Gilmore Field was a minor league baseball park in

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, that served as home to the

Hollywood Stars The Hollywood Stars were a Minor League Baseball team that played in the Pacific Coast League during the early- and mid-20th century. They were the arch-rivals of the other Los Angeles-based PCL team, the Los Angeles Angels. Hollywood Stars (192 ...

of the

Pacific Coast League The Pacific Coast League (PCL) is a Minor League Baseball league that operates in the Western United States. Along with the International League, it is one of two leagues playing at the Triple-A (baseball), Triple-A level, which is one grade bel ...

from 1939–57 when they, along with their intra-city rivals, the

Los Angeles Angels The Los Angeles Angels are an American professional baseball team based in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Angels compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) West division. Since 1966, the team ha ...

, were displaced by the transplanted

Brooklyn Dodgers The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League Baseball team founded in 1884 as a member of the American Association (19th century), American Association before joining the National League in 1890. They remained in Brooklyn until 1957, after which the ...

of the

National League The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, known simply as the National League (NL), is the older of two leagues constituting Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States and Canada, and the world's oldest extant professional team s ...

History

Gilmore Field opened on May 2, 1939 and was the home of the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League until September 5, 1957. The stadium had a

seating capacity Seating capacity is the number of people who can be seated in a specific space, in terms of both the physical space available, and limitations set by law. Seating capacity can be used in the description of anything ranging from an automobile that ...

of 12,987 people.

Location

The ballpark was located on the south side of

Beverly Boulevard Beverly Boulevard is one of the main east–west thoroughfares in Los Angeles, in the U.S. state of California. It begins off Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California, Beverly Hills and ends on the Lucas Avenue overpass near downtown ...

between Genesee Avenue and The Grove Drive, just east of where

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...

Television City is currently located. A couple hundred meters to the west was

Gilmore Stadium Gilmore Stadium was a multi-purpose stadium in Los Angeles, California. It was opened in May 1934 and demolished in 1952, when the land was used to build CBS Television City. The stadium held 18,000. It was located next to Gilmore Field. The st ...

, an oval-shaped venue built several years earlier, which was used for football games and midget auto racing. To the east was the famous

Pan-Pacific Auditorium The Pan-Pacific Auditorium was a landmark structure in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, California. It once stood near the site of Gilmore Field, an early Los Angeles baseball venue predating Dodger Stadium. It was located within sight of bot ...

. Both facilities were built by

Earl Gilmore Earl Bell Gilmore (1887–1964) was the son of Arthur Fremont Gilmore and took control of the family businesses, including the Gilmore Oil Company, in 1918. He was inducted into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum The Indianapolis Motor Speedw ...

, son of Arthur F. Gilmore and president of A. F. Gilmore Oil, a California-based petroleum company which was developed after Arthur struck oil on the family property. The area was rich in petroleum, which was the source of the "tar" in the nearby

La Brea Tar Pits La Brea Tar Pits is an active paleontological research site in urban Los Angeles. Hancock Park was formed around a group of tar pits where natural asphalt (also called asphaltum, bitumen, or pitch; ''brea'' in Spanish) has seeped up from the gro ...

. Later, the Gilmore Drive-In Theater was built, just south of the ballpark and east of the Farmers Market.

Field

The field had intimate quarters from the spectator standpoint – first and third bases were 24 feet from the first row of seats. Home plate was 34 feet from the stands. The outfield gave the pitchers more of a break with foul lines 335 feet long, power alleys about 385 feet, and 407 feet to center field. (Ritter, p. 75) The power alleys were thus 40 feet deeper than in the cross-town counterpart,

Wrigley Field Wrigley Field is a Major League Baseball (MLB) stadium on the North Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is the home of the Chicago Cubs, one of the city's two MLB franchises. It first opened in 1914 as Weeghman Park for Charles Weeghman's Chicago Wh ...

. The diamond was situated in the northwest corner of the field.

Baseball

Hollywood Stars

In 1938 Herbert Fleishaker, owner of the

Mission Reds The Mission Reds were a minor league baseball team located in San Francisco, California, that played in the Pacific Coast League (PCL) from 1926 through 1937. First Missions team In early September of 1914, the failed Sacramento Solons team moved ...

moved his team to Los Angeles, and took the name of the

after the city's previous PCL franchise. After but one season, the team was sold to new owners, among them Bob Cobb of

Brown Derby Brown Derby was a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles, California. The first and best known was shaped like a derby hat, an iconic image that became synonymous with the Golden Age of Hollywood. It was opened by Wilson Mizner in 1926. The chain ...

