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With baseball entering its offseason and me looking for interesting things to write about, I decided to marry my love of baseball history with my love of urban development and my love of America's social history, and write a series of essays each telling the story of a notable historical ballpark, along with some of the social and political history that surround it. Lord knows enough has been written on the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, and the last thing sports writing needs is another long soliloquy about the game in the good old days. Instead, I want to take a close look at lesser known parks...the people who built them, the people who played there, and the fans that watched games there. For the amateur urban archeologist, ballparks are a pretty easy medium. They were big, so they tend to show up on maps, and were written about frequently. Pictures are fairly common, as going to the ballpark was a big deal, and people only took pictures at big deals in those days. The best thing is that ALL of these places have stories, and a lot of those stories got written down. I'm going to stick to baseball for the time being, but I suspect I'll move to other sports eventually. I'm not tied to a particular era, but I suspect most of these will center in and around the early 20th century. If there's a ballpark you'd like me to take a closer look at and or write about, say so! It can be big or small, famous or obscure, ugly or beautiful...just as long as I can find material on it, and it isn't some place everyone has already heard of. If you want to write your own piece, long or short, and post it here, do so!
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Nov 1, 2019 19:33
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Hats and Baseball: Mack Park and Hamtramck Stadium This is Jack White.  In addition to being one of the most brilliant songwriters and guitarists of his generation, Jack, as you can tell from this picture, loves baseball. Unsatisfied with his legacy being “the guy who wrote the world’s most popular association football chant,” earlier this year, Jack – a Detroit native – offered his celebrity status and a substantial sum of money to try and save a small grandstand uncomfortably shoved up against some railroad tracks, sandwiched between one of the larger local jails in the Detroit area and a cramped, lower-class neighborhood typical of this part of the city. Jack and friends played a baseball game at Hamtramck Stadium. John Roesink loved baseball. Sure, his chain of hat stores was notably successful, and this success made John a wealthy man, but not even hats held his attention like baseball did. John was close friends with Ty Cobb. We don’t really know how he became close friends with Ty Cobb, but I choose to believe it was because one day Ty Cobb purchased a jaunty hat from John and the two hit it off after discovering a shared love for baseball and jaunty hats. Selling hats paid the bills, but what John really wanted to was run baseball teams. In 1914, John built one of the first “modern” ballparks in the upper midwest: Mack Park. Baseball was America’s national obsession at this time, and John’s promotion of the sport was relentless. He ran Mack Park like a hotel, hosting numerous minor and independent league teams, sometimes for only a few weeks, sometimes for a whole season. Mack Park probably made John a lot of money in these early years, as there were literally more teams – more than 60 pro and semi-pro teams in Detroit alone – and far more fans than there were decent stadiums. As we shall see, the term “decent stadium” is…negotiable. Mack Park consisted of three grandstands, all single decks of bleacher seats, made cheaply and hastily out of wood with, a tin roof suspended on rickety wood beams. The demands of fitting the ballpark into existing city blocks gave it the sort of wonky dimensions so common from ballparks of all kinds from that era – I’m not sure you’ll ever see a shorter right field porch than the one at old Mack Park. The left-handed power bats of the Detroit Stars – particularly Hall of Famer Turkey Stearns – absolutely loved it. 10,000 people could take in a ball game there, even more if they offered general admission and let people stand down the lines and in the outfield. Clubhouses – or at least something like clubhouses – were, in this era, either hastily built in the outfield or under the bleachers. They were little more than a wooden box with some benches and, if you were lucky, a place to hang your clothes. Mack Park featured one of each; the home team dressed under the bleachers, while the visitors ran in from the outfield. Tragically, there doesn’t seem to be any confirmed pictures of Mack Park in its heyday, but we do have an insurance drawing (note: insurance drawings are some of the most valuable resources for modern amateur urban archeologists). As we shall see, insurance would wind up being extremely relevant to this ballpark.  Note the ridiculously short power alley in right An rear end in a top hat As an eminently qualified amateur historian, I’m a firm believer that, when assessing historical figures, one must be appropriately relativistic. A man must be judged against the sensibilities of the time and place in which he lived. In doing this, you often find that historical figures that held views considered ugly or ridiculous in the modern world really might not have been huge assholes after all. Cap Anson was not one of these people. Cap Anson was an rear end in a top hat even by the extremely generous definition of “rear end in a top hat” that an historical relativist must apply to racial tolerance in 1880s America.  