Hyde Park is a municipal park in

Niagara Falls Niagara Falls () is a group of three waterfalls at the southern end of Niagara Gorge, spanning the border between the province of Ontario in Canada and the state of New York in the United States. The largest of the three is Horseshoe Fall ...

, New York. It is the largest city park in New York outside 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 ...

, and is located along Hyde Park Boulevard ( NY 61).

Park facilities

The park contains a

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping ...

course,

bocce (, or , ), sometimes anglicized as bocce ball, bocci or boccie, is a ball sport belonging to the boules family. Developed into its present form in Italy, it is closely related to British bowls and French , with a common ancestry from ancie ...

lawn bowling Bowls, also known as lawn bowls or lawn bowling, is a sport in which the objective is to roll biased balls so that they stop close to a smaller ball called a "jack" or "kitty". It is played on a bowling green, which may be flat (for "flat-gre ...

tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...

and

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

. The largest structure in the park is

Sal Maglie Stadium Sal Maglie Stadium is a stadium in Niagara Falls, New York. It is primarily used for baseball and is currently home of the Niagara Power ( PGCBL) baseball team. The ballpark has a capacity of 4,000 people and opened in 1939. Its original name ...

, named for Niagara Falls native and

professional baseball Professional baseball is organized baseball in which players are selected for their talents and are paid to play for a specific team or club system. It is played in leagues and associated farm teams throughout the world. Modern professional ...

player

Sal Maglie Salvatore Anthony Maglie (April 26, 1917 – December 28, 1992) was an American Major League Baseball pitcher and later, a scout and a pitching coach. He played from 1945 to 1958 for the New York Giants, Cleveland Indians, Brooklyn Dodgers, New Y ...

. The park also features picnic pavilions, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a rose garden, Hyde Park Lake (which is annually stocked with trout), and the Hyde Park Ice Pavilion. It is located in the geographic center of Niagara Falls.

History

Hyde Park was the brainchild of Charles B. Hyde, the owner of a paper company at the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard (then known as Sugar Street) and Pine Avenue. When he sold the paper company and retired, he bought a large tract of land on what was then the outskirts of the city. In 1921, he suffered a stroke and died. By that time, he had willed the land to the city for use as a park. A year later, additional land was purchased, and the city began to build the park. In the 1930s, a dam was built across Gill Creek, which flooded swampland and created Hyde Park Lake. In 1928, the Niagara Falls Power Company donated to the park. The company donated additional land in 1943.

was originally built in 1936 as a

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

project during the Great Depression and dedicated by U.S. President

Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...

. Originally known as Hyde Park Stadium, it was built as a multi-purpose facility. In the 1980s, the stadium was renamed Sal Maglie Stadium to honor the

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

player Player may refer to: Role or adjective * Player (game), a participant in a game or sport ** Gamer, a player in video and tabletop games ** Athlete, a player in sports ** Player character, a character in a video game or role playing game who ...

who had grown up in Niagara Falls. In 1998, it was demolished and rebuilt as a facility designed only for baseball.

References

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External links

Hyde Park, "The Jewel of Niagara Falls"
Niagara Falls, New York Parks in Niagara County, New York