Jersey City Times: West Side Ballpark: A Forgotten Field of Baseball, Boxing and Football Dreams

West Side Ballpark: A Forgotten Field of Baseball, Boxing and Football Dreams 

This is the sixth in a weekly series of essays on Jersey City’s illustrious sports history. It complements the Museum of Jersey City History’s current exhibit Legendary Arenas… and the Legends Who Performed There at the Apple Tree House (298 Academy Street). The exhibit is open to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 1:00 to 5:00 pm. until October 15.

by Peter Begans

August 15, 2025

In 1906 Jersey City built a new home for the Skeeters down on West Side Avenue in an area where celery farms and hothouses had pre-dominated for nearly a century.

Creation of Lincoln Park forced the Jersey City Skeeters to find a new home in 1906. They located it a mile down West Side Avenue in an area long reserved for celery farms and hothouses. The new West Side Ballpark, built by the city between Culver and Audubon avenues, accommodated 8,500 fans for baseball and 15,000 for boxing. It was convenient to trolley lines and the CNJ’s West Side railroad station. 

The Jersey City Skeeters would never replicate their amazing success of 1903, but they still produced noteworthy players and memorable stories. 

The Skeeters were part of the Eastern League until 1911 and then the International League from 1912 to 1915. The club’s play was reliably mediocre, and in 1915 the cash-strapped owners forfeited the franchise. The International League ran the team for a season and then sold it to new owners who moved the club to Newark. But in 1918. a re-constituted International League again awarded a franchise to Jersey City. New owners tried to change the team’s nickname to the Colts, but Jersey City fans would not buy that departure from tradition, and the Skeeters name remained. In 1933, again under financial pressure, owners would move the Jersey City franchise to Syracuse.

One noteworthy Jersey City Skeeter was Manitoba-born right-handed pitcher Russell Ford. Ford joined Jersey City in 1909 and pioneered his nasty “emery ball.” Ford accessed the emery through a hole in his glove, and he would put a dime-sized abrasion on one side of the ball, which gave straight fastballs a wicked cut as they neared the plate. “The dizzy contortions the ball cut made me doubt my eyesight,” Ford wrote in the Sporting News in 1935. “I could see a distinct hop as the ball neared the batter, followed closely by a sideways sail…A double curve! Could any baseball pitcher dream of a sweeter thing than that?” After his year in Jersey City, Ford rode his emery ball innovation to become one of the American League’s top pitchers. Unfortunately for him, the emery ball was banned from baseball after the 1914 season. 

Ford’s innovative emery ball quickly vaulted him from the Skeeters to the Majors where he won 26 games in his rookie season for the NY Highlanders in 1910. .But after baseball banned his signature pitch in 1914, his results declined dramatically.

Olympic great Jim Thorpe became a Skeeter for several months in 1915. Thorpe played right field and usually batted second or third. He hit .303, with 13 doubles, seven triples, and two home runs in 370 at-bats for Jersey City, Newark, and Harrisburg that summer. (Statistics were not separately attributed to the teams.) 

 In the 1920s, Babe Ruth was no stranger to Jersey City’s West Side Ballpark. The Babe played against Jersey City teams with a barnstorming bunch of major leaguers in October, 1920. He and his Yankee teammates would also play exhibition games at West Side Ballpark against their top farm club, the Newark Bears. Wrote the Jersey Journal on May 3, 1926: “Ruth had a whole lot of fun during the course of the afternoon and gave an assemblage of 13,000 fans, one of the largest crowds that has ever jammed its way into the West Side Avenue park, quite a few thrills…”

The site was also an excellent place for outdoor boxing before Boyle’s Thirty Acres was built. On July 19, 1918, Joe Jeanette, former World Colored Heavyweight Champion, was defeated by Kid Norfolk, who also fought for the Colored title several times. Both were among the top fighters during boxing’s segregated era. 

The most important fight staged at West Side Ballpark involved Georges Carpentier against World Light Heavyweight Champion “Battling” Levinsky of Philadelphia on October 12, 1920. By beating Levinsky, who had held the title for four years against 59 challenges, Carpentier qualified to fight Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship the following summer at Boyle’s Thirty Acres. 

Georges Carpentier defeated light heavyweight champ “Battling” Levinsky in 1920 at West Side Ballpark to earn a shot at heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey the following summer.  That title fight would also be held in Jersey City, at Boyle’s Thirty Acres.  

The Carpentier–Levinsky fight had attracted a sold-out crowd of 15,000. Across the street, hundreds of spectators avoided the price of a ticket by watching from the roof of a scrap metal plant. Suddenly, the floor gave way, and 50 spectators plunged into the space below. Fifteen were rushed to Jersey City Hospital, with one of the victims in serious condition. The accident made the front page of the New York Times. 

West Side Ballpark was also the site of many high school football games, including the intense rivalry between Dickinson H.S. and St. Peter’s Prep. One of the greatest games in Jersey City history occurred in 1933 when the two teams faced off to decide the city and county titles. Prep took the early lead, but Dickinson rallied to produce a memorable 7–7 tie. Undefeated, once-tied St. Peter’s would be named state champion, and Dickinson, the previous season’s state champ, would be ranked fifth in the state despite several losses. 

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, St. Peter’s Prep and Dickinson High School fought for city, county and state football titles at Westside Ballpark.

Some of the Dickinson players who played at West Side Ballpark in the 1930s would make their names nationally. Ed Franco joined Vince Lombardi at Fordham as one of the Seven Blocks of Granite. Al Barabas would score the only touchdown in Columbia University’s rain-soaked upset of Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl. And when Catholic University faced the University of Mississippi in the 1936 Orange Bowl, it was Dickinson product Ferdie Rydzewski who scooped up a blocked punt and scored a touchdown from 20 yards out. That was the winning margin in Catholic’s improbable 20–19 victory. 

The site of the West Side Ballpark is now the College Towers apartment cooperative.  

Peter Begans

Peter Begans is the curator of MJCH’s Legendary Arenas… and the Legends Who Performed There. He was born and raised in Jersey City and has had a long career as a teacher, journalist, speechwriter and public affairs representative.