agate type

recognition for historic negro league ballparks - or not

There was good news and bad news this year about historical markers for Negro league ballparks.

First, the good news.  The Detroit Stars’ Hamtramck Stadium, the 1930s successor to Mack Park and one of the surprisingly large number* of Negro league parks still standing, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, thanks to the efforts of Gary Gillette and others. 

(*-See Kevin Johnson’s great article in the latest Outsider Baseball Bulletin on Negro league ballparks, drawn from his research on the upcoming Negro League Ballparks Database.)

Photo by Paul Healey, from Project Ballpark.

And the bad news.  Unfortunately, Central Baseball Park, the home of the Pittsburgh Keystones and other teams from 1920 to 1925, was denied an historical marker by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.  According to the Commission, the application did not meet the following guidelines:

1)    The person, place, or event to be marked is of statewide or national historical significance rather than that of local or regional interest.
2)    People, places, and events already marked with existing monuments or markers receive less favorable consideration for a PHMC historical marker.

In other words, the Keystones weren’t that big a deal, and the state’s already got some markers commemorating the Negro leagues. 

In reality, I think the problems are:

1)    The information Dr. McDonald Williams and I gave the Commission directly contradicts the Greenlee Field marker and might be seen as somewhat diminishing that landmark’s significance.
2)    They’re having trouble seeing past Pittsburgh’s many Negro league heavyweights like Josh Gibson and the Homestead Grays, and figure that any team or player that doesn’t measure up to them isn’t worth commemorating.

It’s their commission, and they obviously have constraints on the number of markers they can manufacture and place.  But as far as current scholarship knows, Central Park, and not Greenlee Field, was the first black-owned and black-built major league baseball park in the country.  Giants Park in St. Louis was built in 1919 at the behest of the team’s African American owners, but we don’t know what architect or contractor was responsible.  Unlike Central Park, Giants Park was not built in a black neighborhood, so it would seem less likely that a black-owned firm was involved.  Mohawk Park was built in 1914 in Schenectady, New York, by the Mohawk Giants’ white ownership.  Hilldale Park in Darby, Pennsylvania, was built as an amateur park, not originally for a professional team.

Moreover, Central Park was the African American architect Louis Bellinger’s first major commission.  In fact, as I understand it, the ballpark was his first known building, period.

It’s just my opinion, but I think that all this firmly establishes Central Park’s state and national significance. 

There was more to the Negro Leagues than a few big stars and teams from the 1930s and 1940s.  Black professional baseball was a broad-based cultural and economic phenomenon; it represented the strivings of whole communities, a whole people.  Josh Gibson, the Grays and Crawfords, and Gus Greenlee could only accomplish what they did because of those who came before them.  A marker commemorating Central Park would acknowledge that Greenlee Field was not a lone, heroic effort, but rather the culmination of the desires and efforts of fans, players, and promoters over several decades.

Map prepared by the G.M. Hopkins Company in 1923 (from Historic Pittsburgh).

louis bellinger and central baseball park

Louis A. S. Bellinger and Alexander McDonald Williams

A couple of years ago Geri Strecker published a fantastic article on Greenlee Field, home of the Pittsburgh Crawfords, in the pages of Black Ball: A Journal of the Negro Leagues.  It’s an absolute must-read, if you can get your hands on a copy.  In it, among other things, Geri shows how the park was designed and built by a prominent African American architect, Louis A. S. Bellinger, meaning that Greenlee Field was, as it were, a black production from start to finish.

As it turns out, Greenlee Field wasn’t the only Negro league ballpark that could be characterized this way.  Cleveland’s Tate Field (later Hooper Field), for example, was built in 1921 by a black contractor named George Roven Hooper.  We don’t (yet) know who built Stars Park in St. Louis or Lewis Park in Memphis in 1922, Giants Park in St. Louis in 1919, or Hilldale Park in 1914, so it’s quite possible that African American architects and/or contractors were involved in those projects as well.

But we do know about one other Negro league ballpark.  Last spring Dr. McDonald “Mac” Williams, English professor and the son of Pittsburgh Keystones owner Alexander McDonald Williams, submitted an official proposal to the Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission for a state marker to be placed on the site of his father’s ballpark, Central Baseball Park.  As part of his application, he included several fascinating documents from his father’s files, including player contracts, financial statements…and receipts for lumber purchased during the building of the ballpark.  Here’s one of them:

That’s Louis A. Bellinger, and the lumber is being delivered to the approximate location of Central Park, Chauncey and Wylie.  (The date in August is actually after the ballpark hosted its first game on July 24, 1920, but newspapers noted at the time that the park was not yet finished.)  When Gus Greenlee hired Bellinger to build a home for his Crawfords in 1932, he was engaging the services of a man already experienced in ballpark design and construction, because Bellinger had built Greenlee Field’s predecessor, Central Baseball Park.

