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.

2624 wylie avenue

Last week I had the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. McDonald Williams, professor of English and son of Alexander McDonald Williams, the founder of the Negro National League’s Pittsburgh Keystones and builder of Central Baseball Park.  Among many other fascinating things Dr. Williams told me was the fact that I had unwittingly posted a photo of his house in 1931!

His father owned a bloc of four houses to the right of the grocery pictured here.  Going toward the right, the first house after the grocery was rented out; the second was occupied by the family of Rob Bailey, Dr. Williams’s uncle (his mother’s brother, who in fact had worked at Central Park); and the third house, 2624 Wylie, which would be barely visible on the right side in this photo, was the home of Alexander and Margaret Williams, and thus was one of Dr. Williams’s childhood homes.  The fourth house, which isn’t pictured here, was where Alexander’s younger brother Charles lived with his wife.

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.