MLB | Where the Yankees Started, Under a Hospital (Hilltop Park site, Manhattan)

The New York Yankees began as a consolation prize, in a wooden ballpark thrown up in six weeks on a rocky lot in Washington Heights.

After the 1902 season the American League moved its failing Baltimore franchise to Manhattan, where Frank Farrell and Bill Devery bought it. They found a block between 165th and 168th Streets off Broadway, cleared trees and drained a pond, and had a single-tier wooden grandstand ready for 30 April 1903. Officially it was American League Park. Nobody called it that. It stood on high ground with a view across the Hudson to the Palisades, so it became Hilltop Park, and the team became the Highlanders, partly for the elevation and partly because club president Joseph Gordon's name invited a joke about the Gordon Highlanders.

Jack Chesbro pitched the opener and beat Washington 6-2 in front of 16,243. The manager was Clark Griffith, who three decades later would own the ballpark in Washington that appears elsewhere in this collection, and collect rent from two leagues at once.

The park was unfinished for most of that first season. Crews raised the grandstand roof and worked on the bleachers whenever the team was away. Deep right field had a hollow in it too dangerous to play, so it was roped off and anything hit over the rope was a ground-rule double; a fence went up in front of it that June and turned those into home runs.

Attendance was poor. The Highlanders drew 211,808 in 1903 against the 579,530 the Giants pulled to the Polo Grounds a mile downhill. When the Polo Grounds burned in April 1911, though, it was the Highlanders who took their rivals in, and the Giants played here from mid-April to the end of May while their own park was rebuilt in concrete.

The favour was returned in 1913. The Highlanders moved into the finished Polo Grounds as tenants, dropped the nickname, and became the Yankees. Their last game at Hilltop was on 5 October 1912.

The ballpark came down in 1914. The site sat empty until hospital construction began in 1928, and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center eventually covered the whole block.

In September 1993 the Yankees placed a small five-sided plaque within the medical centre marking the exact spot of home plate. It is the only physical trace of the franchise's first ten years.

Coordinates are the medical centre campus, from OpenStreetMap. This is a working hospital; the plaque is a marker inside an institution rather than an attraction.

Cover: the Philadelphia Athletics at the New York Highlanders, Hilltop Park, Opening Day, 1908. Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 2014683272. No known restrictions on publication. Second image: the Columbia University medical campus that now covers the site, photographed by Ajay Suresh, 2021, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.