The Keystones’ ballpark also marks an important passage in Bellinger’s career, as it seems to have been his first major commission as an architect.  To my mind, this adds another justification for a historical marker, as Central Park carries significance in both the sports and the architectural history of Pittsburgh.  Unfortunately, like most of Bellinger’s work, Central Park no longer exists; its location has apparently been a vacant lot since at least the 1930s:

(From Google Maps)

It also strikes me that Greenlee Field is misunderstood if it’s thought to be a pioneering enterprise, the “first” of anything.  In fact the Crawfords’ ballpark was actually a backwards-looking enterprise, an attempted revival of the golden age of the Negro leagues in the 1920s.  With the collapse of Rube Foster’s NNL and the Eastern Colored League, black teams in the 1930s turned more and more to barnstorming, and instead of building their own parks they rented major and minor league venues.  Greenlee Field was not the first of its kind, but the last.  Its demolition in 1938 marked the end of a particular dream of black self-sufficiency, and served as a harbinger of the age of integration that was to follow.

alexander mcdonald williams

I’ve been in touch with McDonald Williams, the son of Alexander McDonald Williams, Barbadian immigrant, founder of the Negro National League’s Pittsburgh Keystones, and builder and owner of their home, Central Baseball Park.  Mr. Williams has been trying for several years, since before I started writing about the Keystones and Central Park, to get a state marker placed on the location of his father’s ballpark, which preceded Greenlee Field as a purpose-built park for black professional baseball by more than a decade.

Mr. Williams sent me a photograph of the Negro National League annual meeting held in Chicago on January 28, 1922, a picture I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else.

Neither Mr. Williams nor I can identify everybody in the photo yet, but here are some IDs for sure:

Back row, far left: Ira Lewis, a Pittsburgh Courier editor and secretary of the Pittsburgh Keystones.

Back row, sixth from left: Alexander Williams, Mr. Williams’s father, builder of Central Park and founder and president of the Pittsburgh Keystones.

Middle row, far left: Joe Green, owner/manager of the Chicago Giants.

Front row, far left: J. L. Wilkinson, owner of the Kansas City Monarchs.

Front row, third and fourth from left: Rube Foster and C. I. Taylor.

Based on photos from the Chicago Defender and Cleveland Gazette, I’ll hazard a couple of further guesses:

Back row, fourth from left: Sam Shepard, part of the St. Louis Stars’ ownership group (who were there fighting with representatives of the old St. Louis Giants for the league’s St. Louis franchise).

Back row, seventh from left (second from right, next to Alexander Williams): George J. Tate, owner of the Cleveland Tate Stars, and proprietor of another black-owned, purpose-built Negro league park, Tate Field.

Any additions to this list are welcome.

UPDATE 4/4/2011 Sadly, C. I. Taylor would be dead less than a month after this photo was taken (he passed away in Indianapolis on February 23).  He had just turned 47 on January 20.

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.

aerial photograph of central park site, 1939

Here, courtesy of Bill Mullins and the Penn Pilot website, is an aerial photograph taken on May 17, 1939, showing the former site of the Pittsburgh Keystones’ Central Baseball Park.  The resolution is not extremely high here, but I think it’s possible to tell that the grandstand is gone.  You can also see some small structures in the outfield which (sort of) match buildings indicated on the 1923 G.M. Hopkins map—this may give us an idea of how far the field extended toward left and and left center fields (not far).

On the other hand, the survey maps all show Hallett St. neatly extending through the block.  While it’s hard to tell just what’s going on here, the street certainly seems less well defined.  It possible that Hallett was no more than a dirt or gravel road back in the early 1920s, and perhaps it was enclosed to form part of right field—though the ground does start to fall away right around there, so the park couldn’t have extended too far into right field without behind very eccentric indeed.

A note on other uses of the site: Williams was said to have built Central Park on a former dump.  Starting in 1925 it was supposed to have been used as a dance pavilion.  In 1961 John L. Clark wrote in his “Wylie Ave.” column in the Pittsburgh Courier of a plan to build another baseball field on the location:

According to the 1959 Geodetic and Topographic Survey of Pittsburgh the former Central Park site was divided between Dr. John S. Irwin and John Williams.

And I recently ran across a message-board mention of “the lot on Humber way (runs behind and parallel to Wylie, between Junilla and Chauncy).”  According to the writer, “They used to have tent meetings in that lot.”

harry salmon on central baseball park

I just saw this remark by Harry Salmon in an interview he did with John Holway:

My catcher, Larry Brown, and I came here to Pittsburgh together to the Pittsburgh Keystones, out to old Central Park, under William Dismukes, who was manager.  Old man Williams—Charlie Williams—and his brother Stanley owned the club.  We had Dolly Gray, Rod Williams, Larry Brown, myself.

