It’s rare that 24 hours click off the clock without Bill Richard’s shadow casting its lean frame onto the 2.5-acre construction site of the Fieldhouse+ on Mount Vernon Street in Dorchester. When we met up by the rear gates next to BC High earlier this month, it was late afternoon on a Wednesday and the sun was still beaming strong. The site itself, though, was quiet.
“I was here earlier. This is actually my second tour today,” he said with a wide grin.
The foreman of the project for Lee Kennedy Co. emerged from a trailer, unlocked the wire-fence gates, and greeted us politely, but with a hint of mild concern. The site was fully clear of ironworkers and laborers and the folks who operate the huge Marr Company crane, which hours earlier was swinging beams and equipment into place 50 feet above. The crane now sat idle. It was clearly half-past quitting time.
“No worries. I can lock up,” Bill assured him.
Bill Richard leads a tour of the Fieldhouse+ in Dorchester on June 3, 2026. Bill Forry photo
The words are scarcely off his lips and Bill is bounding across the yard with kid-in-a-candy-store energy. A version of this tour has unfolded a few dozen times in recent months. But each day reveals fresh progress on this building that Bill and Bob Scannell dreamed up nearly a decade ago.
Earlier this day, a long slab of concrete sub-floor was poured on the upper deck that will someday soon be a huge indoor playing field teeming with kids booming soccer balls, swinging bats, and shagging fly balls.
“We really can’t walk on it,” Bill says, a bit chagrined. He wants to cover every square inch of the site.
Even in its unfinished state, this place feels like hallowed ground.
On May 18, the day of a well-attended topping-off ceremony with Local 7 Ironworkers hoisting the final signature-laden beam into position, Congressman Stephen Lynch— a key supporter— noted the dynamic. The men and women who’re building it say as much: This isn’t just another job.
The story behind it is constantly tugging at your bootlaces, tapping on your hard hat: The Fieldhouse+ is a passion project that will memorialize Denise and Bill’s late son Martin by delivering a world-class facility that Martin and his siblings and their peers could scarcely have conjured back in their early childhoods. Once it opens, their little brothers and sisters— and city kids for generations to come—will learn, play, befriend one another, and connect in ways never before possible on this scale. Not in this neighborhood.
Now Bill’s scaling a temporary stairway to the second floor that emerges onto an east-facing corner of the Fieldhouse that will some day soon be a theatre. Everything up here is still skeleton-like— you can see through walls that aren’t there yet and enjoy panoramic vistas of the building’s every nook and cranny. Soon, drywall and plaster and brick will envelop the 75,000-square-foot structure and close off that sweeping 360 degree view with walls that are as essential as the elevators, the electric wiring, the pipes and the duct work. On this day, though, it’s a gift to watch Bill Richard gaze across the expanse from end-to-end in this pre-natal moment, an expectant father getting his daily dose of a reveal that’s endlessly enthralling.
We next come to a perch that will offer spectators a bird’s eye view of two basketball courts on the floor below. The first-draft of a running track that will ring the perimeter of this upper level is sketched out in aluminum beneath our feet. Steps away, the entry point to what will be an outdoor deck named for the sainted Queenie Santos, the longtime club director who runs the Denny Center across the street, angles out to a view overlooking Ruth Batson Academy, the BPS school that will have full use of this facility.
The outdoor space will include a garden with raised beds that will grow flowers and veggies like they do over at Fenway Park, Bill says.
As to the performance space next to the patio, nothing is fixed, Bill assures his two guests. “It all depends who wants to do what,” he says.
The stage can move. Seating can shift. Dark drapes can turn a bright room with huge picture windows looking out over Mount Vernon Street and Dorchester Bay into a true theater. A lighting and audiovisual grid may be redesigned so it can lower to ground level. That would make production work easier, but Bill is more excited by another possibility: “It also then be a teaching tool.” Kids could learn the craft “down here at ground level.”
Every ten or twenty feet stretch brings Bill’s tour into another not-yet-room: a music clubhouse with “two recording studios,” offices for a rotating cast of partner nonprofits, counseling rooms, a conference table that will probably go over here. Just about right here will be a “sensory room” deliberately made large enough to matter, not treated, Bill says, like “an afterthought.”
On this tour with me and Bill is my son John Forry, 22, freshly graduated from Boston College. John was one of the BGCD teens who several years ago joined in for visioning sessions to help Bill and the grown-ups figure out what should be included in this place. That’s why it’s not just a giant sports complex for would-be Lionel Messi and David Ortiz. It’s got room for the gardeners, the podcasters, the thespians and the therapists, too— including quiet spaces for kids who can get overwhelmed by the pace of it all.
Speaking of pace, Bill’s still in blur-mode, scaling up another scaffold stairway to the roof that will mainly house HVAC equipment but today offers an unobstructed view of the city skyline, the harbor, the grounds of the neighboring schools, and, of course, Sister Corita’s magical multi-colored cylinder. So satisfying is the setting that Bill’s now wondering if there’s a way to add a permanent stairway up here. It would be a helluva spot for a party, but for now a three-man selfie will have to do.
Bill’s enthusiasm is infectious, but time’s almost up. He’s off to work the phones. For all of the generous gifts that have poured in like the fresh concrete, more donations are needed to get this place finished by Bill’s goal: April 2027.
We’re back at the gate, now and Bill Richard fastens the lock and offers a quick embrace and a final selfie.
He’ll be back tomorrow. The tours must go on.
