History
The stadium opened in August 1971 as Schaefer Stadium, primarily as the home venue for the renamed New England Patriots of the National Football League. The team was known as the Boston Patriots for its first eleven seasons 1960-70, and had played in various stadiums in the Boston area. For six seasons, 1963-68, the Patriots played in the venerable Fenway Park, home of baseball's Boston Red Sox. Fenway was poorly suited as a football venue and also had inadequate seating capacity 33,000 for baseball and only about 40,000 seats for football.
The Boston Patriots played the 1969 season at Alumni Stadium at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, and the 1970 season at Harvard Stadium in Boston's Allston neighborhood.
The site was selected when the owners of Bay State Raceway donated the land, midway between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. Ground was broken in September 1970, and it was built in less than 11 months at an announced cost of $4,000,000, (later determined to be about $7.1 million, or $37.5 million in 2007 dollars) a bargain price, even at the time, for a major sports stadium. This was because the Patriots received no funding from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the town of Foxborough. Because of this, and also the era in which it was designed and built, it had very few amenities — the type that became commonplace at football stadiums in the 1990s — such as individual seating, "club seats", luxury suites, and deluxe locker rooms for the teams.
During Kiam's ownership of the Patriots, ESPN anchor Chris Berman humorously referred to the facility as "Shaver Stadium", lampooning Kiam's ownership of Remington Razors.
Read more about this topic: Foxboro Stadium
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