general reluctance of stategovernments to subsidize private amusements in tight economic times -a problem the Krafts avoided by using their own money to build ontheir own land - teams are looking to maximize the revenuesavailable to them on land they already own. The new stadium beingbuilt for the Dallas Cowboys will feature a Hall of Fame Museum, andeven the Green Bay Packers, the league's only publicly ownedfranchise, have remodeled Lambeau Field to include an 'Atrium' thatcan be used more often than the 10 times a year in which the Packersplay home games. 'We have become a facility that capitalizes on ourbrand,' says Green Bay spokesman Aaron Popkey.
At the same time, Patriot Place trades on its team's success inan almost subliminal way. Its logo is the 'lighthouse' that has cometo be the trademark of Gillette Stadium. Except for The Hall, thenew shrine to the team's history, and some of the sweat shirts beingsold in one of the shops along the brick-lined mall that is the mainartery of the plaza's commercial district, the 'Flying Elvis' logoof the Patriots is practically nowhere to be found in Patriot Place.
'From day to day, the stadium itself is backdrop,' explains TedFire, the director of project administration at Patriot Place. 'It'sone more piece of Patriot Place in that it gives the projectidentity.'
The stadium itself is invisible along most of the walkway thatruns down the center of the mall. Strolling through it, you wouldnever know if the team was 14-2 or 2-14 or whether or not the coachwas doing his Gordon Liddy thing again. 'That's the [recent]history,' Kraft says, referring to last season's spying controversy.'If you try to do the right thing in terms of quality, people willstay with you,' he adds. 'I mean, no one's perfect. Life is managingthrough all kinds of different situations, and that requires acertain mental toughness. It doesn't always make us right, and we'llgo through some rough spots, but if we're doing the right thing,we'll get through them. If everybody would see it, then everybodywould do it.'
Once, the Red Wing Diner was as exotic as Route 1 could get. Opensince 1933 and owned by the same family since 1952, the restaurantwas a place where you could buy lobster or a clam plate far from thebeaches of the Cape. Then they built the first stadium, and Route 1got a little busier, but the Red Wing Diner remained. Then theybuilt the new stadium, and the diner continued to thrive andprosper, even though the new stadium now has brought with it adevelopment that makes the neighborhood look so lopsided that itappears as though the whole south side of the highway might justcapsize all the way to the horizon.
'I'm all for it,' Liam Murphy, the third-generation proprietor ofthe Red Wing, says of the new complex. 'As soon as the Bass Pro Shopopened, that was a huge weekend for us. Anything that bringsbusiness down here on days when there isn't a football game really,really helps.'
A professional football team in Foxborough always has been ananomaly. 'Right from the start, the stadium changed the nature ofthe community,' recalls Police Chief Edward O'Leary. 'That firsthappened when Schaefer Stadium was built in the 1970s.' It's justthat now, the football team and everything that's come with it havebecome a big, sprawling, honking anomaly.
'[The Krafts] had anticipated doing some development in theoriginal filings for the new stadium,' says Marc Resnick,Foxborough's town planner. 'Perhaps it's a little larger than manypeople had envisioned, but I don't think it's unanticipated.'
The Kraft Group leases the space in the facility to the tenants.At the start of this NFL season, Patriot Place was 90 percent full,if you include commitments from stores not yet open. Each of theapproximately 70 tenants had different needs, and it was never amatter of simply hanging a sign over every new store.
'I probably underestimated the involvement that each tenant wouldbring to their part of the project,' says Fire. 'I assumed, perhapsnaively, that we were just going to do plug-and-play with thetenants and deal with the geometry of the buildings, but they'reliving, breathing organizations, and I underestimated the intensityof that, from design to operations. I know a lot more than I didbefore about selling fashions, burgers, and perfume.'
Nothing is a better exemplar of patriot place than Bass ProShops, which looms just as hugely at the far south end of thecomplex as the Cinema de Lux does at the northernmost point, andalmost as hugely as the stadium does in the middle. Practically fromthe moment in which an ambitious Missourian named Johnny Morrisconvinced his father to let him sell fishing rods and more from theback of the family liquor store, Bass Pro has been a pioneer in whathas become known as 'entertainment retailing.' (The company'sOutdoor World national headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, drawsmore than 4 million visitors a year.) When officials on Kraft's teamtoured other sites around the country, studying the development ofsuch multipurpose outdoor complexes as The Grove in Los Angeles andthe Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, more than a few of thepeople mentioned Morris's stores as, well, the fish to land.