Just look at this dick. More than any other player, manager, executive, politician, or bat boy, Cap Anson was responsible for baseball throwing up its color barrier. He didn’t want to play ball against blacks. Cap Anson was racist even by the standards of a time in which pretty much everyone was racist. Other ballplayers – who themselves likely did not regard blacks very highly – would still happily play ball against teams that fielded black players. Not Cap. He took his principled moral stand and repeatedly refused to take the field any team with a black player on its roster. As baseball’s first superstar, his actions held some serious sway. Blacks were banished from the highest levels of the game, and Cap would play his way into the Hall of Fame. Stunning news: his post-baseball life was a long series of idiotic decisions and disasters. The history of black subculture in America is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which was their ability to create amazing things from the scraps left to them by more privileged people. Banned from baseball, blacks did exactly what they’d done over and over through four centuries of slavery and brutal repression: they created something great in spite of it all. The Negro leagues were something rather uniquely American; one of those great things that emerged from the shadow of something wholly ugly. People sometimes think that there was just one “Negro League.” Unfortunately, this isn’t so – colored leagues came and went frequently throughout the first half of the 20th century. Arguably the most prominent and influential of these was the Negro National League, which was started, run, and championed by the legendary Rube Foster. Rube was already a legend when he started this new league, having established himself as first superstar black pitcher, and then having managed the era’s dominant black ball club.  The gently caress did you just say to me? In 1920, Major League Baseball was reeling from the Black Sox scandal. For a time, it looked like MLB itself might die. Baseball, though, was still voraciously popular. There was more room than ever for new teams and leagues; they wouldn’t challenge MLB for popularity, but they could certainly steal some of its fans. This is exactly what the Negro National League did, finding new fans not only from the millions of newly-relocated blacks all over the upper midwest, but also white fans looking for alternatives to the big leagues. Rube’s Chicago American Giants were the league’s flagship franchise and its best team. The new league took off. Cap Anson died in Chicago in 1922. I hope Cap Anson died being supremely annoyed at the success of the Negro National League and the Chicago American Giants. A Melting Pot 1920s Detroit was unlike any city mankind had ever seen. The automobile, changing life all over America, changed Detroit most of all. Ford and Chevrolet and Dodge and Packard and Chrysler all planted their stakes in and around Detroit, turning the city seemingly overnight into one of the world’s largest manufacturing hubs. The hard-fought victories of the labor wars over the previous several decades parlayed into powerful unions. These unions, plus the totally unprecedented foresight and relative generosity of Henry Ford, created some of the best worker conditions in the world – conditions we might even today recognize as reasonable. Henry Ford might have been fanatically anti-union and a vicious anti-Semite, but he did treat his workers well.  Can you imagine a vibrant downtown Detroit? People came to Detroit in droves. Detroit’s population increased tenfold between 1880 and 1930, one of the fastest urban developments in human history. Detroit was one of the most common destinations for the waves of immigrants flowing out of Europe and into America in the early part of the 20th century. Lured by the promise of high wages and job security, they wound up forming the labor backbone of the American auto industry. While virtually every European country was represented to some degree, the majority of Detroit’s immigrants were Greek, Italian and, importantly for this particular story, Polish. Detroit was also one of the centerpieces of what was almost certainly the largest mass migration in human history: millions of blacks were fleeing the oppression and racial violence poisoning the south, hoping to find prosperity and safety in northern industrial cities. Racism in the American south was a tradition. In the early 20th century, white southerners were trying desperately to keep alive a society and culture that had been mortally wounded by the consequences of the Civil War a half century earlier. Southern racism was all about subjugation and exploitation of blacks: chattel slavery had been its mainstay; racial classification, its mechanism. Despite the centuries of brutality and mistreatment, however, there was a simple familiarity between whites and blacks in the south. They lived among one another. You had to, really, if you were going to subjugate and exploit someone in those days. Racism in northern cities at the start of the 20th century was a different creature, something more comparable to what we’d now call xenophobia. Northern cities were amalgams of people from every corner of Europe and from every corner of rural America. All had come to the cities to find their place in the new industrial economy. One of the results of this melting pot was an intense tribalism, a territoriality that was built along financial, religious, social, and geographic lines. Ethnic groups carved out their domains, be