Agate Type

taft’s giant face & the 1908 leland giants

Fit for Strange Maps, this is just a random (and slightly unsettling) thing I saw on the front page of the Chicago Examiner for June 8, 1908: a map of the 1908 Republican National Convention, held at Chicago Coliseum, in the shape of the face of the eventual nominee, William Howard Taft.

Tenuous baseball connection: Taft, of course, inaugurated the tradition of the president throwing out the first ball on Opening Day.

Somewhat less tenuous Negro league connection: Just a couple of days before this, Taft’s brother, Charles P. Taft, attended a game between the white semipro Gunthers and Rube Foster’s Leland Giants.  Bored with the major leagues, Taft had (supposedly) “long cherished a desire to see the famous negro team play ball.” His white beard made him “easily identified” by everyone in the park.  He “applauded the negro players frequently,” and when the Lelands had the game safely put away in the sixth (leading 11 to 2), Rube Foster himself came in to pitch, apparently so Taft could see him work.  “If that fellow was pitching in a league he would make a sensation,” Taft enthused afterwards.

As the following article from the Chicago Tribune points out, there was probably more going on here than Taft’s keen interest in black baseball.  President Roosevelt, also a Republican, had expelled 167 soldiers from the all-black 25th Infantry Regiment* after a series of incidents between the soldiers and white citizens of Brownsville, Texas, and a what turned out to be a false accusation of murder.  The consequent outrage on behalf of the wronged soldiers undermined African American support for the Republican Party, and the candidate’s brother’s visit to the Lelands/Gunthers game was part of a concerted effort to mend fences.

Charles P. Taft would own the Cubs for a few years in the mid-1910s.

*-The 25th Infantry moved within a few years to Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, where it fielded the “Wreckers,” one of the best black baseball teams of the 1910s, featuring future Negro leaguers Dobie Moore, Heavy Johnson, Lemuel Hawkins, Bob Fagan, and Hall of Famer Bullet Rogan.

  

(click to enlarge)

UPDATE 6/21/2011 Added image of President Taft throwing out the first ball.

catholic protectory oval

One of the most remarkable settings for Negro league baseball was the Catholic Protectory Oval in the Bronx, home of the New York Lincoln Giants in the 1920s.  The Lincolns’ original home, Olympic Field in Harlem, had been built by the club’s founders, Roderick James “Jess” McMahon and his brother Edward*, for their white semipro club, the Olympic A.C., back in 1905.  The McMahons lost control of both Olympic Field and the Lincoln Giants in 1915, founding a new black club, the Lincoln Stars, which played at Lenox Oval for a couple of seasons.  The Lincoln Giants, under the ownership of James J. Keenan and Charles Harvey, continued at Olympic until 1920.

(*-Jess McMahon was eventually best known as a boxing and wrestling promoter, an associate of Tex Rickard and Carlos Henriquez.  You’ve heard of his grandson.)

At the start of the 1920 season Olympic Field was torn down, and its bleachers were transferred to the ball field at the Catholic Protectory, a famous orphanage in the Bronx.  Sunday semipro and amateur games had been played there for a couple of decades, but the coming of the famous African-American team would bring much larger crowds.

Here’s an illustration of the Catholic Protectory from sometime before 1920, with the Oval situated in the center left.  The outfield bleachers had not been installed yet.  (From Lawrence Ritter’s East Side, West Side: Tales of New York Sporting Life, 1910-1960.)

Here’s a diagram from a Sanborn fire insurance map, showing the Oval in 1929, the year the Lincolns joined the American Negro League, the short-lived successor to the Eastern Colored League:

And here, courtesy of Kevin Johnson (who has written a couple of posts on the 1928 Negro leagues), is a fantastic aerial photo of the Catholic Protectory Oval in 1924, the Lincolns’ second season in the ECL:

The scorekeeper’s table was placed under the trees visible here along the right field line.

Aside from the neo-Gothic architecture surrounding it, the other unusual feature of the Oval was its cramped shape.  Kevin asked the ballpark expert Ron Selter, author of Ballparks of the Deadball Era, to estimate the dimensions.  This is what he came up with:

LF 180
SLF 238
LC 358 (deepest point in park)
CF 292 (the HP-CF axis hit the CF end of the RF-CF bleachers)
RC 286
SRF 256
RF 180

Ron remarked (to Kevin) that it reminded him of “a miniature version of the playing field at the Polo Grounds.”

