Alumni Stadium is a football stadium located on the lower campus of Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, approximately six miles west of downtown Boston. The stadium lies within the city limits of Boston, although its postal address is Chestnut Hill. It is the home of the Boston College Eagles. Its present seating capacity is 44,500.HistoryAlumni Field, Boston College's first stadium opened in 1915 and was located just south of Gasson Quadrangle, on the site of the present Stokes Hall, a newly-built academic buildings for the humanities that opened in 2013. Before the building of Stokes, the area was known as The Dustbowl, a nickname that originated as a description of Alumni Field in the years when it was intensely used as a practice field, a baseball diamond, and a running track. Formally dedicated "as a memorial to the boys that were" on October 30, 1915, Alumni Field and its distinctive "maroon goal-posts on a field of green" were hailed in that evening's edition of the Boston Saturday Evening Transcript as "one of the sights in Boston." The original grandstands, which could accommodate 2,200 spectators in 1915, were enlarged over the subsequent years to 25,000. Nonetheless Alumni Field often proved too small for BC football games which were frequently held at Fenway Park, and later Braves Field, beginning in the 1930s.On September 21, 1957, Alumni Stadium opened on Boston College's lower campus. The new stadium incorporated a football field encircled by a regulation track with a seating capacity of 26,000. The dedication game, a match-up with the Midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy, was orchestrated with the help of BC benefactor and then-Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, who had received his honorary degree at Commencement Exercises in Alumni Field the previous year, would return to Alumni Stadium on a number of occasions over the course of his political career, including a 1963 Convocation Address, one of his last public appearances.
