The Real Field of Dreams

Hinchliffe Stadium was once the home of Negro Leagues baseball. Now, the games begin again

Jun 09, 2023

In 1933, when Babe Ruth was drawing sellout crowds at the original Yankee Stadium, you could have driven across the Hudson into New Jersey, wound your way to the industrial town of Paterson, and there, next to the waterfalls that once powered factories, sat a very different vision of the National Pastime. This was Hinchliffe Stadium, and though less than 20 miles separated it from Yankee Stadium, they occupied different worlds. At Hinchliffe, you might have seen the legendary Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell standing in the batter’s box, or watched the singular Satchel Paige dazzle on the pitcher’s mound. This was home to the New York Black Yankees—the Negro Leagues.

Now, nearly 75 years after the crowds left, Hinchliffe Stadium is the home of professional baseball once again.

Once a vital and inspiring part of America’s sports culture, Negro League ballparks have all but vanished. Hinchliffe has long been one of two Negro League stadiums still standing, along with Rickwood Field in Birmingham, and it is now the only one that regularly hosts ballgames. As recently as two years ago, that feat would have seemed all but impossible. Trees grew in the grandstand. Blacktop asphalt covered the playing field. Graffiti stained the walls.

An audacious $100 million renovation has returned the park to its former glory—and led to one helluva comeback. Once again, the grandstand seats 10,000, the field features a perfect 90 feet between each base, and the walls are painted a pristine, stark off-white. Constructed in 1933, Hinchliffe is a model of art-deco, with bronze reliefs of Olympic athletes adorning the façade. It’s gorgeous, unlike any park I’ve ever seen, at once modern and out of another time, like baseball itself. The stadium was built in 1932 by an architect who had previously only ever worked on schools and churches—which is perfect if you think about it. A place to learn and a place to communicate with a higher power—is there a better definition of the role of a stadium in society than that?

For decades, Black crowds, performers, and athletes that had been barred from other venues converged at Hinchliffe. There were concerts, featuring everyone from Duke Ellington to Sly and the Family Stone. There were early pro-football games, and in one, Vince Lombardi played on the offensive line. But most of all, there was baseball and the Negro Leagues. Larry Doby, who integrated the American League a few months after Jackie Robinson debuted for the Dodgers, was discovered on a tryout held there.

Eventually, the local school district took control of the stadium, and local teams hosted games and ceremonies nearly every day of the week. But as budgets waned, the district couldn’t afford to maintain Hinchliffe. In the mid-80s, a sinkhole swallowed the outfield, and Hinchliffe just started to rot away.

A local advocate group had other ideas; they recognized that beneath the neglected exterior was a vibrant history and a story that needed to be shared. In 2014, they asked volunteers to come help clean the park, and 800 people showed up for an afternoon of weeding and scrubbing graffiti off walls. They petitioned for historical protections, and soon became the first ballpark in the nation to earn a prestigious National Historic Landmark designation (to this day, Wrigley Field is the only other ballpark with the designation). Finally, the group had traction. With the help of mayor André Sayegh, the city of Paterson was granted state tax credits to renovate the park and build a museum.

“I wanted to try to hit a home run for Hinchliffe,” Sayegh said. “I wanted to hit a home run for history, too.”

The first game back was several weeks ago. Old ballplayers attended, and new ones took the field for the Jersey Jackals, the independent league team that moved from nearby Little Falls. High school boys, who will play there too, watched from the renovated grandstands. Harold Reynolds, the former all-star, was welcomed onto the field by an Arab mayor, a Black manager, and a white owner. The world has changed quite a bit since Hinchliffe last hosted a professional baseball game.

There’s hope that the MLB will stage a game there soon. It would be a special night, a celebration. (“We are continuing to evaluate the many opportunities in determining our special event schedule for upcoming seasons,” a league spokesman told the New York Times.) “That is the real Field of Dreams,” Mayor Sayegh said. “I thought it was an outstanding film, but it’s a movie set. It’s not where history happened, right? It’s not where individuals, who were excluded because of the color of their skin, played. They played in Paterson. They had a home in Hinchliffe when they were not allowed to play at Yankee Stadium or in Fenway Park or Wrigley Field.”

There’s a buzz in the air at Hinchliffe now, something you might not feel at any other sporting event in the country, a sense that something larger is at work, some unique alchemy of past and present melding together. Stadiums, more than any other place we have, can act as living museums. We play the same games, following the same rules, in the same places that people have been doing so for generations. You might feel the presence of ghosts during every routine at bat, as the faint outlines of moments accumulated on this hallowed ground reveal themselves carefully.

Once, the teams that played at Hinchliffe were outcasts, pushed to fringes of the sport. Now, they could be on its center stage. A museum can only tell us about the past; it’s all the more powerful to watch the future in real time.

The Real Field of Dreams

Hinchliffe Stadium was once the home of Negro Leagues baseball. Now, the games begin again

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