Baltimore Memorial Stadium was a multi-purpose stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, that formerly stood on 33rd Street on an oversized block officially called Venable Park, a former city park from the 1920s. The site was bound by Ellerslie Avenue to the west, 36th Street to the north, and Ednor Road to the east.
Two stadiums were located here — a 1922 version known primarily as Baltimore Stadium or Municipal Stadium; and a rebuilt, double-deck, multi-sport stadium, completed in mid-1954, and rechristened Baltimore Memorial Stadium — Memorial Stadium for short.
History
Construction of the football stadium
thumb|right|Municipal Stadium/Baltimore Stadium with the old [[Greek architecture|Greco–Roman style colonnade and porticoes and 33rd Street boulevard to the south in the foreground – Army–Navy football game in 1944]]
Memorial Stadium was launched as Municipal Stadium, also sometimes known as Baltimore Stadium or Venable Stadium. Designed by Pleasants Pennington and Albert W. Lewis, it was built in 1922 over a six-month period at the urging of the Mayor, William F. Broening in a previously undeveloped area just north beyond the city's iconic rows of rowhouses. The stadium was constructed in what was formerly Venable Park and was operated by the city's Board of Park Commissioners.
It was primarily a football stadium, a large horseshoe with an earthen-mound exterior and its open end with a large stone gateway of a Greek/Roman colonnade and porticoes on the open-faced south side facing the new 33rd Street boulevard/parkway which had just recently been cut through east to west. In this configuration, it seated anywhere from 70,000 to 80,000 people.
In its early years it hosted various public and private high school and college-level games, including the annual "Poly-City Game" on Thanksgiving Day where the "Collegians" (later known as the "Black Knights") of Baltimore City College opposed its rival Baltimore Polytechnic Institute "Engineers" (1889), along with the Roman Catholic high schools' "Loyola-Calvert Hall Game" pitting the Cardinals of Calvert Hall College against Loyola High School at Blakefield's Dons.
Home games for the University of Maryland at College Park's Terrapins football and the United States Naval Academy Midshipmen were sometimes held at the stadium, attracting a national audience and media coverage.
Baseball park
In July 1944, Municipal Stadium was pressed into service as a baseball park by the Baltimore Orioles of the International League, when their previous home, "Oriole Park," located in the Abell neighborhood to the southwest, was destroyed by fire.
The minor league Orioles went on to win the International League championship and the Junior World Series that year. The large post-season crowds in attendance at Municipal Stadium, which would not have been possible at Oriole Park, even surpassing the attendance of Major League Baseball's 1944 World Series, caught the attention of professional team owners, and Baltimore suddenly became regarded as a viable option for teams looking to relocate.
thumb|right|[[Babe Ruth's widow, Claire, at the unveiling of a memorial plaque to his memory in Memorial Stadium (1955)]]
Further momentum for sports in Baltimore was spurred when the failing Miami Seahawks franchise of the fledgling All-America Football Conference (AAFC) was relaunched in the fall of 1947 as the Baltimore Colts.
The presence of professional football and the prospect of professional baseball spurred the city to rebuild Municipal Stadium into a facility of "major league caliber." This reconstructed stadium was to be renamed Baltimore Memorial Stadium in honor of the thousands of the city's dead of the recently concluded World War II. Baltimore mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. championed the new stadium project and overcame various legal and political hurdles which delayed progress on the project.
The initial plan called for a single, horseshoe-shaped deck to be built, with the open end facing north, and was designed to host football as well as baseball. It was engineered with enough strength to eventually support a second deck and a roof.
The lower deck reconstruction began in the spring/early summer of 1949 and was done in stages, first at the previously open south end of the stadium, and slowly obliterating the old Municipal Stadium stands, even as the International League Orioles continued playing on their makeshift diamond, along with the new Baltimore Colts of the former All-America Football Conference merged with the reorganized National Football League.
The old seating at the north end was retained for the pro and college football seasons that fall. By year's end, the horseshoe was sufficiently completed to allow the baseball infield to be relocated from the northwest corner of the field to the south end, and the Orioles opened the 1950 season at the newly oriented diamond. Construction continued on the single deck, until finally all the remnants of the old stadium were gone. The new facility could seat around 31,000.
During the 1950 season, the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro American League hosted four games at the venue, including their season opener on May 12, a 4-3 victory over the Philadelphia Stars in front of more than 10,000 fans.
Second deck
The first Baltimore Colts franchise terminated operations for financial reasons at the end of the 1950 season. Community support for a second NFL franchise remained strong, however, and late in 1952 a group of Baltimore businessmen pooled their resources in a bid to win a new league franchise. A "Bring Back the Colts" drive launched in December 1952 generated the presale of 15,000 season tickets in just six weeks.
thumb|right|The Orioles playing one of the last [[Major League Baseball|major league home night games at the stadium, September 14, 1991]]
thumb|right|Scoreboard before the final Orioles home game, October 6, 1991
Both the new Orioles and the Colts had some great successes over coming years, with both teams becoming among the winningest and competitive franchises in their respective leagues during the late 1950s and throughout the decade of the 1960s. The Colts actually sold out 56 consecutive games at Memorial Stadium during their peak years of popularity in Baltimore. Both Colt and Oriole fans were so wildly devoted to their teams, with as many as 60,000 Colts during the consecutive games streak, that the stadium was dubbed "The Worlds's Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum."
