Another frustrating title from the Detroit Publish Company via the Library of Congress: “Stadium, New York, N.Y.”. The library added the description “Possibly Polo Grounds; elevated railroad in background.” The Polo Grounds was the home of the New York Giants baseball team until they moved to San Francisco in the late 1950s (and the home of the Mets in 1962 and 1963) and the home of the football Giants team as well.
The name Polo Grounds was descriptive of the first stadium with the name, just north of Central Park and used for polo before becoming the home of the Giants and, briefly, the Metropolitans. When the Giants were forced out of the field, they moved briefly to a piece of unused land at 155th Street west of Eighth Avenue, facing a hill known as Coogan’s Bluff, and taking the name “Polo Grounds” with them. They then built a more permanent stadium on the north half of that piece of land, between 157th and 159th Streets. That stadium open in 1891 and burned in 1911, when it was replaced by the famous version of the Polo Grounds. The old temporary stadium south of the Polo Grounds survived until the fire, and from 1911 was a vacant lot for some time after.
Here’s a badly-joined composite of two fire maps showing the area in 1916:
The river on the right is the Harlem, separating upper Manhattan from the Bronx. (Yankee Stadium would eventually be built on the Bronx side at 161st Street, leaving the two stadiums a ten minute walk from one another.) Edgecomb Avenue is considerably higher in elevation than the Speedway, an 1898 carriage road that was eventually turned into the Harlem River Drive, a controlled-access highway. Note that 155th Street, the left-right street at the south end of block 2106, is on a viaduct as it follows the high elevation at the top of Coogan’s Bluff on its way to a bridge (not shown on this map) over the river.
Back to the photo, we’re pretty clearly in Highbridge Park, on the hillside, looking southeast over the Speedway and the south side of the Polo Grounds. This is after 1911, so the old stadium is gone, replaced by open land, with the elevated viaduct of 155th Street beyond. The hills in the distance are in the Bronx; the elevated railroad in front is over Eighth Avenue. We must be before a game or right around the start: the long line of people in the foreground are descending the stairs to the stadium, not trying to see over the bleachers. That stair is in yellow on the map, just to the left of the stadium proper. There are a lot of people on the 155th Street viaduct, and it’s not clear if that’s the line to go to the stadium or if there was actually a view of the field from there. The size of the crowd and the dark suits suggest this might be a pennant-chase game in the fall: the Giants won the National League pennant in 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1917 (as well as bunch more in the 1920s and 30s) so this could be a late-season game or World Series game in any of those years.
If only all mysteries were so easy to solve.
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