With the excitement of a new baseball season approaching during the spring of 1871, several changes to the league became newsworthy. In an article of the New York Times titled, “The Baseball Occurrences of March,” an interesting conversation took place on the advancement of the sport. For the first time, a convention of delegates from each of the professional clubs in the country convened on...
A place for relaxation, picnics, play, and companionship, the Back Bay Fens lie just outside Fenway Park near the Charles River in Boston. Now a beautiful location, the park, imagined by Frank Olmsted, has a history mired in literal filth. Construction of the Fens began in the 1880s. Chosen to be the first park in a much larger network of public grounds known as the Emerald Necklace, the Fens were...
1940, the city of Detroit voted to consolidate the Department of Parks and Boulevards and the Department of Recreation into a new Department of Parks and Recreation. The consolidation was the outcome of overlapping goals and not enough discussion between the groups, which sometimes bottlenecked recreational activities. “It was a case of one hand letting the other know what it was doing,” remarked...
In 1882, Frederick Law Olmstead, a landscape architect and designer of fifteen previous parks, was invited to take a look at a newly purchased property in Detroit, MI. As the designer of the first municipal park in America, he is considered the father of landscape architecture. With his pioneering expertise cultivated through years of follow-up work, Olmstead wrote an explanation for future planning...
It was a chilly 65 degrees in the waters of the Detroit river on a perfect Sunday afternoon in the early autumn of 1914 as revellers debated whether it was too cool for a swim in the Belle Isle bath houses. Several hundred Detroiters could brave the dip for only 15 minutes each, but swimming was not the only weekend activity available on the large, lush island of recreation for escapees of the industrial...