One man’s quest to mark a historic St. Paul ballpark

Downtown St. Paul used to be fun, if you ask Stew Thornley.

A century ago, where today Interstates 94 and 35E tangle below state office buildings, there once stood a tiny ballpark where a generation of St. Paulites gathered to cheer on teams like the barnstorming St. Paul Colored Gophers.

The park is long gone. But Thornley wants to make sure its memory won’t keep fading, by getting a plaque installed.

“We need to give recognition to those entertainment facilities that are long gone,” Thornley said, and the way of life that revolved around the local baseball fields.

Thornley is a baseball history fanatic who has published books on the Minneapolis Millers and the history of baseball in Minnesota. He also researches old parks and has raised funds for plaques to commemorate them.

Around the turn of the 20th century, St. Paul had several baseball fields around downtown and Frogtown. There was the Athletic Park in the area now called the West Side Flats. The Fort Street Grounds were on today’s W. 7th Street near St. Clair Avenue. A park on University Avenue and Lexington Parkway hosted Sunday baseball games, Thornley said, just far enough from churches so rowdy fans would not to upset the devout. For a couple of seasons in the 1890s, Comiskey Park was on Dale Street, before Charles Comiskey moved the St. Paul Saints to Chicago and renamed them the White Sox.

And then, on Minnesota Street, there was the downtown “pillbox” stadium, so called because it was so small that there was barely a strip of outfield. Hitting a ball out over the fence along the first or third base lines was only considered a single, Thornley said, and marks at 235 feet outside the field distinguished a home run.

Commemorating the “pillbox” park is a little more complicated than marking others, Thornley said, because the site is now part of the State Capitol complex, roughly where the state Department of Health now stands.

To get a plaque approved, Thornley had to make a request to the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board. After no objections were raised at a public hearing last week, Thornley is a step closer to realizing the marker. The board will determine the plaque’s location.

“This downtown pillbox ballpark is fascinating,” Thornley said, opening a window onto a bygone city.

It opened while the State Capitol was under construction, to bring baseball closer to what was then St. Paul’s center of gravity in downtown and the West Side. At that time, the larger field on Lexington was a long way to travel for a game, he said.

When baseball season was over, the park was flooded in the winter and became an ice rink.

Thornley said he thinks this park is especially important because of its place in Minnesota’s Black history, as the home of the barnstorming St. Paul Colored Gophers.

Significant players in what would become the Negro Leagues played at the pillbox, Thornley said, including Hall of Fame pitcher Andrew “Rube” Foster.

With the Chicago Leland Giants, another Black team, Foster pitched a no-hitter at the pillbox in 1908 against the Gophers.

“More and more Black baseball is emerging from that hidden history,” Thornley said.

Development and eventually the interstate system all but obliterated a keystone of St. Paul’s Black community, much like the destruction of the Rondo neighborhood. But Thornley said he hopes a marker will restore some memory of the ballpark’s place in the neighborhood and the community.

“That ballpark has been kind of underground,” Thornley said.

But he hopes that past will not be buried much longer.