it neighborhoods, jobs, families, and fought to hold on to what was theirs. This was understandable to some degree. These people were generally poor, faced all manner of bigotry from “native” Americans (read: those whose families had immigrated in previous generations), along with incredibly stiff competition for jobs and homes. Things were tense enough in places like Detroit when it was just a contest between white ethnic groups. When black migrants from the American south entered the picture, things exploded. Black migrants were viewed as invaders, bringing along crime, disease, and poverty. They represented competition in the labor market and the housing market, both direct, existential threats to the laborer and his family. Blacks looked different and sounded different. While you might not know a Pole from a Greek on sight, it was impossible to misclassify a southern black. Seemingly overnight, the various European ethnicities found peace with one another, and unified their front against this new enemy, who was much simpler and easier to demonize. Mechanisms, both formal and informal, were put in place to ensure blacks stayed out of white parts of town; that suppressed black voting; that made it difficult for blacks to get and keep good jobs. In Detroit, blacks were quite literally confined to a ghetto, a neighborhood called Black Bottom. Many of the vestiges of this era of segregation are still with us, like your neighborhood association.  The American flags are a nice touch Radical racist politics exploded all over the upper midwest in the early 20th century. In 1915, a guy named D.W. Griffith released a movie called The Birth of a Nation that crystallized all of these racist feelings, and reminded every just how great the Ku Klux Klan really was. The “second” Klan was born shortly thereafter, and gained so much political power in northern states that it became a viable political party for a while.  Heroic Klan members defend southern society from the menace of blacks and carpetbaggers Detroit was a national epicenter of racial friction and violence. Thousands of white southerners had come to Detroit in large numbers along with the blacks, and brought their unique brand of race relations along for the ride. The “Black Legion” was something like an even more extreme Klan; it was thought that there were 30,000 “legionnaires” in Detroit alone, including, possibly, both the mayor and the police chief. And out of the dark, baseball. John Roesink loved baseball. Despite being a wealthy white guy in one of the most viciously racist cities in America, John was surprisingly progressive when it came to race and baseball. Who knows if he was motivated by a belief in racial equality (probably not), the chance to make some bucks (probably), or just a love of baseball (definitely), but in 1925, John bought the Detroit Stars, one of the flagship franchises of the new Negro National League, becoming one of only two white owners of a Negro League team. The Stars had been playing at his Mack Park for years, and were a consistent draw and local favorite: most weekends they’d bring in the full 10,000 fans, and even outdrew the Tigers from time to time. Though prone to using casual racial slurs, Roesink was well-liked by his players, who appreciated his generosity with their salaries and the fact he bought their meals on gamedays, or when they were on the road. Mack Park was deep in its death throes by this time. Ballparks in this era were rarely built to last, and Mack’s cheap wood construction was just about to give out under the strains of Detroit’s weather and the abuse of fans and players. Some sources say it had already been condemned by the spring of 1929, and that Roesink had slid some money under the table to buy himself some time to build a new ground. Regardless, Roesink had had enough of this shoddy old ballpark, and put up a fortune of his own money – some $100,000, or $1.5 million today – to build a new ballpark. He just had to find the right place. Hamtramck, Michigan is one of those strange fully-enclosed-but-not-annexed cities-within-a-city entities that still fiercely defend their “independence.” It was named for a hard-rear end French-Canadian-born career soldier who fought in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He died in an embryonic Detroit in 1803; his remains are still there. The locals were kind enough to name a little village outlying Detroit after him, and everyone forgot about Hamtramck, both the colonel and the town, for a little over a century. The Dodge brothers, looking to expand their wildly successful line of cars, saw exactly what they needed in Hamtramck: cheap land and good rail access. They bought around 70 acres of land, and built a Big rear end Factory.  That is a Big rear end Factory. The ballfield is just off the picture to the left. The Hamtramck Assembly Plant, which was also called “Dodge Main,” was the world’s most sophisticated factory when it was built. It was arguably the first fully integrated automotive industrial facility, outstripping even Henry Ford’s spectacular assembly line efforts in speed and efficiency. By 1920, Dodge Main was employing around 22,000 workers, about 60% of whom were Polish. Now, “Poland” wasn’t technically a thing just yet, but you still had lots of Poles. In 1918, there was all kinds of crazy crap going on over there, all related to the fall of the German Empire, and Russia, and World War I, all topics that are no doubt very interesting to any casual baseball fan. Long story short, lots of Poles were leaving the area and immigrating to America, and lots of these immigrants wound making