Tiger Stadium: The Corner
Near Detroit, Michigan
A few blocks southwest of Comerica Park, at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues, is the site of Tiger Stadium, a ballpark that stood for eighty-seven years and became so thoroughly woven into the fabric of Detroit that its demolition in two thousand nine felt like the removal of a limb from the city's body.
The ballpark opened on April twentieth, nineteen twelve, the same date as Fenway Park in Boston, two of the most iconic stadiums in American baseball history opening on the same afternoon. The first home run ever hit at Navin Field, as it was then called, was struck by Ty Cobb. The stadium went through multiple names, Navin Field, then Briggs Stadium after a major expansion in nineteen thirty-eight that pushed capacity past fifty-two thousand, and finally Tiger Stadium in nineteen sixty-one.
The history that accumulated on those grounds is staggering. Ty Cobb played here for most of his career. Hank Greenberg hit fifty-eight home runs in nineteen thirty-eight, a record that stood as the American League mark for decades. Babe Ruth hit his seven hundredth career home run here in nineteen thirty-four. Al Kaline patrolled right field for twenty-two seasons. In the nineteen seventy-one All-Star Game, Reggie Jackson hit a ball so far off a light standard above the right-center field roof that witnesses claimed it would have traveled over six hundred feet if unobstructed.
The Tigers won four World Series while playing here, in nineteen thirty-five, nineteen forty-five, nineteen sixty-eight, and nineteen eighty-four, and each championship brought the city into the streets. The nineteen sixty-eight championship came just one year after the Detroit uprising of sixty-seven, and many observers credited that pennant race with giving a shattered city something to hold together around.
The stadium closed after the nineteen ninety-nine season. Demolition was finally completed on September twenty-first, two thousand nine. In Eminem's music video for his song Beautiful, released that same year, footage of the stadium coming down played as a backdrop, one Detroit institution grieving another.
