Brooklyn Before Baseball
The Sports They Played
This essay formed the basis of a talk delivered on November 13, 2021 to the Brooklyn 19th Century Baseball Interdisciplinary Symposium (SABR).
LIEUTENANT ANBURY, writing to a friend in England under date of October 30, 1781, refers thus to [Charles] Loosley’s King’s Head Tavern, also known as Brooklyn Hall: “On crossing the East River from New York, you land at Brooklyn, which is a scattered village, consisting of a few houses. At this place is an excellent tavern, where parties are made to go and eat fish; the landlord of which has saved an immense fortune during this war.”
While the British occupied Brooklyn, horseraces were more or less regularly held on the old course around Beaver Pond near Jamaica, at New Lots and at Flatlands, not far from the ferry. They were largely attended by the army officers and the people of New York, who crossed over on the ferry and, no doubt, added greatly to the profits of the King’s Head.
Loosely had a ballfield owner’s entrepreneurial bent, not unlike that of Bill Cammeyer of the Union Pond, which ultimately became the enclosed baseball field. Of a sponsored horserace he warned:
It is expected that no person will attempt to erect a booth on the race ground, without first subscribing at least three guineas, neither to sell wines, liquors, &c. from waggons and other carriages, without subscribing two guineas towards the Saddle, Bridle and Whip [to be run for each day], and other expences attending the races.
This notice was signed “God Save the King,” and dated “Brooklyn Hall, February 10, 1781.”
Loosley often prefaced the announcements of his sporting affairs with the motto “Pro Bono Publico” — encouraging not only participants and bettors but even mere spectators. (Amazingly, these broadsides survive to testify that Brooklyn and sport grew up together.) On August 9, 1779, he took an advertisement in The New York Mercury: “A Set of Gentlemen propose playing a cricket match this day, and every Monday during the summer season, on the Cricket ground near Brooklyn Ferry.” The company “of any Gentleman to join the set in the exercise” is invited. “A large Booth is erected for the accommodation of spectators.”
Sometimes he closed his notices with warnings that “rebels should not approach nearer than Flatbush wood.” Once the American victory seemed assured, however, Loosley declared bankruptcy and headed to “to the promised Land of Nova-Scotia,” with “Brother Loyalists, where Freedom and Liberty reign triumphant”; there he opened another tavern, if not on the same principles of sporting events promoting comestibles and potables, or vice versa.
What does all this have to with baseball, you may wonder, to which Brooklyn arguably gave birth in the 1850s and ’60s? EVERYTHING, as I will proceed to lay out. Just as England gave us baseball itself, in rudimentary form, so did it shape the sporting appetites of Brooklyn.
A bit belatedly, some preliminary niceties: Let me note Ralph Carhart’s prior presentation, so agreeably commenced at about the point where I will end. Let me also acknowledge Peter Mancuso … not only for his kind words about me but also for his pioneering of the interdisciplinary concept, so apt for the SABR crowd; I have addressed each of his prior conferences — in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Minneapolis (Brooklyn will be my swan song). Thanks also to Tom Gilbert, author of a fine new book, who will lead this afternoon’s panel into an exploration of Baseball’s Birthplace, a point of enduring and to me fascinating contention.
My task should have been a snap: a welcoming talk to an audience that largely knows me, or at least my work. But instead, it became a joyfully arduous expedition down a rabbit hole, as research has been for so many of us here (the writing is the hard part!). I realized some time ago, after committing to speak today — on a subject to be determined — that I knew precious little about Brooklyn sport prior to the 1860s except for stray newspaper references to baseball that now and then I had shared with the Protoball group. (By the way: profound props to that noble effort, which like Retrosheet has put flesh on the bones of a story that fans thought they already knew.)
So, off and on for several weeks now, I have steeped myself in the history of Brooklyn and its formidable neighbor across the East River, about which I already knew a thing or two. Focusing on amusements and their prohibitions — the latter so illuminating about the ethos of the community — I now make bold to share with you a rambling highlight reel of the riches I have found.
