Dyckman Oval was a sports venue in the Inwood section of the northern end of

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, New York City. It was best known as a home for

Negro league baseball The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latin Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be ...

, but was frequently used for other events, including boxing, wrestling, football, soccer, amateur baseball, and even ice skating competitions. It existed from about 1915 through 1937. The park was on a roughly triangular block bounded by Nagle Avenue and the elevated tracks of the subway's Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line (northwest, third base); 204th Street (northeast, left field); 10th Avenue (southeast, right field); and Academy Street (southwest, first base). The address of the park was sometimes given as

Dyckman Street Dyckman Street ( ), occasionally called West 200th Street, is a street in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It is commonly considered to be a crosstown street because it runs from the Hudson River to the Harlem River and inter ...

, farther to the southwest. The Dyckman train station provided easy access to the park. The park was also about a mile south of

Baker Field Robert K. Kraft Field at Lawrence A. Wien Stadium, officially known as Robert K. Kraft Field at Lawrence A. Wien Stadium at Baker Athletics Complex, is a stadium in the Inwood neighborhood at the northern tip of the island of Manhattan, New Y ...

, the athletic fields for

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. Most sources list Dyckman's seating capacity as around 4,500. Some sources say the capacity was later expanded to 10,000. An early newspaper reference to the park appeared in the ''

Brooklyn Standard Union The ''Brooklyn Times-Union'' was an American newspaper published from 1848 to 1937. Launched in 1848 as the ''Williamsburgh Daily Times'', the publication became the ''Brooklyn Daily Times'' when the cities of Brooklyn and Williamsburg were un ...

'' for June 3, 1915, reporting on an amateur ball game between two local clubs. As early as 1917, games played by the independent black team called the Cuban Stars were being advertised in local newspapers. The Stars joined the

Eastern Colored League The Mutual Association of Eastern Colored Clubs, more commonly known as the Eastern Colored League (ECL), was one of the several Negro leagues, which operated during the time organized baseball was segregated. League history Founding The ECL ...

in 1923 and operated through 1928. They also played one year, 1929, in the

American Negro League The American Negro League (ANL) was one of several Negro leagues established during the period in the United States in which organized baseball was segregated. The ANL operated on the East Coast of the United States in 1929. History The Easter ...

. They were then independent during the 1930s. Games involving various Negro League teams were also staged there. A number of them were night games, as Dyckman Oval had acquired lights in 1930, several years before the major league New York area teams did. The Cubans' owner, an entrepreneur named Alejandro Pompez, had a side business in the

numbers racket The numbers game, also known as the numbers racket, the Italian lottery, Mafia lottery or the daily number, is a form of illegal gambling or illegal lottery played mostly in poor and working class neighborhoods in the United States, wherein a be ...

. This eventually got him into legal trouble, and he had to abandon the team. The days of Dyckman Oval came to an end. The stands were demolished sometime during the off-season of 1937–1938. A writer for the ''

New York Age ''The New York Age'' was a weekly newspaper established in 1887. It was widely considered one of the most prominent African-American newspapers of its time.

'' on April 2, 1938, p.8, lamented having gone to the ball field and finding it gone. Very few photos of this park exist. One widely-circulated photo shows the outside of the main entrance at Nagle and Academy. The block is now mostly occupied by the Dyckman Cornerstone Community Center and its basketball courts. The Monsignor Kett Playground sits where the left field area once was.

References

*Peter Filichia, ''Professional Baseball Franchises'', Facts on File, 1993. * *{{cite book, last=Lowry, first=Philip J., title=Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of All 271 Major League and Negro League Ballparks Past and Present, year=1992, publisher=Addison-Wesley, location=Reading, Massachusetts, isbn=0-201-56777-6, url-access=registration, url=https://archive.org/details/greencathedralsu0000lowr

External links

Dyckman Oval informationDyckman Oval more detailsSanborn map showing the ballpark, 1935
Inwood, Manhattan *