The data I’ve gathered definitely suggests that the Catholic Protectory Oval increased offense by huge amounts.  Any hitter with the Lincoln Giants in the 1920s—I’m looking at you, Chino Smith—probably saw his stats greatly inflated by the park, in the midst of what was already a very high-scoring era.

The Lincoln Giants’ successors in the 1930s, most notably the New York Black Yankees, moved to other venues; and in 1938 the Catholic Protectory was razed to make way for the Parkchester Apartments.

UPDATE 3/1/2011 Corrected dates on the map & aerial photo.

sanborn typography

Sanborn fire insurance maps are not only a fantastic source for diagrams of obscure Negro league and semipro baseball parks (e.g., the various parks used by the St. Louis Giants between 1906 and 1921)—they also boast beautiful and meticulous typography and design.  BibliOdyssey has posted the title pages of a number of Sanborn maps from between 1880 and 1920:

Sanborn's fire insurance enterprise produced not only excellent and detailed urban maps, but they also maintained an elegant aesthetic in the headings and legends on the maps themselves, and in the title pages of the (larger) city volumes. The ornamental flair is diverse - I don't think any of the examples above repeat type styles - and lends an air of individuality and refinement to each of the towns surveyed.

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.)

st. louis stars park, 1932

Here’s another find by Kevin Johnson: the location of Stars Park in St. Louis, from a 1932 Sanborn map. The baseball park is not actually marked here, so as Kevin notes it’s possible that the location had already been turned into a city park by the time the map was made.  Nevertheless the ballpark’s lopsided shape is quite apparent, with the famous trolley car barn cutting off left field.

ammon field

As I mentioned the other day, it turns out that the current Josh Gibson Field (formerly Ammon Field) is actually a block west of the old Ammon Field where Gibson played his earliest professional baseball for the Crawfords in 1929 and 1930.

Here is the 1929 City of Pittsburgh Geodetic and Topographic Survey, courtesy of Historic Pittsburgh, showing Ammon Playground at the intersection of Somers St. and Bedford Ave., just a couple of blocks west of the future location of Greenlee Field.  While the two baseball parks coexisted, they were separated only by a small residential block and by Lincoln Memorial Cemetery.

And here is the 1959 survey, showing the Ammon Playgrounds moved west to the current location of Josh Gibson Field, now at the intersection of Kirkpatrick St. and Bedford Ave.

Ammon Field, part of a larger city recreational park that included tennis courts and two baseball diamonds, served as the home field for the Pittsburgh Crawfords as well as a number of other professional or semiprofessional teams from 1928 to 1932, when Greenlee Field was built.  After that it seemed to fall out of use even for semipro teams and other athletic activities; hardly a mention of Ammon Field appears in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1936 and 1937. 

Then one night in June 1938 the bodies of a couple were found behind Ammon Field, evidently robbed and killed by a spurned suitor who had been stalking the young woman.  Witnesses described the assailant and his accomplices fleeing down “Wesley row” and turning onto “Fonville street” (Panola St. in the 1929 map above, but Fonville in a 1923 map) west toward Kirkpatrick.  That is, they ran through what is now Josh Gibson Field, but what was then still a grid of short streets.

The Courier helpfully printed a map of Ammon Field, with Wesley St. mislabeled “Ridgeway,” which was actually the dirt road that ran behind the recreational park.  You can see the curve of Bigelow Boulevard at the top of the map and Chauncey Street in the lower right (though Somers Street is not shown).

The following month it was announced that the Pittsburgh Housing Authority would be acquiring Greenlee Field as well as “other parcels of real estate contiguous” to the ballpark (Courier, July 23, 1938), which eventually included the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, in order to construct a new low-cost housing project.  At some point that same year it was decided to annex the Ammon Playgrounds to what would become Bedford Dwellings.  Apparently the city promised to build a new park and recreational center on the land directly to the west of the old Ammon Field.

But two and a half years later in January 1941, as the new Ammon Recreational Center at the corner of Bedford and Kirkpatrick was nearing completion, nothing had been done about the park and baseball field that was supposed to adjoin it. 

 

(Pittsburgh Courier, January 18, 1941)

There’s quite a bit in the Courier through 1941 about continuing efforts to get the city to do something about a new park.  While the details are still unclear to me, by 1945 the new Ammon Playgrounds had been built, and the baseball field was serving as home to the semipro Pittsburgh Monarchs.

So, to sum up: the current Josh Gibson Field is not literally where Josh Gibson played his earliest professional games, and the Bedford Dwellings housing project now sits on ground formerly occupied by not one but two historic baseball parks (as well as an historic cemetery).

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.