Paterson

Hinchliffe Stadium
Location: Liberty and Maple Streets, Paterson, N.J.

The 7,500-seat stadium was built for $240,000 in 1932 during the Great Depression. It was a public works project authorized by Mayor John V. Hinchliffe.

The stadium is best known for its role in professional baseball as home to the New York Black Yankees of the Negro National League in the 1930s and '40s. It has been closed since 1997 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Hall-of-Famer Larry Doby played baseball and football at Hinchliffe for Paterson's East Side High School. Doby was scouted at the stadium before going on to break the American League's color barrier with the Cleveland Indians in July 1947.

The National Park Service put Hinchliffe on the national register on March 22, 2004 after it was one of five sites listed on New Jersey Register of Historic Places in February. Successful applications for state historic listing are automatically forwarded to the Park Service, and those sites are all but assured of listing on the national register.

"Hinchliffe can be said to have hosted some of the most prodigious baseball in America," Flavia Alaya, a cultural historian and Paterson resident, wrote in Hinchliffe's application for historic listing. "This significance resonates not just in local and regional or even national sports history, but in national social history, given the enormous social significance both of sports and of the racial segregation of sports at the time."