On April 28, 1896, baseball fans traveled in horse-drawn buggies to
watch the Detroit Tigers play their first baseball game at the site
on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues. Starting out as
Bennett Park, a wooden facility with trees growing in the outfield,
Tiger Stadium has played a central role in the lives of millions of
Detroiters and their families for more than a century. Bennett Park
was torn down and replaced by a concrete and steel structure named
Navin Field in 1912, was expanded and renamed Briggs Stadium in
1938, and finally was given the name Tiger Stadium in 1961.
Richard Bak traces the importance of the corner of Michigan and
Trumbull in the history of Detroit and its people. During the last
century, millions of fans have come to Michigan and Trumbull to
watch the Tigers' 7,800 home games, as well as to attend numerous
Other sporting, social, and civic events, including high school,
collegiate, and professional football games, prep and Negro league
baseball contests, political rallies, concerts, and boxing and
soccer matches.
A Place for Summer covers baseball in Detroit from its
beginnings in the 1850s through the Tigers' 1997 season, and offers
a history of Detroit's playing grounds before Bennett Park,
including the Woodward Avenue cricket grounds, the original Detroit
Athletic Club, Recreation and Boulevard parks, and the many places
where the Tigers played bootleg games on Sundays at the turn of the
century. Bak presents attendance records from the Tigers' Western
League days onward and a complete account of every opening day
since 1896. A chapter is dedicated to the football Panthers of the
1920s and their more enduring successor, the Lions, who playedat
Michigan and Trumbull through 1974.
A companion to the narrative history, almost two hundred rare
photographs capture the spirit of 140 years of baseball in Detroit,
from photographs of Detroit's nineteenth-century diamond pioneers,
to an eighteen-year-old Ty Cobb in his rookie year, to baseball's
first "stadium hug" on April 20, 1988, when more than a thousand
fans encircled Tiger Stadium. A Place for Summer furnishes a sense
of the relationship between the community, its teams, and the
various fields, parks, and stadiums that have served as common
ground for generations of Detroiters, especially timely in view of
the upcoming erection of a new stadium downtown.
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