Lights and BC's Proposed Baseball Stadium

At Monday's public meeting of the BC Neighbors Forum, the lighting for BC's proposed baseball stadium was discussed. The lights will presumably be the 80-foot field lighting standard (ref 1, 2), but it's hard to get a feeling of what that height would entail at the site.

I went a couple of blocks away from the proposed site of the stadium to Rogers Park, property owned and managed by Boston Parks and Recreation Department. This park has a baseball and softball field is heavily used during the April-October season, and has field lights for nighttime practices and games. Using GoogleEarth, I measured off the distances for both the Brighton Campus and Rogers Park photo locations in order to get a match within roughly 5%. I then simply placed the Rogers Park field lights on top of the picture of the Brighton Campus location proposed for the baseball stadium:



Lane Park houses can be seen on the left-hand-side of the image.

Several points are clear from this image composite:

1. The field lights will extend above the tall, old-growth trees (on the left) which lie between the proposed stadium and the abutting houses at Lane Park.
2. The lights appear high enough that they will shine over those trees to illuminate more houses on Lane Park than just the direct abutters.
3. The photo of the proposed baseball stadium site was taken during the April 21, 2007 walking tour of the Brighton Campus (former Seminary property), hence the lack of tree foliage directly shows how the trees themselves will not block the field lights from the direct abutters during the standard April -- early May baseball season.

As a side note: the proposed baseball stadium will presumably be 40-50 feet high, which would extend to the top of the neighboring houses (or slightly above), based on a roughly 15-foot difference in grade between the field and Lane Park.