Historic N.Y. Baseball Photos from the Library of Congress

Since 2008, the Library of Congress has been putting photos from its collections onto flickr to share them with a broader audience. The catalog covers a wide range of topics, but we decided to look through their New York baseball related photos. Photos include the New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Highlanders/Yankees. Here are a few of our favorites from the online collection.

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By tien mao in News on August 22, 2009 1:59 PM

Comments [rss]

Alex

These pictures are all really cool. My favorite picture about NY baseball is this one:

Yankee Stadium & Polo Grounds

Yankee Stadium in the foreground with the Polo Grounds right across the Harlem River.

dr zippy

We definitely need more tobacco advertising!

It was before my time but the Polo Grounds was a weird, but not endearingly quirky, stadium. Left and right fields were really short and it was 483 ft to the center field wall. It was also poorly maintained and the Giants were the team of wealthy Manhattanites, who went to games to see and be seen, not to watch baseball. Ebbets Field was a neighborhood stadium, much like Wrigley Field, and attracted working class Brooklynites. It is easy to see why one stadium has a nostalgia factor while the other doesn't.

famdoc

@David McC: Agree. Nevermind rebuilding the WTC. Let's rebuild the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field. Those were classy, beautiful stadiums. And let's have the same advertisements on the OF walls: Bull Durham tobacco and Fatima cigarettes.