Polar Park and the Canal District: Worcester Bets on Itself

The baseball stadium you can see from here is Polar Park, home of the Worcester Red Sox, and it opened in May of twenty twenty-one on what had been a brownfield parking lot that sat vacant for twenty years. It cost roughly one hundred eighteen million dollars to build, making it the most expensive minor league baseball stadium ever constructed at the time.

The story behind it is really about the Canal District neighborhood, which occupies the ground where the Blackstone Canal ran from eighteen twenty-eight to eighteen forty-eight. After the canal closed, the waterway was used increasingly as an open sewer, eventually arched over and forgotten in the eighteen nineties. The district became a working-class immigrant neighborhood, and then, through the second half of the twentieth century, it declined as manufacturing left and investment moved to the suburbs.

The turnaround began in earnest in twenty sixteen, when the city and its redevelopment authority drew up a plan for the area. In twenty eighteen, the Pawtucket Red Sox announced they were relocating from Rhode Island and would play in a new Canal District stadium. The announcement set off a two hundred forty million dollar public-private development around Polar Park, including hotels, housing, and retail.

Since the park opened, property values in the Canal District have risen at more than double the rate of the city as a whole. Polar Beverages, a Worcester company that makes seltzer and sodas, holds the naming rights.

The Canal District is now one of the most actively developing neighborhoods in central Massachusetts, built on ground that remembers the Irish laborers who dug the original canal by hand, the manufacturers who sent goods to the coast, and the generations of workers and immigrants who stayed when the factories closed. The ballpark sits on top of two centuries of Worcester's working life.