their way to Detroit, where the biggest, baddest, and best new place to work in town was the Dodge Brothers’ Big rear end Factory. And so, Hamtramck, Michigan, became one of the largest Polish communities in America. History has lost the true reason why John Roesink built his ballpark in Hamtramck. Most of his market was in Black Bottom, which was a solid 45 minute walk away from Hamtramck. Public transit to the site was good, though, so fans could take the train or streetcar easily enough. There’s a lot of…circumstantial evidence…that suggests Roesink got an unnaturally good deal from both the city of Hamtramck (Roesink and the mayor were friends) and the Detroit Lumber Company, who owned the land the ballpark would be built on. Honestly, it would be surprising if there hadn’t been some sleight-of-hand stuff going on. That’s how ballparks were built back then. So, Roesink had his land, and his money, and got down to the business of building what would become Hamtramck Stadium. Just in time, as it turned out. July 6, 1929, was a rainy day in Detroit. How do I know this? Well, because the Detroit Stars were set to host the Kansas City Monarchs, at the dying Mack Park, in a doubleheader on July 7th. This was a big deal; the Monarchs were the NNL’s biggest draw and best team, and a doubleheader on a Sunday meant big money. Problem was, the field was absolutely soaked. This was before tarps were a thing, and not only was the dirt muddy, but standing water was everywhere. Apparently, the way one dealt with this situation in 1929 was to pour gasoline everywhere and light it on fire. So, they poured gasoline everywhere. And lit it on fire. What could go wrong? Fortunately, there were only a few thousand people in the stands when the grandstand caught went up. Players from both teams reacted quickly to tear down the foul ball netting at the front of the grandstand and allow people to escape. Miraculously, no one was killed, but between 100 and 200 people were injured…had it happened a few minutes later, after the start of the game, or had the players not reacted as quickly as they did, thousands of people might have been killed. In any case, Mack Park’s grandstand was dead, and the Stars were temporarily homeless. They played the rest of the season out at other local ballparks, or on the Mack Park field while fans just stood on the grass.   John Roesink was going through a tough time. Not only did he lose a huge amount of money as a result of the fire, but his reaction to it – or lack thereof, really – infuriated his predominantly black fan base. He didn’t visit any victims in the hospital, donate any money for relief, or do much of anything, really. And his fans didn’t like it. Attendance dropped dramatically through the second half of the season, and Roesink began to feel the pinch a bit financially. Still, he was optimistic. After all, the NNL was thriving, he’d have a brand new, state-of-the-art stadium ready to go in the spring, people were still buying hats, the economy was doing fine, Detroit was a thriving city on the rise, and America was the richest nation on earth. No reason for panic, right?  Mack Park after the fire, allegedly. A stadium built for the 1930s When it was finished, Hamtramck Stadium was one of the nicest non-Major League ballparks in America. It was built with brick and concrete and steel, with concrete ramps leading up to the seats, proper steel girders holding up the wooden bleacher deck, a tin roof supported by more steel framework, and brick ticket offices, concession boxes, and clubhouse walls. Wooden bleachers wound around the park on the baselines, giving way to an absolutely massive outfield – some 515 feet to center field. Not only was center field crazy distant, but it was surrounded by a 12 foot corrugated steel wall, allegedly put into place to keep people from climbing boxcars on the train tracks behind the park and stealing baseball. It had cost a fortune, but the prospect of 12,000-plus fannies in the seats, with several thousand paying a healthy premium for shady and comfortable places in the grandstand, made it look like a rock-solid investment. Baseball in the 1920s had been a huge money-maker, and there was no reason to think that the 30s would be any different. The 1930 Stars season looked promising. They’d performed well the previous season despite their stadium woes; they now had a new ground that was the envy of every other NNL team, and a good number of high-level white pro teams. Roesink’s old buddy, Ty Cobb, was flown in from Georgia to throw the first pitch. The stands were filled with an integrated audience: blacks who had come up from Black Bottom, and whites – mostly Poles – who were thrilled there was a brand new stadium in their neighborhood. A curious thing – in a Detroit being ripped apart by racial violence, with even worse things still to come, the new Polish fans got along quite famously with the old black fans.  Cobb throws out the first pitch.  