Abandonment
The dual-use stadium was not without its critics, however. Traffic and a parking shortage made accessing the stadium difficult. Concrete poles blocked views, and unsheltered areas grew hot in the summer. Most of the seats were bench-style, with few having chair backs — let alone more modern amenities.
The NFL's Baltimore Colts were the first to express deep dissatisfaction and to seek a new venue. In addition to sub-optimal conditions at Memorial Stadium, capacity was a concern, with the Colts selling out every home game from the start of the 1964 season to the end of 1970 and unable to meet demand for season tickets.
In 1970, Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom announced that he was seeking a 500-acre parcel in one of three suburban Baltimore counties for construction of a new stadium. A new $20 million football-only facility was planned, with Rosenbloom adamant that the team would be leaving Memorial Stadium expeditiously due to unhappiness with stadium conditions and ongoing irritation over a September legal dispute with the city over whether a Monday Night Football game could be hosted at the site — a dispute which Rosenbloom characterized as "the end of the road." He immediately swapped franchises with Colts owner Rosenbloom, becoming the controlling partner of the Baltimore franchise that same day.
For the next decade, while the community input process lumbered on, Memorial Stadium hosted a minor league baseball team and two new professional football teams. The Bowie Baysox, a minor league affiliate of the Orioles, played their inaugural 1993 season at Memorial Stadium while their permanent home ballpark was being built. As the Orioles were then in their second season at Camden Yards, this gave Baltimore the rare distinction of hosting both major league and minor league teams simultaneously; currently, New York City has that honor with the presence of the Brooklyn Cyclones, who are affiliated with the Mets.
The Baltimore Stallions played during the Canadian Football League's "southern expansion" experiment to the United States for two seasons in 1994 and 1995. The team was originally known as the "Baltimore CFL Colts", but they were forced to change their name to the Stallions (after one year of playing without an official name) when the NFL was granted a legal court injunction which prevented the CFL franchise from reclaiming the "Colts" name. Owner Jim Speros took over the facility, exchanging tickets to contractors for renovations to help bring the dilapidated stadium to workable condition. Memorial Stadium was unique in that it was one of the few U. S. stadiums that could accommodate the full 65-yard width and 150-yard length of a regulation Canadian football field (most likely since it had been designed for baseball as well as American football). They had winning records in each of the 1994 and 1995 seasons, and in both years advanced to the championship game. Averaging more than 30,000 spectators a game for two years, the Stallions would eventually become the only American team to win the Grey Cup in 1995.
As of 2005, the former site of Memorial Stadium housed Maryland's largest YMCA facility and the developing vision of "Stadium Place", a mixed income community for seniors in Baltimore City. Currently there are four senior apartment complexes up and running on site.
All of this, the political wranglings, the sports history and the city's attachment to a doomed landmark was captured in a documentary, "The Last Season, The Life and Demolition of Memorial Stadium."
There was also a plan initially to keep the front of the stadium as a dedication to commemorate all who served America during both World Wars, but it had to also be taken down because alone, it was structurally unsafe.
New field
In 2010, work started on developing a new recreational baseball/football field on the site (Cal Ripken Senior Youth Development Field), with home plate being in the same exact location as it was when Memorial Stadium existed. The field was completed in December 2010. A ribbon-cutting ceremony on December 7 was attended by Billy and Cal Ripken, and Governor Martin O'Malley.
Layout
The general layout of Memorial Stadium resembled a somewhat scaled-down version of Cleveland Stadium (then home of the MLB Indians and NFL Browns). Due to the need to fit a football field on the premises, the playing area was initially quite large, especially in center field and foul territory. The construction of inner fences after 1958, however, reduced the size of the outfield. The addition of several rows of box seats also reduced the foul ground, ultimately making the stadium much more of a hitters' park than it was originally. It did host the Major League Baseball All-Star Game that year. Memorial Stadium was one of the nation's few venues to host a World Series, an MLB All-Star Game, and an NFL Championship game.
Incidents
At least two serious incidents occurred within Baltimore Memorial Stadium.
Fatal escalator accident
On May 2, 1964, a freak accident involving a stadium escalator caused the death of a teenaged girl and injuries to 46 other children. That day, the Orioles held "Safety Patrol Day" to honor schoolchildren who served in their schools' safety patrols, in which they helped their fellow students travel to and from school safely. For the event, 20,000 schoolchildren from around the state of Maryland were given free admission to the Orioles' game against the Cleveland Indians.
