Hi all! For today's park we go to upstate New York and the penultimate season of the major league American Association.
Star Park was the usual name for the home grounds of Syracuse baseball teams, much like the name Oriole Park has served for Baltimore. There were five different Star Parks from 1878-1929, with some parks occasionally having different names as well. This is the
second Star Park, and the one that lasted the longest, serving from 1885-1904. The first Star Park served the NL Syracuse Stars of 1879, which is on our collective to-do list but for which information is very scant.
This Star Park, as noted, was home to the
Syracuse Stars of the American Association in 1890, their only year in that league. This was
not a good team, finishing 7th and then leaving the league. After Syracuse and Rochester departed the AA at the end of 1890, only NYC and Buffalo ever represented the Empire State at the major league level, and Buffalo only did so in 1-2 year stints in off-brand major leagues or unofficially.
However, this park did host football as well during the late 1800s, including some high profile college games involving Cornell.
Google Drive link to Star Park 1890
The most useful available info for the park was an appearance on a Sanborn insurance map (included below). I interpreted the weird notch in left field as a parking area for carriages and had the wall continue straight from center to left field. There's a photograph from outside the park, which didn't seem to help much. The map has a funny structure that I wasn't sure how to interpret--clearly a two-story tower atop a one-story thing. I decided to make it another grandstand with a treehouse-style press box on top. It's not impossible that the photo shows it and it's something more like an entrance gate, but it doesn't seem to be in the right place for it?
For those keeping track at home, the background is actually from Syracuse, but not really the same part of town as the park was.
I'm off on some work travel soon, depending on my as-yet undetermined schedule I might have some free time to do a bit more on this, I might not. In either case I'll post where I think we are and reconfirm my near-term modeling plans. If there's any sort of deadline coming up where it would be useful to get something done to get it packaged with other things, please let me know!