MLB | The Hotel Room Where the National League Was Made (Grand Central Hotel site, Manhattan)

The National League was not founded at a ballpark. It was founded in a hotel room on Broadway, on 2 February 1876, by a coal dealer from Chicago who had already fixed the vote before anyone sat down. William Hulbert owned the Chicago White Stockings and had lost patience with the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, which had run professional baseball since 1871. Any club could enter by paying ten dollars. Teams abandoned schedules when travel got expensive, players jumped contracts, gamblers worked the crowds, and nobody had the authority to stop any of it. Hulbert dealt with the problem by arriving with a majority already assembled. He had the four western clubs, Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville and St Louis, signed up in writing before he wrote to the east. On 23 January he sent a letter to Boston, Hartford, the New York Mutuals and the Philadelphia Athletics inviting them to the Grand Central Hotel to discuss, in his phrasing, the reformation of existing abuses. The eastern clubs turned up knowing what was on the table. What came out of the meeting was a closed league of eight clubs, with entry controlled by the existing members rather than by a fee, and with scheduling taken away from the clubs and handed to a league office. Harry Wright took the minutes. The National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs has operated continuously ever since, which makes that afternoon the oldest surviving institution in American professional sport. Hulbert then demonstrated what the new authority meant. When the New York and Philadelphia clubs declined to make their western road trips at the end of the 1876 season, he expelled them both, and the league went without a team in either of the country's two largest cities for six years. One point of frequent confusion: the Chicago White Stockings who joined in 1876 are the club now called the Cubs. The present-day White Sox are a different franchise, founded a quarter of a century later in the American League. The hotel had opened in 1870 as the largest in the country, 630 rooms under mansard roofs, and was already notorious as the place where Jim Fisk was shot in 1872. On 3 August 1973, by then a decayed welfare hotel, it collapsed into Broadway and killed four people. New York University built student housing on the site. A plaque on the Broadway frontage marks the founding. Coordinates are 673 Broadway in NoHo, from OpenStreetMap. Cover: the Grand Central Hotel, Broadway at Bond Street, from Valentine's Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1870. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the same building as the Broadway Central Hotel, engraved for King's Handbook of New York City, 1893. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.