Washington Park was the collective name for three successive Major League Baseball stadiums built on two adjacent sites in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, near the intersection of Third Street and Fourth Avenue. The grounds took their name from George Washington, whose Revolutionary War headquarters during the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn stood nearby. Baseball had touched the site as early as 1861, when the Brooklyn Atlantics played a novelty winter game on skates before an estimated 15,000 onlookers, but it was the wooden ballpark that hosted the Brooklyn Grays’ first home game on May 12, 1883 — a 13–6 victory over Trenton before roughly 6,000 fans — that put Washington Park firmly on the professional map.
Over the following three decades the site hosted three distinct incarnations of the stadium. The first served Brooklyn’s American Association and early National League clubs through 1891, when the team relocated; the second opened in 1898 and became the Dodgers’ home for fifteen seasons, with capacity growing from about 12,000 seats to roughly 16,000 by 1912. A third, steel-and-concrete version rose in 1914 for the Brooklyn Tip-Tops of the short-lived Federal League. The Brooklyn Edison electric company acquired the property in 1925 and razed the stands the following year, though a remnant of the left-field wall survived along Third Avenue and was preserved by local historians in 2002.
Stats at a Glance
- Teams: Brooklyn Grays / Bridegrooms / Superbas / Dodgers (NL); Brooklyn Tip-Tops (Federal League)
- Location: Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York
- First Home Game: May 12, 1883
- Final Season: 1915 (Federal League)
- Peak Capacity: About 16,000 (1912 expansion)
- Demolished: Stands razed 1926
- Named For: George Washington’s nearby 1776 Battle of Brooklyn headquarters
- Notable Remnant: Left-field wall preserved at a Con Edison yard on Third Avenue
Three Parks, One Legendary Address
The first Washington Park opened in 1883 as a modest wooden structure bounded by Third and Fifth Streets and Fourth and Fifth Avenues. It housed Brooklyn’s entry in the American Association before the franchise joined the National League, and a catastrophic fire in May 1889 forced a mid-season rebuild. After the club moved away in 1891, the site sat dormant until 1898, when a brand-new ballpark opened across the street. That second Washington Park greeted some 15,000 fans on April 30, 1898, and served as the principal home of the team the press increasingly called the ‘Dodgers’ — a nod to local pedestrians who dodged the trolley lines that ran past the outfield walls, giving the franchise its enduring nickname.
When the Dodgers departed for Ebbets Field in 1913, the Federal League’s Brooklyn Tip-Tops moved in and erected a third, modern stadium in steel and concrete in 1914. Observers noted the design closely resembled the Federal League park being built in Chicago that would eventually become Wrigley Field. The Tip-Tops folded with the league after the 1915 season, and the stadium fell into disuse before Edison leveled the grandstands in 1926.
Legacy and the Surviving Wall
Of the three parks that stood at Washington Park, only one tangible fragment endures: a stretch of the left-center field wall from the 1914 Federal League rebuild, which ran along Third Avenue and was incorporated into the Con Edison storage yard that replaced the stadium. By the late 1990s the wall faced demolition, but a coalition of baseball historians and community advocates secured its preservation in 2002, ensuring that at least one brick remnant of Brooklyn’s pre-Ebbets baseball history remained standing.
The site’s broader legacy lives on in the team that outgrew it. The ‘Trolley Dodgers’ name that crystallized at Washington Park traveled with the franchise through Ebbets Field, across the continent to Los Angeles, and into baseball immortality. The Old Stone House, a reconstructed Dutch colonial structure that once served as a clubhouse annex at the first Washington Park, still stands in J.J. Byrne Park a block away and today operates as a museum interpreting both the Revolutionary War battle and the stadium’s storied past.
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Washington Park FAQs
Why was it called Washington Park?
The grounds were named in honor of George Washington because the site was near the field headquarters he used during the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, one of the largest engagements of the American Revolutionary War.
Did the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Washington Park?
Yes. The team known variously as the Grays, Bridegrooms, Superbas, and eventually the Dodgers used the first Washington Park from 1883 to 1891 and the second from 1898 to 1912, when they moved to the newly built Ebbets Field.
Does anything remain of Washington Park today?
A section of the left-field wall from the 1914 Federal League stadium survives along Third Avenue in Brooklyn as part of a Con Edison facility. Local historians saved it from demolition in 2002, and it stands as the last physical remnant of the historic ballpark complex.
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Photo: unknown photographer / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.