For more than a decade, the ballfield at 205 Winthrop Avenue in Revere sat empty, overgrown and prone to flooding. This month, it’s a ballfield again.

McMackin Field — the Little League park generations of Revere kids nicknamed “Little Fenway” — has been rebuilt and is returning to community use after closing in 2014, according to the City of Revere. The field had become unplayable in its final years because of persistent flooding. Mayor Patrick Keefe will mark its return with a public celebration at the field on Saturday, Sept. 12, according to the Revere Journal.

The field has deep roots in local baseball. Opened in 1952, it served for decades as the home of Revere Little League, producing All-Stars including Steve DiCarlo, Steve Cushing, Vin Martelli, Mike Spinelli, David Lightbody, Steve Bagnera and Thomas DiGregorio before they moved on to Revere High School baseball, the Revere Journal reports. It also hosted the District 10 and District 16 Little League All-Star tournaments — among them a District 10 championship game in which Revere Journal reporter Cary Shuman, then an All-Star shortstop for a Chelsea Nationals team, helped beat Revere East, 7-3.

The park’s best-known alum is Tony Conigliaro, the future Red Sox slugger who played at McMackin as a member of the East Boston Little League All-Star team. Conigliaro, a Revere native, went on to lead the American League in home runs in 1965 at age 20 — the youngest player ever to do so — before a career-altering beaning in 1967. McMackin Field itself is named for a different hometown figure: Staff Sgt. Charles G. McMackin, a 26-year-old Revere man killed when his B-24 bomber was shot down over Romania in 1943. His remains were identified in 2020 and returned home for burial in 2022, nearly 80 years after his death.

The rebuild addressed the flooding that had plagued the field for years. Crews excavated the site and filled it with roughly 14,500 tons of stone, gravel and dirt to improve drainage, the city said when it broke ground in late 2024.

The roughly $6.5 million project was funded in part through a $25,000 state earmark secured by state Rep. Jessica Giannino and a $4.2 million city loan the Revere City Council approved in October 2025 to cover the project’s second phase, according to Advocate News. The result is a multi-use turf field designed for Little League baseball, regulation softball and Under-10 youth soccer. New construction includes a two-story press box, a storage building with accessible bathrooms, an 8-foot decorative fence, protective netting, a scoreboard, bleachers for 144 spectators and 17 parking spaces along Winthrop Avenue. The surrounding streetscape is also getting upgrades, including new crosswalk beacons, sidewalk replacement and decorative lighting.

Keefe said the project reflects the city’s broader push to preserve its history while investing in its future, calling the rebuilt park “a symbol of that commitment to our roots.”

For Chelsea-area families, the story lands close to home: a neighboring city has turned a longtime neighborhood eyesore into a modern recreation space with direct ties to East Boston and regional youth baseball history — the kind of infrastructure investment that shapes where local kids play for the next generation.