By “Old man Williams” Salmon probably really means Alexander Williams.  Charlie and Stanley were his younger brothers, also from Barbados, who worked with him in his various business ventures.  Stanley in particular continued to be a well-known pool hall operator for years afterwards.

found: “central amusement park,” pittsburgh 1923

Here is a fantastic map, made by the G.M. Hopkins Company in 1923 and available from Pitt’s Historic Pittsburgh site, showing “Central Amusement Park,” complete with grand stand, on exactly the spot hypothesized the other day, on the south side of Wylie Avenue between Junilla and Chauncey.  In those days Hallett Street cut all the way through from Junilla to Chauncey, so Central Park was bounded by Humber Way on the north, Chauncey Street on the west, Jacobus Way on the west, and Hallett on the south.

The plot of land on which Central Park stood seems to have been divided, as of 1923, between “A.H. Wood,” “Mrs. A. H. Wood” and “C. Machesney,” with “A. Williams” owning two thin strips along the east side of the park, either in the outfield or just beyond it.  It’s hard to tell just from this map what Machesney and the Woods had to do with the ballpark.  They might have been Williams’s or Sell Hall’s creditors or financial backers.  It could be that the park was built on leased land, or that Williams owned all the land originally but, in dire financial straits by 1923, had sold the land in pieces (with Hall or Williams paying rent to the landowners). 

Also, looking through the maps at Historic Pittsburgh, it appears that the current Josh Gibson Field is actually located a block west of the historic Ammon Field where Gibson and the Crawfords played in the late 1920s and early 1930s (and which did not exist at all in 1923).  I’ll post more about this in the next day or two.

UPDATE 1:16 a.m.  It’s unclear where the exact boundaries of the park were, by the way, but any way you look at it Central Park was evidently quite tiny.

central park, pittsburgh 1920-25

Recently, during the Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues Conference in Pittsburgh, an historical marker was dedicated on the site of Greenlee Field, 1930s home of the Pittsburgh Crawfords.  Admittedly it’s hard to distill historical significance into two or three sentences pithy enough to fit on a marker.  And Greenlee Field was certainly of historical significance.

But the statement that it “was the first African American owned stadium in the Negro Leagues” is a specific, verifiable claim.  And like so much else that we hear about Negro league history (or baseball history in general), in the end this claim comes from information that has been recycled again and again, getting slightly garbled in the transmission, without anyone going back to check it out.

In actuality the historical marker carries a shortened version of a longer claim that can be found at both Wikipedia and the Negro League Baseball Players Association: that Greenlee Field “was the first black-built and black-owned major league baseball field in the United States” (emphasis mine).  But at least two other Negro league parks were “black-built” (meaning built on the initiative of African American club owners or other businessmen), at least as far as contemporary newspaper accounts indicated.  These were Stars’ Park in St. Louis (built in 1922) and Central Park in Pittsburgh (built in 1920, home of the Keystones).  Greenlee Field, in other words, was not even the first “black-built and black-owned” park in its own city.

Central Park (also known as Keystone Park or Chauncey Street Park) was the brainchild of Alexander McDonald “Don” Williams (1883-1941), a Barbadian immigrant who had settled in the United States sometime around the turn of the century.  In 1914 he started a billiard hall in the basement of Burke’s Theater, and within a few years had decided to enter the city’s burgeoning independent baseball market. He built Central Park in late summer 1920.  Its first tenant was Sell Hall’s American Giants, also known as the “Green Stockings” or “Green Socks.”  In 1921 Williams founded his own team, the Pittsburgh Keystones, hired Dizzy Dismukes as player-manager, and in 1922 entered them in the Negro National League. 

The club was not a success, however; the Keystones finished seventh (10-21) and folded, Williams lost his savings, and by 1924 he had sold the park to Sell Hall.  The independent baseball scene in Pittsburgh suffered rough times in 1925.  Central Park was sold again and turned into a “summer dancing pavilion.”  As Pittsburgh Courier editor William G. Nunn put it, “[W]here the shouts of the diamond enthusiast once held sway the shrill chatter of the modern jazz-crazed youth will be heard” (“The Passing of Central Park,” June 27, 1925).  Williams’s small stadium thus enjoyed an even shorter life span (1920-25) than Greenlee Field (1932-38).

Greenlee Field was in every way more successful than Central Park, of course.  It was almost certainly better funded and constructed, with better grandstands and locker rooms and a larger capacity.  Of course it hosted one of the greatest teams in baseball history, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, while Central Park witnessed only one rather dismal season of Negro National League baseball in 1922.  Nevertheless it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten entirely.

