We took Greenleaf Park for granted as kids in The Acres, but it took some foresight, planning, and fundraising to make it happen. In 1967, the Greenleaf Park Civic Association put on a flea market to help fund two baseball fields, a play area, and a “reading site” behind the library.
There aren’t too many photos of those perpetually flooded dugouts at the now-gone “Friendly Field” there, but here’s one with the Sixteen Acres Lions team, circa 1970-71.
Here’s one of the outfield with Johnny Pesky and a couple of kids. You can see that the psychedelic Greenleaf Park sign is missing. I would love to have a photo of that.
In the background there are trees, but back then there were trees—and a vacant lot known by locals as Elsden’s Field, named after the Elsden family that lived on the corner of Frank Street and Kane Street. In the early- and mid-1970s it was the sometime hangout of a group of 20-30 teens that also called it “The Field” or “The Pine Tree.”
Here’s one with the Parker Street traffic in the background. The catcher is Danny Croteau, who was murdered in 1972.
The flea market story above refers to “the reading area under a large oak behind the new Sixteen Acres library.” That, of course, became the hangout of the notorious Circle Gang:
The newspaper story also mentions youngsters “clambering over the children’s train.” That structure was a series of gigantic cement pipes with big holes cut in them. I loved that “train” and spent hours climbing in and out of it. What I wouldn’t give for a photo of this contraption. I’ll bet anything the city had donated sewer pipes to make this “train cars.” There must be a photo somewhere—it would be my Holy Grail picture of childhood amusements.
One Baystate West photo I never published in this blog—back when it was a happening place.
Before Friendly’s on the Longwood end of Sumner Avenue there was Buckeys.
Check out these Springfield Civic Center concerts in for September through December of 1972: Bob Hope and the Golddigers, David Cassidy, Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Roberta Flack, Allman Brothers, Rod Stewart, Fifth Dimension, Carpenters, Johnny Cash, and Grand Funk Railroad. Not a bad autumn, music-wise, for Springfield. Read more about the days when the Civic Center rocked.
I stole these from one of the Springfield Facebook pages. (Boy, Morganetta is in this blog A LOT!) don’t think Morganetta was ever a part of the actual circus, but she used to walk in parades now and then, including random Sumner Avenue parades and the Fourth of July parade in The Acres.
Circuses like Barnum & Bailey, which stopped in 2017, went the way of the dinosaur. The Melba Shrine Circus gave up the ghost in 2019–I am confident that the coronavirus would have killed it in 2020 anyway. Circuses have been under fire for their treatment of elephants for years.
In the past the PETA website site had a few posts blasting the Melha Shrine Circus and used this photo of a hook being used on a baby elephant. I’m not sure this photo was from one of the West Springfield circuses, but a picture is worth a thousand words.
The circus dog shows were kind of cool, but that’s not going to fill an arena these days. I remember going to circuses in the Big E Coliseum and the Civic Center, and it was like Vaudeville or burlesque being brought back for an afternoon. Truth be told, when the circus came to Springfield, our parents got much more excited about it than we did. How they talked it up—and went on and on about the circus during the days leading up it. And then it was three hours of sitting on your ass feigning excitement. OK, the clowns piling out of the car was funny, but when you’ve seen it enough times and you know what’s coming—like a Harlem Globetrotters game—you outgrew it and it became a struggle to stifle the yawns.
Even the tigers jumping through flaming hoops, like the one in the 2017 Melha Shrine Circus above, bored me to tears.
As for clowns like the ones in a pie fight in a photo from the same circus—I recall a lot of fake laughter in the crowd. Everyone was SUPPOSED to laugh, so they did.
This painting really should have gone in the Really, Really Random Cathedral High School Stories post—only I don’t know the story behind the Cat High gym mural. Garrett McCarthy, an Acres guy from Pidgeon Drive who graduated from high school in 1979, painted it, and I remember seeing it in gym class my freshman year in 1977, so he must have painted it as a junior? Not bad!
This is the design he drew of the Forest Park trolley shelter (where a 1970 gang brawl ended in a stabbing death) for the former Springfield Institution for Savings annual bank calendar.
Garrett went to UMass—here is a scenic mural in one of the university’s dining commons.
As for the Cathedral Gym mural—well, YOU KNOW. Maybe it initially survived the 2011 tornado. Here is one of the gym walls. I’m not sure which wall the mural was on.
Then the school was leveled and replaced with Pope Francis High School. Fortunately, at least ONE photo of the mural survived. I wonder if there are larger, more high-density shots of it.
Garrett is an artist living in Henderson, NY, near Lake Ontario, with a winter studio in the Fort Knox area of Kentucky.
Here’s the view from STCC’s Top of Our City Conference Center. I took the photos at a conference. The STCC property is a lot larger than I thought it was and looks more like I college campus than I imagined. The structure sticking up on the horizon in the middle photo is the Our Lady of Hope bell tower in Hungry Hill. You can also see the tower plainly on the North End bridge coming into Springfield from the West Side.
I loved Main Music. Remember that giant Hendrix Band of Gypsys poster there? I wanted to buy that sucker but they wouldn’t sell it! Yes, I found one online. I should buy it:
I remember walking in Main Music once in 1984 and Whodini’s “Five Minutes of Funk” was playing. “Wow, this is GOOD!” I said. They kept playing more of the “Escape” album, so I bought it, of course.
My friend Craig Stewart bought the above button on the same trip to Main Music, and wore it often and proudly. I can’t believe I found that button on the web! On that affirmation, see you next month.