But, all was not well in the crazy world of the NNL and the Detroit Stars. The stock market had crashed the previous October, right about the time the finishing touches were being put onto Hamtramck Stadium. People were no longer buying as many fancy hats. As government revenues started to fall, city and state tax bill – once hand-waved away by friends in the local government – started showing up. Old fans had yet to forgive John for his apparent callousness after the fire. This, mixed with his choice to build a Negro League ballpark in a white neighborhood, and rumors of his constant use of racially-insensitive language, began to breed serious resentment among the old Stars fanbase. People stopped buying so many cars, and factory workers started to lose their jobs. The Dodge factory was hit especially hard, and a lot of the Polish locals that Roesink was hoping would fill his seats now couldn’t afford to go to games. Roesink had to sell his interest in the Stars after the season. He did, to a black (alleged) gangster. He kept ownership of the stadium for another year, but had to give it up to pay back taxes. John Roesink loved baseball, but now he didn’t have either a team or a stadium. Hamtramck Stadium would only see two years of NLL use before the league folded. After Roesink sold it to the city, it was leased to a handful of minor league teams over the years, used for tournaments and high school games, and gradually neglected. It was renovated a couple of times, once in the 1940s, and again in the 1970s. It was last used formally for high school games in the early 1990s. Epilogue The Depression would kill off the NLL, and a brown-eyed handsome man would kill off the Negro Leagues (or, really, kill off the need for Negro Leagues) in a more general sense a few years later. The Detroit Stars died along with the NLL, having enjoyed mostly winning seasons, but having never won a championship or a Negro World Series. Turkey Stearns left the Stars after they stopped paying him in 1931, bouncing around various Negro league teams until he retired in 1942. He then went to work in the factories of Detroit, dying in 1978. Rube Foster began to suffer severe mental issues following exposure to a gas leak sometime in 1925. He would be institutionalized in 1926, and died in 1930, a year before the NLL folded. John Roesink would see his way through the Depression, and died in Detroit of a heart attack in 1954. His obituary described him as “one of the greatest sports fans Detroit has ever known.”  Hamtramck, Michigan, would see its fortunes rise and fall with the American auto industry. By the 1950s, Hamtramck was considered one of the jewels of American industry, a safe and peaceful community mostly populated by well-integrated immigrants. By the 1970s, it was suffering the same kind of devastating urban decay seen everywhere else in the Detroit metro area. As it happened, a bunch of very bad things happened in southern Asia about that time, and the badly depressed property values appealed to a new wave of immigrants hailing from that part of the world. Eventually, Hamtramck would become one of the first Muslim-majority cities in America, populated by semi-refugees from Yemen and Bangladesh. Poles are still there too, but not nearly as many. Today, Hamtramck Stadium is just the main grandstand, surrounded by a high KEEP OUT fence. You can still see the vestiges of the infield in overhead shots, and the ground itself remains largely untouched since the 1930s. So many other urban ballparks were razed to make use of the land they sat on. Hamtramck, though, sitting in one of the most economically depressed parts of one of the most economically depressed cities in America, wasn’t even worth bulldozing. This situation, too, applied to thousands of ballparks around the country, but thanks to John Roesink’s deep pockets, the steel and concrete construction of Hamtramck held up over the years, while most other prewar ballparks – constructed with wood – gradually disintegrated. People started to rediscover Hamtramck’s history about ten years ago. Someone figured out that it was one of only two surviving regular-season homes of Negro league teams, and this prompted a minor swell of interest in preserving it. These sorts of things move slowly, however. Today, the renovation fund has around $150,000, enough to renovate the field, but not nearly enough to renovate the grandstand. The ground isn’t really in a part of Detroit enjoying urban renewal, though, and it is hard to see a renovated stadium being commercially viable, at least for the foreseeable future. Not that any of that mattered to Jack White. The good news is that John Roesink’s well-built stadium probably isn’t going anywhere any time soon, even as it sits unused and unloved. I find something profoundly American about Hamtramck Stadium. A ballpark, built by a wealthy white man, for black players, in a community of Polish immigrants that was named after a French-Canadian. Maybe someday the local children of Muslim immigrants will get to take in baseball games there. Hamtramck, as she sits today:    Most images from: http://www.hamtramckstadium.org or Detroit Free Press Archives Thanks to the Negro League Museum, who let me borrow their copies of Turkey Stearns and the Detroit Stars and Black Baseball in Detroit, neither of which were available at any local library. Seriously, they just let me take them home, on my honor.
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Nov 1, 2019 19:33
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Thank you for the thread and the history. It is very good.bewbies posted:
I was in Detroit over the summer for a bit, and the downtown looks about the same as any other major city downtown at this point. I was right at the statue in this picture, and it was vibrant as heck. A couple other neighborhoods nearby are also pretty lively. But yeah, get more than 1 block outside these places, and you're in the middle of vacant lots, dilapidated homes, and urban decay. It really is something.
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Nov 1, 2019 22:31
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This was a super interesting read
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Nov 4, 2019 17:30
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