The facilities team at one of America’s oldest ballparks is using digital infrastructure to ramp up security without taking away from the building’s historic charm, Ryan Kozul, senior director of ballpark and game day operations at Fenway Park in Boston, told Facilities Dive in an interview. Fenway Park is home to Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox, where Kozul heads up the security and event operations departments.
“There’s been a ton of construction done to preserve Fenway, and that has caused us to rethink and reimagine what we have in certain places,” Kozul said.
How the park is used has changed dramatically since it was built in 1912, Kozul said. In addition to being the home field for the Boston Red Sox, it hosts 400 to 500 private events a year, some with thousands of people, and is a major concert venue, with 12 shows scheduled for this summer.
“From a business standpoint and from a scheduling standpoint, we do so much more than baseball now,” he said. “It has really turned into an almost 365, 24/7 place.”
Improving security without disrupting events while maintaining the park’s historic features has required a new way of thinking, said Kozul. He pointed to a back-of-house hallway that in the past saw little traffic but today is heavily used.
“This hallway never needed any surveillance before, because no one’s ever back there,” he said. “Now we have 8,000 people walking through there during a concert. …. There’s definitely a lot of nooks and crannies in this place and a lot of tight angles.”
To modernize security within the limits it was facing, the park partnered with Johnson Controls to bring in the company’s Connected Security Systems platform.
The platform integrates video surveillance, remote access control and maintenance scheduling, according to Greg Parker, Johnson Controls’ Americas vice president of life cycle solutions.
Remote access enables the park’s internal IT team to draw on Johnson Controls’ technicians without having to disrupt events if servicing is needed beyond what in-house staff can accomplish, Kozul said.
“In the past, as soon as we’ve exhausted our initial diagnosis, we just immediately had to call for a tech to come,” he said. “With this system, we’ve really been able to knock a lot of that down and get some more remote help on things, which has been big.”
Remote access has been especially helpful during a homestand, when the Red Sox are hosting two or more games in a row. They “can’t necessarily wait until next Thursday when the homestand ends to get something back up and running,” he said.
The park now has more than a 95% remote resolution rate for security systems issues that were resolved without on-site technician dispatch, according to Johnson Controls. Truck or service vehicle dispatches have also been reduced by more than half, a company spokesperson said.
With this latest security upgrade, the park has about 400 cameras deployed, up from a quarter of that in 2010, when it first started working with Johnson Controls on security. The cameras include many with multi-sensors that have two or four lenses built in and can change views depending on need, according to Kozul.
The multi-sensors help multiply security staff’s ability to see around the park without having to deploy so many cameras that attendees start to notice their presence, Kozul said. “We don’t want cameras in people’s faces every time they turn around, so a lot of these multi-sensor and dual-sensor cameras have been really helpful for us,” he said.
A portion of the new cameras have replaced older cameras that needed upgrading, something Johnson Controls did without adding installation costs, Kozul added.
The upgrade also helps improve the park’s perimeter security, he said. Unlike many other stadiums, Fenway is located in a city neighborhood, requiring it to cordon off some streets during games to help accommodate ingress and egress. Additional cameras help the park keep tabs on that and ensure that nothing going outside spills in to the stadium, he said.
“Being able to effectively have eyes on the perimeter…has been really big as well,” Kozul said.
