Agate Type

update on giants park, st. louis

In the previous post I noted that “we don’t know what architect or contractor was responsible” for building Giants Park in St. Louis, one of the earliest ballparks built specifically for a Negro league team.  I then guessed that, because the park was not built in a black neighborhood, it seemed “less likely that a black-owned firm was involved.”

Well, up steps Dwayne Isgrig, the go-to guy on the St. Louis Giants, with some court documents from a 1921 case.  It seems that the contractor responsible for improvements, additions, and alterations to the park undertaken before the start of the first Negro National League season in 1920 was never paid.  He had to sue the Giants’ owners and the owners of the park. 

The defendants in the case were 1) the Athlone Realty and Investment Company, owners of the real estate on which Giants Park was built, and 2) John Haynes and the St. Louis Giants Baseball and Amusement Company, who leased the land.  The Athlone Company was named after a street in the neighborhood, and Dwayne points out that Conrad Kuebler, the promoter who used to bankroll the Giants years before, lived near the park.  Haynes was one of several African American financial backers of the Giants; presumably he’s singled out because at this point he was the majority owner of the team or its chief executive.  (The documents also note that both Haynes and the St. Louis Giants had obtained interests in the real estate itself, thus becoming at least part owners of the land and park.)

Anyway, the plaintiff in the case was a contractor named Tony Menke, a German-American who emigrated with his family in 1887 when he was six years old.  He was, unsurprisingly, listed as white on all documents I could find.  Dwayne suspects that Menke was an associate of Kuebler.  Now it’s true that this only proves that Menke did the 1920 improvements; we don’t know if he was responsible for the original construction of the park in 1919.  But it’s a piece of information well worth having.

One more thing, maybe more important, emerges from these documents—a description of the piece of real estate on which Giants Park was built:

An article in the St. Louis Argus (April 25, 1919, p. 4; courtesy of Patrick Rock) about the building of Giants Park in 1919 gave its dimensions as 560 by 400 feet, which made it seem that they had enclosed Holly Avenue and stretched the park into the next block.  (Clarence Avenue runs down the far left on this map; Holly Avenue is the street separating lots 3446 and 3445, running vertically here from Prescott to Broadway.)

The court documents provided by Dwayne, however, show that these dimensions are wrong.  Giants Park was located entirely in lot 3446.  Right field was in fact bounded by Holly Avenue, and thus much, much shorter than 560 feet (perhaps it was really 360?).  I had noticed a number of home runs hit in St. Louis over the right field fence in 1920 and 1921; it looks like Oscar Charleston’s epochal 1921 season took place in a home field that was pretty friendly to left-handed hitters.

giants park, st. louis 1919-1922

What I’d originally intended as a couple of posts about the ballparks used by the St. Louis Giants, especially Giants Park (1919-1922), has turned into a kind of impromptu history of the Giants themselves.  The most important thing I hadn’t realized in taking up this subject was just how many obstacles the team faced over the years, far more than any other northern Negro league team of the era that I’m aware of.  From their beginnings in 1906 through 1918, the Giants had to contend with rapacious white financial backers, the resentment of local white semipro teams, difficulties finding a home field, hostility and outright interference from the major-league St. Louis Browns, and the vicious race riots in East St. Louis in 1917.

But Charlie Mills and the Giants persevered, and in 1919 things finally took a turn for the better.  Mills was able to lure back a number of the team’s stars from previous years, and the owners put up the capital to build an entirely new field for the Giants.  This new Giants Park was adjacent to the old Kuebler’s Park (itself also known as Giants Park), and stood at the corner of North Broadway and East Clarence Avenue, bounded by Prescott Avenue in left field and Holly Avenue in right, and across the street from O’Fallon Park, a public park.  Here are a couple of articles from the St. Louis Argus, the first from April 25, 1919 (p. 4), the second from May 2, 1919 (p. 4).

 

(Click to enlarge either story.)

Note that motion pictures were to be made of the first game in the new park, vs. the Mexico (Mo.) Grays, a white semipro team.  As it happens, the originally scheduled date (Sunday, May 11) was rained out, but the game went on the following day, when the ballpark was dedicated.  You have to wonder: does any footage of opening day 1919 in Giants Park still exist somewhere?

Here’s another piece from the Argus the following spring (May 28, 1920), discussing an expansion of the ballpark made in preparation for the first season of the Negro National League.  Here we find confirmation that the grandstand was built at the corner of Clarence and Broadway, with bleachers in the outfield, and Holly Avenue as a boundary.

(Many, many thanks to Patrick Rock and Dwayne Isgrig for providing material from St. Louis newspapers for this period.)

And here’s a Sanborn fire insurance map from 1931 showing the location of Giants Park, though no ballpark is depicted (East Clarence Avenue is on the left margin; Holly Avenue runs between lot 3446, where the park was located, and lot 3445):

The dimensions noted in the Argus (400 x 560 feet) seem right for the distance between North Broadway and Prescott, which were about 400 feet; but 560 feet the other way would extend considerably beyond Holly Avenue, and seems to indicate a pretty deep right field fence.  At the same time, I’ve seen a number of mentions of home runs hit over the right field fence (usually by Charlie Blackwell or, in 1921, Oscar Charleston), so it probably was not that deep.

The St. Louis Giants played their home games in this park through both their seasons in the Negro National League, including the very successful Charleston-led squad of 1921, before Mills was ousted before the 1922 season and the NNL St. Louis franchise awarded to a new group led by Richard Keys and Samuel Shepherd.  They changed the team’s name to the Stars and, because Giants Park was still rather distant from the city’s major black neighborhoods, made plans for a new park at Compton and Market.  This would be Stars Park, with the famous trolley car barn impinging on left field.  The old Giants Park became the home of the St. Louis Tigers, a Negro Southern League Club; but because Stars Park was not ready until July, 1922, the Stars (featuring rookie southpaws Cool Papa Bell and Earl C. Gurley) played their first nine home games at the old field.

Giants Park apparently still existed for a number of years, and in 1937, when Dizzy Dismukes managed a new version of the St. Louis Stars in the Negro American League, the team used the site, now called Metropolitan Park, as its home field.  By 1950, however, the space had been taken over by the McCabe and Powers Auto Body Company.  Today no sign of Giants Park is left.

(Thanks to Kevin Johnson, who started the search for Giants Park and other Negro league ballparks in St. Louis.)