Agate Type

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.

“certainly our ball players are professionals” : the 25th infantry wreckers, hawaii, 1915

Patrick Rock has come up with some fascinating material on the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Wreckers in Hawaii during the teens.  The Twenty-Fifth was one of the four all-black Army regiments (also including the Twenty-Fourth Infantry and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry) known collectively as the “Buffalo Soldiers.”  All four regiments maintained good baseball teams in the 1910s and 1920s, but the Wreckers were the preeminent Army baseball team of that time (at least among teams that stayed together for a number of years, as opposed to temporary wartime aggregations), featuring in its lineup such luminaries as Bullet Rogan, Dobie Moore, Heavy Johnson, and Branch Russell, along with a number of other future Negro league players.  The Wreckers enjoyed their heyday at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, from 1915 to 1918, and at Camp Stephen D. Little, Cochise Santa Cruz County, Arizona, from 1918 to about 1921 (or perhaps later).

Patrick has been scouring Hawaii newspapers for reports on the Wreckers and their participation in both Army leagues and competitions involving civilian teams.  I wanted to post one article he found (from the Honolulu Commercial Advertiser, July 18, 1915) about a dispute that erupted between the Twenty-Fifth and the other (non-black) Army teams at Schofield Barracks, who wanted to restrict the Wreckers’ practices and stop them from paying their players and exempting them from guard and fatigue duty.  It has long been understand that the Twenty-Fifth Infantry team was essentially a professional club, and here we have the regiment’s representative, Lt. Charles Wyman, being quite frank about it.  “Certainly our ball players are professionals,” he says.  “They have received pay for playing.”

Anyway, check out the whole article.  (You should be able to enlarge by clicking.)

 

stoney mcglynn vs. cuban X giants, 1902

Looking for something else entirely I ran across this account of a 1902 game between the Cuban X Giants and the local team in Chester, Pennsylvania.  On the mound for Chester was Stoney McGlynn, a minor league superstar and sometime St. Louis Cardinal who is supposed to have been a distant relative of mine.  Although the game was close, the X Giants smashed four home runs off poor Stoney in their 5-to-3 win, three of the long balls coming from the bat of the almost completely unknown Ed Wilson.

You should be able to enlarge the story by clicking on it; be sure to read the notes on the game in the far right column.

glimpses of the past

Here are some wonderfully evocative photographs of Pete Hill’s family, shared by Ron Hill and Leslie Penn.

First, on the left is Pete’s mother, Elizabeth Seals; on the right his older brother, Walter Vaughn Hill, second of the three Hill brothers.

Here are Pete’s sisters-in-law, Bessie Johnson Hill (left), who was married to Jerome, and Florence Findlay Hill (right), who was married to Walter.

  

And lastly, Pete’s oldest brother Jerome Bryant Hill at his retirement from the post office in Pittsburgh.