While the national anthem was playing before the start of the game, hundreds of children began getting onto an escalator that traveled from the lower deck to the upper deck on the stadium's third base side. Unfortunately, while three or four children at a time were getting on the escalator at the bottom, the top of the escalator was partially blocked by a narrow metal gate that allowed only one person to pass through. The mass of children was thus blocked at the top, and children began falling back on top of one another in a crush of bodies as other children continued to get on at the bottom and as the jagged metal steps of the escalator continued to move beneath all of them. The moving steps cut and mutilated the children until a stadium usher, 65-year-old Melville Gibson, finally reached the escalator's emergency shut-off switch and turned the escalator off. Previously, the shut-off switch had been moved to a wall across from the escalator in order to prevent pranksters from turning it off while people were on it.
A 14-year-old girl named Annette S. Costantine was killed in the accident. 46 other children were injured, some more seriously than others. It was considered the worst accident in the history of the stadium. The Steelers had won the game handily (40–14), and most of the fans had already exited the stadium by the time the game ended. There were only four light injuries, and the pilot was arrested for "reckless flying". Donald Kroner was the 33-year-old pilot charged with reckless flying, littering, and making a bomb threat against former Baltimore Colts linebacker Bill Pellington, who owned a bar and restaurant from which Kroner was once ejected for using foul language.
|- style=;"
| Year || Total attendance || Game average || AL rank
|-
| 1954
| 1,060,910
| 13,778
| 5th
|-
| 1955
| 852,039
| 10,785
| 7th
|-
| 1956
| 901,201
| 11,704
| 6th
|-
| 1957
| 1,029,581
| 13,371
| 5th
|-
| 1958
| 829,991
| 10,641
| 5th
|-
| 1959
| 891,926
| 11,435
| 7th
|-
| 1960
| 1,187,849
| 15,427
| 3rd
|-
| 1961
| 951,089
| 11,599
| 5th
|-
| 1962
| 790,254
| 9,637
| 6th
|-
| 1963
| 774,343
| 9,560
| 7th
|-
| 1964
| 1,116,215
| 13,612
| 4th
|-
| 1965
| 781,649
| 9,894
| 6th
|-
| 1966
| 1,203,366
| 15,232
| 3rd
|-
| 1967
| 955,053
| 12,403
| 6th
|-
| 1968
| 943,977
| 11,800
| 6th
|-
| 1969
| 1,062,069
| 13,112
| 5th
|-
| 1970
| 1,057,069
| 13,050
| 6th
|-
| 1971
| 1,023,037
| 13,286
| 3rd
|-
| 1972
| 899,950
| 11,688
| 6th
|-
| 1973
| 958,667
| 11,835
| 9th
|-
| 1974
| 962,572
| 11,884
| 8th
|-
| 1975
| 1,002,157
| 13,015
| 9th
|-
| 1976
| 1,058,609
| 13,069
| 6th
|-
| 1977
| 1,195,769
| 14,763
| 10th
|-
| 1978
| 1,051,724
| 12,984
| 10th
|-
| 1979
| 1,681,009
| 21,279
| 6th
|-
| 1980
| 1,797,438
| 22,191
| 6th
|-
| 1981
| 1,024,247
| 18,623
| 8th
|-
| 1982
| 1,613,031
| 19,671
| 8th
|-
| 1983
| 2,042,071
| 25,211
| 5th
|-
| 1984
| 2,045,784
| 25,257
| 5th
|-
| 1985
| 2,132,387
| 26,326
| 6th
|-
| 1986
| 1,973,176
| 24,977
| 6th
|-
| 1987
| 1,835,692
| 22,386
| 9th
|-
| 1988
| 1,660,738
| 20,759
| 10th
|-
| 1989
| 2,535,208
| 31,299
| 4th
|-
| 1990
| 2,415,189
| 30,190
| 5th
|-
| 1991
| 2,552,753
| 31,515
| 5th
|}
Seating capacity
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Baseball
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|Years
! scope="row" style=";"|Capacity
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1950–1952
| 31,000
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1953–1957
| 52,060
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1958–1959
| 57,557
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1960
| 57,808
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1961
| 57,641
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1962
| 57,966
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1963
| 60,065
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1964
| 60,213
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1965–1969
| 60,238
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1970–1975
| 60,240
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1976–1980
| 60,020
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1981–1995
| 60,586
|}
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|Years
! scope="row" style=";"|Capacity
|-
! scope="row" style=";"|1996–1997
| 65,248
|}
Gallery
<gallery mode="packed">
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 1.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 2.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 3.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 4.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 5.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 6.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 7.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 8.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 9.jpg
Image:Baltimore Memorial Stadium abandoned 10.jpg
</gallery>
See also
- Wild Bill Hagy
References
Sources
- House of Magic, by the Baltimore Orioles
- The Home Team, by James H. Bready
External links
- Memorial Stadium Demolition
- The Ghosts of Old Memorial Stadium - Series of old photographs from Ghosts of Baltimore blog