Red Wing Stadium
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Red Wing Stadium was primarily a baseball stadium and the home park of the International League Rochester Red Wings from 1929 through 1996. It was also the home of the New York Black Yankees for their 1948 Negro National League campaign. It was located at 500 Norton Street in Rochester, New York. It was torn down about a year after the last baseball game was played there on August 30, 1996. The Red Wings moved in to Frontier Field beginning with the 1997 baseball season.
It was renamed Silver Stadium in August 1968 in honor of Maurice E. "Morrie" Silver, a Rochester businessman who led a group of more than 7000 fans of the team that formed Rochester Community Baseball in the fall of 1956. The organization was formed to purchase the stadium and the Red Wings franchise from the major league parent St. Louis Cardinals, which kept the team in Rochester for the 1957 season and beyond.
The park was built in the middle of a thriving urban residential neighborhood, which like most suffered a decline in the latter half of the century. Plentiful parking for automobiles, not a huge concern at the time it was built, became an issue as more and more fans drove their cars to the ballpark. Major league baseball mandated changes to minor league ballparks in the 1990s to both upgrade the field of play and the facilities that the players used. Even though it was renovated in the mid-1980s, Silver was deficient in a number of these areas. Like most old ballparks of its era, it did not have any corporate luxury suites. Also, public sentiment in Rochester was in favor of building a new ballpark somewhere closer to the downtown area, with plenty of parking and access to expressways (though at various times proposals were made to build the new stadium in one of Rochester's suburbs, namely Greece, New York and Victor, New York). Silver Stadium was a much loved ballpark by most of the fans of the Red Wings but it was simply not well suited for minor league baseball in the 21st century.
[edit] References
Lloyd Johnson & Miles Wolff, editors The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball Durham (NC): Baseball America, Inc., 1997. ISBN 09637189975