I haven’t so far been able to find a street address for Central Park.  According to the Pittsburgh Post  (August 21, 1921), it was located at “Wylie Avenue and Chauncey Street.”  Courier columnist John L. Clark wrote (January 21, 1961) that Central Park had been situated on “the plot of ground at the rear of Wylie Ave., extending from Chauncey to Junilla Sts.”

Looking at Google Maps I’m persuaded that Central Park must have been south of Wylie Avenue between Chauncey and Junilla—and in fact, there is what looks a vacant lot ringed by trees (making a suspiciously diamond-shaped clearing, I might add), currently bounded by Chauncey Street, Humber Way, and Jacobus Way.  Obviously some real research into county and/or city records would nail down the old ballpark’s exact whereabouts for sure, but for now I’ve made a Google Map showing the definite locations of Greenlee Field and Ammon Field (another important park for black baseball in 1920s and 1930s Pittsburgh—see below), along with the hypothetical location of Central Park. (Click on the blue markers for notes on each location.)


View Negro League Ballparks in Pittsburgh in a larger map

Ammon Field, at 2217 Bedford Ave., has been listed in some sources (for example Wikipedia) as the Keystones’ home in 1922.  This is definitely not accurate, and for what it’s worth the phrase “Ammon Field” turns up for the first time in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1928, when it served as the home for early versions of the Crawfords and for an independent team called the Pittsburgh Monarchs.  The field has recently been refurbished and rededicated as Josh Gibson Field, which seems apt as it was the site of many of Gibson’s earliest professional appearances.

pittsburgh’s central park

In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James writes: “The only park I know of built specifically for the Negro Leaguers was White Sox Park in Los Angeles, built by Joe Pirrone, who was the man behind the California Winter Leagues” (p. 178).  In fact, there were at least three important parks built for Negro League clubs, the other two being: Stars Park in St. Louis (at 34th and Laclede), with its famous 250-foot left field fence, which first saw action in 1922; and Greenlee Field in Pittsburgh, home of the Pittsburgh Crawfords in the 1930s.

I think I’ve found a fourth.  From William G. Nunn’s “Diamond Dope” column, Pittsburgh Courier (June 27, 1925):

THE PASSING OF CENTRAL PARK

Central Park, the only race-owned, controlled and managed colored baseball park in the city [Pittsburgh], has passed into the Great Beyond.  Upon the spot where the most famous colored players of modern days once planted their spikes arises a summer dancing pavilion.  The pavilion will be completed by the end of this month, and where the shouts of the diamond enthusiast once held sway the shrill chatter of the modern jazz-crazed youth will be heard.

And with the passing of the grand old park memories of those halcyon days of 1920-21-22 rise to haunt us like ghosts of the night.  Finished late in the summer of 1920 by A.D. Williams, the park launched out upon a glorious future.  Sell Hall brought his American Giants into the park, and there, under the name of the Green Stockings, they finished the season, playing to big crowds and doing much to show the potential possibilities.

The next year Williams was given a franchise in the N. N. League [the Pittsburgh Keystones].  Dismukes was brought here to manage the club.  The park was enlarged, grandstands erected, and things looked prosperous.  Dismukes used the nucleus of local players to make his club, augmenting them with various out-of-town stars from time to time.  Included in the list of those who played with him were Harold Martin, Gooden, Allen, Buddy Clay, Jap Washington, Oscar Owens, Texas Burnett, Fred Downer, Willis Moody, Salmon, Brown, Gray, Gerard Williams and many others.  The club made a glorious record, and local fans were given a chance to see big leaguers in action here.

In the middle of 1922, following a game with the Homestead Grays, which ended in a riot, Dismukes severed relations with Williams.  From that time on the park went down.  Dicta Johnson was brought here, but he failed to make a go of it.  Sell Hall, Williams and Downer tried to make the park go.  But lack of management and capital proved their undoing.

Central Park is no more, but it will always hold fond memories for thousands.

Central Park was located at “Wylie Avenue and Chauncey Street,” according to the Pittsburgh Post (Aug. 21, 1921).  Nunn mentions the Pittsburgh Keystones of the 1922 Negro National League; the club was actually founded in 1921, which would seem to indicate that A.D. Williams built Central Park with the Keystones in mind. The 1921 Keystones, though independent, played a number of games against Negro National League teams (going 5-8-1), as well as a bitterly contested series against the Homestead Grays (which was only sporadically reported in the Post). 

RESEARCH NOTE: The standard microfilm edition of the Pittsburgh Courier starts in 1923 (though the paper was founded in 1910), and one important Pittsburgh daily newspaper, the Press, has apparently not been microfilmed from 1900 to 1925.  This makes the Post the only easily available newspaper for Pittsburgh in 1920-22.  I’d love to know if the pre-1923 Courier has been archived anywhere, or if a bound run of the Press exists.