After old teams, old Brooklyn ballparks, and old Manhattan ballparks, it’s time for ballparks in Queens.
Despite the modern use of a numbered street system, Queens has street naming that drives outsiders mad, so it is fitting that three of the four old ballparks in the borough were close enough to one anther that they are readily confused, so much so that they share a single Wikipedia entry.
Ridgewood Park / Wallace’s Ridgewood Park / Grand Stadium was used, in part, before the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898, by Brooklyn-based teams – the Gladiators, Dodgers, Bushwicks, and Royal Giants – that wanted to play Sunday games, which were illegal in the city of Brooklyn but in an unenforced gray area in Queens County.
The rather low-rent wood bleachers are visible in this 1922 photo:
Grauer’s Ridgewood Park was also used by the Dodgers to…uh…dodge Sunday blue laws.
Meyerrose Park was used, barely, for some independent professional baseball early in the twentieth century.
The map below shows Ridgewood Park in the blue rectangle, Grauer’s (called Ridgewood Grove) in the purple, and Mayerrose (shown as empty land) in the green.. Note that Eldert Street had been mapped but not opened. The vertical line near the left edge of the map is the Brooklyn/Queens border.
Finally, the Queens ball field that wasn’t right next to the others was Dexter Park, a converted horse-racing track, home for a while to Brooklyn Royal Giants and the Bushwicks.
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