What is our starting point? For New York, it is the Dutch attitudes toward sport of the 17th century, followed by the more straitlaced and class-bound proclivities of the English. For Brooklyn, we must start a century later, in the pre-Revolutionary period: its horseracing, cricket, and blood sports will mark our beginnings for today, with some bouncing between the banks of the river that separates the two cities. (I will not have cause to use the word “borough” going forward, as I have decided to end my talk well before the birth of the megalopolis known as Greater New York.)
The sporting milieu in New York City into which baseball intruded forcibly in the mid-1830s — racing, yachting, rowing, tenpins, pedestrianism, boxing, and canine- and cock-fighting — arose from the materialism, personal solitude, and risqué lures of the city’s bachelor culture. Rural youths with no prospects flocked to the city after 1825, when the completion of the Erie Canal made New York — not Philadelphia or Baltimore or New Orleans — the nation’s economic capital. The milieu for diversion in Brooklyn — less caught up in imports from the hinterland or in financial speculation — was still found in fishing, hunting, and the field sports inherited from Loosley and his not yet forgotten British compatriots.
By 1845 New York, its northernmost region rising with each generation from the Battery to what would become Central Park, had seen its playing grounds give way to the needs of the railroad. In less densely populated Brooklyn, however. the advent of rail only enhanced the appetite for sport. By 1837 stations of the newly organized Long Island Railroad had been built alongside the entrances to racecourses old and new: Jamaica (dating to Loosley’s heyday), Union, Centreville trotting grounds and, in 1855, Fashion Race Course, whose station name would be subsequently styled as West Flushing and then Corona.
Let me break in with a tidbit, or…
Sidebar: The Union Race Course, laid out in 1821 — and site of the great victory by Eclipse over Sir Henry two years later — was owned by Aaron Burr, who in 1833 sold it to Alexander L. Botts of Virginia … the father of Jane Botts, who would become Henry Chadwick’s wife.
Charles Peverelly described the situation of the ballplayers who would become Knickerbockers, driven from Madison Square Park in New York by the first Grand Central Station:
At a preliminary meeting, it was suggested that as it was apparent they would soon be driven from Murray Hill, some suitable place should be obtained in New Jersey, where their stay could be permanent; accordingly, a day or two afterwards, enough to make a game assembled at Barclay street ferry, crossed over, marched up the road, prospecting for ground on each side, until they reached the Elysian Fields, where they “settled.”
But why, in 1845, did they go to Hoboken rather than to Brooklyn? Let me suggest that Hoboken, not yet a city, had long earned its reputation as a pleasure garden tailored to the likes of aspiring if not actual gentlemen; while Brooklyn was a city of laborers and farmers as well as pietists and roughnecks. (The last named would soon enough characterize Hoboken as well.) Both Hoboken and Brooklyn might have been viewed as satellite communities of New York — suburbs, if you will — but the boys who may have played baseball in Brooklyn at that time would go on to become shipwrights and mechanics, not brokers and clerks. For young men “Base” was a bat and ball game of indistinct rules in Brooklyn noted by the Long Island Farmer in 1835, just as it had been played on Manhattan Isle in 1805 by the lads of Columbia College.
Sidebar: The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club formed on September 23, 1845. Thirteen days later they played their first intramural game, seven on seven, at the Elysian Fields. On June 19, 1846 they played what Hoboken has proclaimed to be the first match game — that is, the first game between two distinct ballclubs. Yet on April 13, two months earlier, the Knicks had traveled to Brooklyn to play baseball with the Union Star club, which had played against the New York Ball Club in Hoboken in 1845. A rainstorm prevented this April date from supplying what many have termed the “first match game.”
Even then, in the 1840s, when cholera had displaced yellow fever as the prevalent epidemic, Brooklyn still viewed New York as a cesspool of disease, vice, and depravity … and their merited consequences.
