Coordinates: 39 57 N 79 5 W
Population: 5,687,147 (2006 est.)
With Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game tonight, and the end of the softball season for the Oxford Blues (OUP’s baseball team) looming next week, I decided to take a sportier slant with my post this week. But why Philly? Well, as it happens, the City of Brotherly Love was the site of the first steel and concrete baseball stadium in the United States. Shibe Park, which later became Connie Mack Stadium, opened its doors and entered the history books on April 12, 1909 as the home of the Philadelphia Athletics. Located north of the Central Business District and slightly east of the Schuylkill River between West Lehigh Avenue and West Somerset Street, this famous field hosted games until the end of the 1970 season. Fire damaged the structure the following year, and in 1976 it was finally demolished as that year’s All-Star Game took place across town on former marshland at Veteran’s Stadium.
Ben Keene is the editor of Oxford Atlas of the World. Check out some of his previous places of the week.
I was puzzled as to why a stadium in Pennsylvania would be named after a politician from Florida. A little googling reveals that I’m not much of a baseball fan.
Given that the Phillies now play in Citizens Bank Park (and that many other new stadiums have assumed corporate monikers), it seems possible that future baseball fans probably won’t encounter puzzlement of this kind…