smoky city

I’ve been scouring the Historic Pittsburgh site for photographic evidence of Central Baseball Park and Ammon Field, hoping to find an outfield wall or a grandstand appearing in the distance over somebody’s shoulder or something.  No such luck, but there is quite a bit of imagery that conveys the atmosphere of the Hill District during (and around) the 1920s, the decade of the Pittsburgh Keystones, Alexander Williams’s brief career as a baseball magnate, and the Homestead Grays’ ascent to the status of Pittsburgh’s premier black baseball team.  These photos were all taken by the Pittsburgh City Photographer.

Here is a 1912 photo of Wylie Avenue looking east:

 

The southwest corner of Wylie and Kirkpatrick in 1927, just a couple of blocks south of the current location of Josh Gibson Field:

A 1930 photo of 2135 Wylie Avenue, just three longish blocks west of the Keystones’ Central Baseball Park (which may well not have existed by then), looking west:

A 1931 photo of a grocery at 2630 Wylie.  Central Park would have been two to three blocks west (to the right), and the future location of Greenlee Field would have been two blocks to the north (behind the photographer):

Here is a pair of 1930 photographs showing 1213 Wylie Avenue, a number of blocks west of the area where the Negro League ballparks were located.  The first is looking west, the second looking east:

This is 803 Wylie Avenue in 1931:

Next is a gas station that existed in 1930 at the corner of Centre Avenue, just south of the old Central Park location.  The caption locates the station at 2352 Centre Avenue, which would have put it on the north side of the street, and we would be looking east.  That would mean Central Park would have been not very far behind the service station, somewhere to the left beyond the trees:

The corner of Tomahawk and Shafer streets looking south to Bedford Avenue (see the map in this post for the location).  Today’s Ammon Playground stands on this spot, with Josh Gibson Field itself a few yards behind where the photographer was standing:

NOTE: I found these images several weeks ago; just yesterday Historic Pittsburgh added 2,000 more images from the Pittsburgh City Photographer, which I haven’t looked at yet.

Comments

[Geri Strecker]

Be patient. The next issue of Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal (due out any day now) will include a 1938 aerial photograph of the Hill District, showing the locations of Central Amusement Park, Ammon Field, and Greenlee Field. Due to copyright restrictions, I can't share the image online. The "Black Ball" article will also contain several other previously unseen aerial and ground photos of Greenlee Field taken before it was demolished in 1938.

[james e. brunson]

These photographs are superb! Shades of Jacob Riis!