MLB | The Last Ballpark to Desegregate Its Seats (Sportsman's Park site, St Louis)

On 4 May 1944, Black customers at Sportsman's Park were allowed to buy grandstand seats for the first time. Until that day they had been confined to the bleachers and the right-field pavilion. St Louis was the last city in the major leagues to stop segregating its ballpark seating, and this was the ballpark.

It is worth sitting with the date. It is three years before Jackie Robinson, and it is 1944, which means that for the first four decades of the twentieth century a paying customer in St Louis could be sent to a specific part of a public building because of his race, by a private club, with nobody obliged to stop it.

The site is otherwise remarkable for sheer duration. Baseball was played on this ground at Grand Avenue and Dodier Street from the 1860s, after August Solari bought the plot in 1866. A wooden grandstand went up in 1881, a concrete-and-steel park replaced it for the 1909 season, and major-league ball continued here until 1966. The historical marker on the site claims more major-league games were played on this diamond than on any other in America, and given a hundred years of continuous use by two clubs, that is plausible.

The St Louis Browns played here for their entire existence, from 1902 until they left to become the Baltimore Orioles after 1953. Their tenants from 1920 were the Cardinals, who outgrew them so completely that the landlords left town. In 1944 the two met in the World Series, and the Cardinals won it in six games; it is the only World Series played entirely in a single ballpark by both clubs. In 1947 Hank Thompson and Willard Brown became the first Black players to appear here, signed by the Browns.

Bill Veeck sent Eddie Gaedel, who was three feet seven inches tall, to the plate here in 1951. Anheuser-Busch bought the Cardinals in 1953 and the park became Busch Stadium. The last major-league game was on 8 May 1966, a 10-5 loss to San Francisco in front of 17,503; Willie Mays hit the last home run. Fans took the seats and dug up home plate. Demolition followed within months.

August Busch gave the land to the St Louis boys' club movement, and the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club has been on it since. There is still a ball field, and children still use it. A commemorative sign stands behind the clubhouse.

Coordinates are the Boys and Girls Club at 2901 North Grand Boulevard, from OpenStreetMap. The field is private property in daily use by a youth programme; it is visible from the pavement.

Cover: Sportsman's Park during the 1946 World Series, photographed by Gerald Massie. Missouri State Archives, no known restrictions. Second image: the site in 2012, photographed by Delaywaves, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.