Roosevelt Stadium: New Deal Ballpark to Rock Shrine
New Jersey
Just south of here, on a strip of landfill reclaimed from the Hudson waterfront, stood one of the strangest and most overlooked arenas in American sports and music history. Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City was built in nineteen thirty-seven as a Works Progress Administration project, at a cost of one and a half million dollars, on the former grounds of a small municipal airport at Droyer's Point.
Designed in Art Deco style by architect Christian Ziegler, the bowl-shaped ballpark was widely considered the finest minor-league venue of its era, and it opened as home to the Jersey City Giants of the International League. Its Terrazzo floors and sweeping concrete curves signaled ambition, the kind of civic pride that New Deal public works were meant to project.
But the stadium's most remarkable chapter came decades later, in its role as a bridge between professional sport and the emerging stadium-rock era. In nineteen forty-six, Jackie Robinson played his first game as a professional baseball player on this field, breaking the color line in organized baseball as a member of the Montreal Royals in an International League opener about a year before he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The crowd that day was enormous, and the welcome Robinson received in Jersey City was warmer than almost anything he would encounter that season.
Then, beginning in nineteen seventy-two, promoter John Scher transformed the old ballpark into one of the premier outdoor concert venues on the East Coast. For five summers the stadium hosted the Beach Boys, the Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and dozens more. The Pink Floyd concert in nineteen seventy-three was recorded and released decades later as a live album.
The stadium was demolished in nineteen eighty-five. A gated residential community now stands on the site. The Art Deco grandstands and the patch of outfield grass where Robinson first stepped onto a professional diamond are gone, leaving only a footnote in the long, tangled history of the meadows between Jersey City and the Hudson.
