Roosevelt Stadium

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The fountain and the main entrance, looking southeast, recorded by survey after the stadium had closed. Historic American Buildings Survey. Library of Congress.

The color line in organized baseball did not break in Brooklyn. It broke here, in Jersey City, on April 18, 1946, and almost nobody remembers. Roosevelt Stadium was a Depression-era public works project — built with federal relief money, opened in 1937, named for the president who was paying for it. It sat on the Hackensack River at Droyer's Point and it was where Jersey City went. On opening day of the 1946 International League season, the Jersey City Giants hosted the Montreal Royals, the top farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Montreal's second baseman was Jackie Robinson. It was his first game in organized baseball — the first game of the experiment, a full year before Ebbets Field. He went four for five. He hit a home run in the third. He stole two bases, and twice he drew a throw and came home on it, which is a thing that reads like a stat line and is actually a description of a man forcing an entire sport to admit he was there. Montreal won 14 to 1. Then he played a whole season in a league that had never had him in it, and the next April he went to Brooklyn. The stadium outlasted the Giants and became a concert hall as much as a ballpark before it was torn down in 1985. There are apartments there now. The Historic American Buildings Survey photographed it before demolition — eighty-eight photographs, taken in the way you photograph something you know is about to stop existing. Empty seats, ramps, the light towers, nobody in the frame. If your family was in that crowd on April 18, 1946, you are holding a piece of American history and you may not have realized it was worth writing down. It is. Please write it down here. Photographs: Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS NJ-1029 (call number HABS NJ,9-JERCI,16-), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.