Double Play: Public Buildings as Indoor Sport Facilities in the Late Nineteenth Century

Description

On Thanksgiving Day in 1887, Chicago’s Farragut Boat Club, served as the impromptu facility for the inaugural game of indoor baseball. Scholars have provided substantial intellectual treatment to that story and the game’s history across cities large and small throughout the Great Lakes. However, histories of the facilities that accommodated the surprisingly popular indoor pastime remain woefully unearthed. My work addresses that oversight by examining two of the buildings which hosted games for the most competitive indoor baseball league in Rochester, NY, in 1898. That year, the city’s Turners hoisted the pennant, spurred on by their infamously large and rambunctious crowd of supporters. Thousands of Rochester’s Germans packed the marble floors at Fitzhugh Hall and the Arsenal, where their cheers echoed off the walls to deafening impact.
When not overrun in the evenings with zealous sports supporters, the halls served the city as hubs of public service. Fitzhugh Hall, constructed in 1875, operated as the city’s Main Post Office from its construction until 1930. The Arsenal, built eight years earlier, served as the reserve station for the county’s military presence until 1905. Both buildings resulted from famed western New York architect Andrew Jackson Warner, who was responsible for developing all Rochester’s grandest buildings in the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, both buildings still stand today. Now renovated, updated, and historically protected, they offer a lingering reminder of a forgotten sliver of the city’s sporting past.
Explorations into the duality and intersections of place and space are rooted in Susanne Rau’s recent history on the subject and Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation of
fields. Drawing from each, I will present insight aimed at deepening our understanding on the origins of indoor playing spaces and how they acted as links between the public spheres of civic life with the private sphere of athletic clubs.

Period	2022
Event title	North American Society for Sport History
Event type	Conference
Location	Chicago, United States, IllinoisShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International