Restaurant fame and the inventor of the California Cobb Salad. In their salad days, as it were, the Stars attracted glamorous actors and other celebrities or anyone else who wanted to be "seen", much as

Dodger Stadium Dodger Stadium is a baseball stadium in the Elysian Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It is the home stadium of Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers. Opened in 1962, it was constructed in less than three years at a cost of ( ...

would later. One of the L.A. Angels players,

Chuck Connors Kevin Joseph Aloysius "Chuck" Connors (April 10, 1921 – November 10, 1992) was an American actor, writer, and professional basketball and baseball player. He is one of only 13 athletes in the history of American professional sports to have p ...

, made a successful move from one side of the box seat railing to the other, becoming the star in ''

The Rifleman ''The Rifleman'' is an American Western television program starring Chuck Connors as rancher Lucas McCain and Johnny Crawford as his son Mark McCain. It was set in the 1880s in the fictional town of North Fork, New Mexico Territory. The show ...

'', a popular 1950s TV show. The Stars would play at Gilmore Field through the 1957 season.

Pittsburgh Pirates

In 1948, Gilmore Field was used as the spring training location for the

Pittsburgh Pirates The Pittsburgh Pirates are an American professional baseball team based in Pittsburgh. The Pirates compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) Central division. Founded as part of the American Associati ...

Movies

Although L.A.'s Wrigley Field seemed to get the lion's share of Hollywood screen time, Gilmore Field also had its moments on celluloid. It was featured in a 1949 movie called ''

The Stratton Story ''The Stratton Story'' is a 1949 American biographical film directed by Sam Wood that tells the true story of Monty Stratton, a Major League Baseball pitcher who pitched for the Chicago White Sox from 1934 to 1938. The film is the first of thre ...

'', starring

James Stewart James Maitland Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American actor and military pilot. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality h ...

and June Allyson, the true story of a promising pitcher (

Monty Stratton Monty Franklin Pierce Stratton (May 21, 1912 – September 29, 1982) was an American pitcher in Major League Baseball (MLB). He was born in Palacios, Texas (some sources state Wagner, Texas) and lived in Greenville, Texas, for part of his life. ...

) whose career was curtailed due to a hunting accident that left him with an artificial leg. Stratton's

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), ...

career was over, but he made a comeback at the minor league level. The scenes at the end of the movie were set elsewhere but were filmed at Gilmore Field. The layout of the outfield, and especially the exceptionally high left and right field corners, help to identify it. In ''

The Atomic City ''The Atomic City'' is a 1952 thriller film directed by Jerry Hopper and starring Gene Barry and Lydia Clarke. The story takes place at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a nuclear physicist (Barry) lives and works. Terrorists kidnap his son and ...

'' (1952), Gilmore Field plays the site of a "Communist spy drop" during a game, with the still-new televising of the game providing the FBI agents with close-ups. Gilmore Field was also seen in the movie ''

711 Ocean Drive ''711 Ocean Drive'' is a 1950 American crime film noir directed by Joseph M. Newman and starring Edmond O'Brien, Joanne Dru and Otto Kruger. Plot Telephone technician Mal Granger, with knowledge of telephones and electronics, is hired by gangster ...

'' (1950). Half of the

neon Neon is a chemical element with the symbol Ne and atomic number 10. It is a noble gas. Neon is a colorless, odorless, inert monatomic gas under standard conditions, with about two-thirds the density of air. It was discovered (along with krypton ...

art deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

"Hollywood Stars" sign, above the stadium entrance, is clearly visible.

Demolished

The ballpark site was abandoned after 1957. Gilmore Field was razed in 1958, beginning soon after an announcement in the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

'' of January 17. Much of the site is now occupied by a parking lot at CBS Television City, near the Farmers Market. In September 1997, the Pacific Coast League Historical Society, CBS, and the A.F. Gilmore Company dedicated a bronze plaque in commemoration of Gilmore Field on a wall outside CBS Studio 46. "The Ferris Wheel", one of the episodes of ''

Rescue 8 ''Rescue 8'' is a syndicated American action adventure crime drama series about Los Angeles County Fire Department Rescue Squad 8. It premiered in 1958 and originally ran for two seasons with syndicated reruns continuing for almost a decade th ...

'', a syndicated United States television series broadcast in September 1958, was filmed at the demolition of Gilmore Field and includes many views of the stadium as it was being razed.

References

*''"Lost Ballparks"'' by Lawrence Ritter.

External links

* * {{Pittsburgh Pirates Hollywood Stars Defunct baseball venues in the United States Defunct minor league baseball venues Pittsburgh Pirates spring training venues Baseball venues in Los Angeles 1939 establishments in California Sports venues completed in 1939 1957 disestablishments in California Sports venues demolished in 1957 Demolished sports venues in California