At auction in 1784, the year after the British evacuation of New York, John Stevens had purchased a confiscated Tory property that would become the Elysian Fields. Not until 1849, though, would Hoboken be formalized as a residential township, despite decades of fitful development. Stevens had set up the Elysian Fields in response to yellow fever, in 1798 and again in 1822, as a summer theme park for fashionable gents fearful of New York’s pestilential crowd.
Brooklyn, on the other hand, was fairly clear of infection. Gabriel Furman noted in 1824: “During the prevalence of the yellow fever in the city of New-York, in the summer of 1822, seven persons died of that disease in Brooklyn…. it was introduced from the city of New-York…. Indeed the high and airy situation of Brooklyn almost precludes the idea of its being engendered among us.”
Today we think of the two as the rivals they would become by the Civil War (in 1860 Brooklyn was the nation’s third largest urban center) but The City of Churches had begun as a rural adjunct, like Hoboken, with sleepy concerns for its future quite different from those of New York. In the first national census of 1790, New York had been the nation’s largest city — as it has been ever since — with 33,000 residents; Brooklyn counted in at some 4500. By 1830 New York’s population burgeoned to 202,000; Brooklyn’s grew as well, to about 20,000.
In 1850, as those had fought the Revolution went to their reward and baseball was poised to stand alongside cricket as a national game, the comparative figures were 515,000 to 139,000. Brooklyn’s population had nearly tripled in the past ten years alone. (Hoboken’s population in 1850 was still less than 3,000.)
By 1860 it doubled again. New York would always be larger, but Brooklyn was growing faster. Only thirty years before, Brooklyn residents had numbered one-tenth of those in New York. In 1860 its population was one-third that of its rival.
If Brooklyn saw Gotham as a den of iniquity, New York viewed the people of Brooklyn as hayseeds, with quaint customs and beliefs and a deep distrust of newcomers. What may have bound the cities together in something they could agree about was neither the nature of their commerce nor the expression of their creed but sport — first, cricket and horseracing; then, the lamentable blood sports involving bulls, bears, cocks, dogs, and rats; and, after a while, baseball.
***
In Dutch New York, sport was encouraged or at least tolerated except on the Sabbath. Among Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s various prohibitions, the one of October 26, 1656 will give an idea of what was permitted six days of the week. Ordinary labor was banned on the Sabbath, but so were pleasures regarded as profanations. Hunting and fishing, whether for commerce or fun, were prohibited, “on pain of forfeiting One pound Flemish for each person.” Moreover, a double fine was prescribed for “any lower or unlawful exercise or Amusement, Drunkenness, frequenting Taverns or Tippling houses, dancing, playing Ball, Cards, Tricktrack, Tennis, Cricket, or Ninepins, going on pleasure parries in a Boat, Car or Wagon, before, between or during Divine Services.”
Sidebar: Bowling or keggling meant a game of nine pins, not ten. Ninepins had been banned periodically to place a check on gambling and boozing, but the saloon keepers and lane proprietors got around the ban by creating the ten-pin configuration. When the Knickerbocker Bowling Saloon opened in 1840 as the first indoor alleys, ten pins were featured.
Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer writes in her History of the City of New York in the Seventeenth Century: “With small success, apparently, the governor in council issued ordinances against firing guns, beating drums, and selling liquor on New Year’s Day and May Day, against the erection of May-poles as likewise conducive to disorderly conduct, and against the rough sport called pulling or riding the goose.” Maypoles were phallic symbols of fertility and, in the eyes of clerics, the abandoned demeanor around them inspired licentious conduct. Dance and sport and pleasure were all wrapped up in one irreligious bundle. Robert Henderson opened his classic Ball, Bat and Bishop with these words: “It is the purpose of this book to show that all modern games played with bat and ball descend from one common source: an ancient fertility rite observed by Priest–Kings in the Egypt of the Pyramids.” So Maypoles and blood sports and baseball have something in common….
Horse racing came in during the year after the Dutch first ceded New York to the British, in 1665. Taking place at the Newmarket course on Long Island, this first racing meet in North America was overseen by New York’s new colonial governor, Richard Nicolls. Even when Manhattan was narrowly populated, racing was a sport that might attract spectators and bettors; it would be dispatched to Brooklyn or Queens or Long Island. Trotting races along the Bowery came in later, with upper-class clubmen betting on drivers plucked from the lower social classes.
