Here’s a shout out to Carl Koechlin.

Carl is one of the unsung heroes whose determination helped save Fenway Park – and much of the colorful neighborhood around it – from the wrecking ball.

After 12 years at the helm of the Fenway Community Development Corp., Carl is moving on to take over the helm of South Shore Housing, a regional nonprofit serving Plymouth and Bristol counties.

I got to know Carl when I was at business reporter at the Herald, covering a potentially disastrous plan by former Red Sox chief John Harrington to tear down the 1912 antique ballpark.

Harrington and crew, with the backing of City Hall, claimed Fenway was too creaky to be saved and had to be torn down. Not only that, but it had to be replaced by seizing- largely at public expense - a large swath of the neighborhood next door and building a phony looking, outsized new Fenway atop it.

Carl and some of the other dedicated folks at the Fenway CDC weren’t buying it.

They teamed up with a coalition of activist groups, including the now famed Save Fenway Park! to save both the ballpark and the neighborhood.

It wasn’t easy. City officials and the Sox executives under the Harrington regime wanted nothing more than to arrogantly brand opponents as a bunch of out of touch crazies.

I had one well known public relations flak scream at me over the phone after I wrote a story that support was building among even top city business leaders for a renovation, not a tear down. She claimed saving Fenway Park was an engineering impossibility and that she had the studies to prove it.

So much for that.

Carl and his gang were never the flashiest folks in a debate that brought out some heated emotions.

But they shrewdly, and calmly, promoted an alternative plan to save the ballpark and the streets around it.

The so-called Urban Village plan envisioned a restored and somewhat expanded Fenway as the centerpiece of a neighborhood revival, one that would replace unsightly surface parking lots and fast food joints with new residences, shops and offices.

It was far better than any plan City Hall came up with for the area – and it was mostly a volunteer effort to boot.

In fact, even if the Boston Redevelopment Authority looked askance at such citizen planning, hard headed developers have taken a different view.

Long a backwater, the streets around Fenway are now filling up with new housing, shops and offices.

Maybe it’s not exactly the Urban Village envisioned by Koechlin and other folks at the Fenway CDC.

But all the new development taking shape around the old ballpark is a testament to those like Koechlin who believed that Fenway and the streets around it deserved another shot, not a wrecking crew.

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