'One thing everybody said to us is that if you can get a Bass ProShops to New England, it will be great, but you'll never get one,'says Jonathan Kraft, president and chief operating officer of theKraft Group. 'We chased those guys for two years.
'Their people said that the store had to be on Route 1. . . . Weknew we had that body of water back there in the woods, with deerand turkey, so we said to Johnny [Morris], `You've got to come upand look at the site.' On his way to a fishing trip in Gloucester,Morris drove to Foxborough and looked at the location, and he agreedalmost immediately.'
The store is set in the woods along Route 1, just south of thestadium. (A nature trail is being built through the woods behind thestore.) The store's interior is vast and almost incomprehensiblybusy. Models of various game animals peer over the counters. A mockshark hangs ominously above the fishing tackle. Along one down-sloping staircase is an old-style shooting gallery. With 50 centsand a decent aim, you can make whistles blow and jugs spin andsquirrels duck back into hollow logs. At the foot of the staircaseis an aquarium full of various local game fish, all swimming in awide circle. If the whole place becomes too exhausting, you canrepair to the Blue Fin Lounge on the ground floor.
Patriot Place begins in the sporting-goods store with the bar init and ends in the movie theater with the waitresses and the shinymetal menus. There is some kind of consistency in that kind ofjumble.
When members of the Kraft team started talking to people aroundthe country, 'the thing that kept coming up - because we're nottraditional real estate developers - was if you could build adestination that's entertainment- and retail-focused,' says JonathanKraft. 'In the Northeast, land is so scarce that everything isvertical. But if you go around urban areas in the Southeast and theSouthwest, you can see these open-air entertainment and retailvenues being built.' When the new stadium was built, he says, one ofthe things they asked themselves was: 'What is going to make usspecial - not be like everyone else?'
The nature trail is going to wind through the wetlands, and,sooner or later, the big store will fade from view and the stadiumwill as well. There will be deer and turkey. And everything - thesporting goods and the movie house, the clothes and the perfume, theburgers and the linebackers - will be in the same place, all part of'entertainment retailing,' which is what used to be called'amusement parks,' before everything became one.
They look lost, the three of them do, in their 'Brady' and 'Moss'and the old-school 'Grogan' jerseys. They've come to a pre-seasongame between the Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. They'veparked across Route 1 from the mall, because that's where you haveto park now for games. They've walked through the tunnel and acrossRoute 1 and down through the parking lots reserved for the people inthe luxury boxes. The stadium, they are sure, is somewhere aroundhere, but they've made a wrong turn and they've beached themselvesin front of Aeropostale. One of them walks down toward the movietheater, and another one walks off in the general direction of RedRobin. The third one wanders just around the corner, and there,looming above the end of one of the sidewalks, is the stadium, likesome diffident monster peeping out of its lair.
There's a lot of general milling about in Patriot Place thisAugust Friday evening. (It's vastly more interesting than thetypically useless NFL exhibition contest in which New England isthumped, 27-17.) The whole thing seems like the culmination of aseries of mergers decades in the making - sports wholly merged withentertainment and entertainment wholly merged with consumerism andthe corporate culture until everything seems here to be part of auniversal whole, a common destination for football fans, Sichuanbeef fans, Batman fans, and people in the CBS Scene, wallowing inthe glory days of M*A*S*H. There's always a lot of earnest huffingand blowing about the problems with wanting it all, but thisgenerally overlooks the American desire for convenience. We are,after all, the culture that invented While U Wait, the Drive Thru,and the All U Can Eat Buffet. It isn't just wanting it all. It'swanting it all here.
It's difficult at moments like this to remember the simplefootball team that is somehow at the heart of it, the team that'shidden by the atmosphere of Patriot Place as surely as the upperdeck of the stadium is hidden behind the line of shops andrestaurants. Once there was just the team and the beaten-up stadiumand the racetrack and the horse barns and the trailer park and thedeep woods. Then the team started winning and the new stadium cameand everything that's come afterward appears now almost to have beeninevitable, even as the singular competitive entity that is the NewEngland Patriots seems to be no more (or less) relevant to PatriotPlace than Davio's restaurant or the CBS Scene.
Now in his 13th season with the team, linebacker Tedy Bruschi isthe only player to have participated in all five of the Super Bowlsin which the team has played since Robert Kraft bought it. Hestarted in the old stadium. He once drove around the horse barns. Hehad a stroke, and he came back to play. 'I like to tell people,'Bruschi says, 'that I grew up with the organization, that I grew upas the organization was growing, too. If we can be as successful aswe have been, then there's no reason why the whole organizationcan't be that successful in its own way, too.'