A cricket match by London (Marylebone) rules was played in New York between sides of Englishmen on April 29, 1751:
…this day, a great Cricket match is to be played on our commons, by a Company of Londoners against a Company of New-Yorkers. The game was played for “a considerable Wager,” there being 11 players on each side, and “according to the London Method: and those who got most Notches in two Hands, to be the Winners.” The New Yorkers won by a total score of 167 to 80.
This was followed up by Marylebone-governed matches in Brooklyn in June of 1820 (Union Club vs. Mechanic Club, both from New York, and both comprised of Englishmen) and again in 1838 and 1839 between the Long Island and New York sides. Playing for the latter, which shortly thereafter became the St. George Cricket Club, with headquarters at the Bloomingdale Road and 29th Street, was Samuel Wright, father of Baseball Hall of Famers Harry and George and their brothers Sam and Dave as well. I spotted a lone mention of John Brooks’s Cricket Club in an 1825 advert but nothing beyond.
The contests held at Loosey’s King’s Head Tavern in the late 1770s had been arranged on the fly but as with the London Rules matches, the end game was gambling — which in itself was not the perceived evil; it was other people’s pleasure.
Gambling is the foundation of organized sport for adults. Boys become men and begin to lead serious, calculating lives, as in business. To justify their continuing interest in a youthful pleasure they must inject purpose into it, as in taking a reasoned risk: making money or honorably losing it. The love of sport as boys became the art and science of sporting men: the wager was all.
The by now familiar Loosley sponsored not only the catch-as-catch-can cricket matches of 1779 to 1782 but also the great horserace at Ascot Heath on June 4, 1781. This was Brooklyn’s first mass sporting event and was memorialized not only in contemporaneous print but even long after, in a lengthy reminiscence, with fictional frilleries, in The Scrap Table book of 1831. Cricket endured as the favored pastime of even some of the most celebrated players of a modern day. Johnny Holder of the Excelsiors, a Fashion Race Course home-run hero, played for the Long Island Cricket Club, and Jim Creighton clean bowled five wickets out of six successive balls in an 1860 match against Englishmen.
Sidebar: The Excelsiors were bitter at the Atlantic and Eckford clubs’ slight to their players in the selection process for the Brooklyn side in the Fashion Race Course games, as gentlemanliness seemed to yield before betting interests. This is what gave rise to fairly blatant professionalism in the 1860s as the Excelsiors supplied cash under the table to Jim Creighton and George Flanley, and other clubs followed suit.
Skating had been enjoyed by Brooklyn lads in the 1840s on the mill ponds where nary a lady skater was to be seen. “No fair one ever dared to take the ice,” according to Chadwick. But in 1860, after the Central Park lake had opened, “a furore set in for the sport.” First came the Washington Pond, then the Nassau, the Capitoline, the Satellite and, fatefully for baseball, the Union Skating Pond.
Along the way there developed, on both sides of the East River before the debut of The Great Bridge, a rage for speed in sport, arising from the locomotive to the telegraph to record-breaking feats of even the most mundane and, to our eyes, absurd sort: oyster and clam opening, type setting, quail eating, newspaper folding, butchering, horseshoe turning, soft boiled egg eating.
What did I leave to one side, for reasons of time and space? Wrestling, sparring, and quoits, because they are dull. Billiards, which became popular so rapidly that by the 1850s a table in the front parlor was the mark of a gentleman, not a rapscallion. And rowing and yachting, notably the stories of George Steers and Frank Pidgeon. But I have written about both in some depth, and while rowing was sufficiently popular in Brooklyn for a club to have sprung up in 1838, no Brooklyn Yacht Club came into being until 1857 (13 years after the founding of the New York Club). By this time Steers’s shipbuilding exploits, culminating in the America’s Cup victory of 1851, had made him a Transatlantic hero and Brooklyn a city of renown.
