MLB | The Baseball Palace of the World Is a Car Park (Comiskey Park site, Chicago)

Charles Comiskey bought a garbage dump. In early 1909 the White Sox owner acquired a tract near 35th Street and Shields Avenue that the city had been using as landfill, three blocks from the wooden park his team was playing in, and hired a young architect named Zachary Taylor Davis to put a permanent ballpark on it. Davis prepared by touring the country with Ed Walsh, the White Sox spitballer, taking notes on sight lines and drainage. Walsh got what a pitcher would want: 362 feet down each line and 420 to dead centre, among the most generous dimensions in the majors. The cornerstone went down on St Patrick's Day 1910, and the park opened on 1 July for $750,000. Comiskey called it the Baseball Palace of the World. He had wanted an ornate classical front; the money ran out and he got brick with arched windows instead. About 30,000 people watched the Sox lose the opener 2-0 to St Louis. Walsh pitched, and lost, which fairly summarises his 1910: twenty defeats and the lowest earned run average in the league. A correction worth making, since this collection keeps running into the same Cleveland firm: Osborn Engineering did not design Comiskey. Davis did, and went on to design Weeghman Park four years later, the one now called Wrigley Field. Osborn came in for renovations around 1920. Davis's North Side ballpark is still standing. His South Side one is a car park. The Chicago American Giants of the Negro American League played here from 1941 to 1952, and the East-West All-Star Game, the biggest annual event in Black baseball, was staged at Comiskey for decades. Joe Louis knocked out James Braddock on this field in 1937 to take the heavyweight title. The White Sox played their last game here on 30 September 1990 and moved across the street. Demolition followed in 1991. The site is now the parking area on the north side of 35th Street, opposite the current ballpark. A marble marker set into the asphalt shows where home plate stood, and the old foul lines are painted across the lot. It is a strange thing to visit: no ruin, no fence, just a plate-shaped stone among parked cars, with the replacement stadium visible over your shoulder. Coordinates are the home plate marker, from the geotag on the Wikimedia Commons photograph of it. Cover: fans on Chicago Day at White Sox Park, Bain News Service, between 1910 and 1913. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 2001704385. No known restrictions on publication. Second image: the marker showing the location of old Comiskey Park's home plate, photographed by Ken Lund, 2013, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.