SPORTS

Sporting events had a central place in the leisure of Harlem's residents in the 1920s. Most took place on Saturday nights. College fraternities, lodges, YMCAs, YWCAs, churches, Sunday schools, public schools, and military units competed among themselves in athletics, bowling, and especially basketball. These contests largely, but not exclusively, featured men. Several girls’ and women’s basketball leagues did compete throughout the 1920s. Games took place in the gyms and halls attached to churches, the YMCA and YWCA, and the public schools; in the armory; and in dancehall.

Basketball games between athletic clubs affiliated with Harlem’s churches became popular enough in the early 1920s to require a larger venue than was available black Harlem, the Manhattan Casino, north of the neighborhood. Seeking to capitalize on that popularity, the white McMahon brothers established a black professional basketball team in 1922, to play at their venue, the Commonwealth Casino to the east of black Harlem. When that team failed to attract sufficient crowds and folded after two years, the New York Renaissance, or Rens, a black-run team that played at the Renaissance Ballroom in the heart of the neighborhood, became Harlem’s team, displacing the amateur athletic clubs. Playing white teams, which local amateur teams did not, in a commercial venue more accessible to white fans than the halls of black organizations, helped the Rens attract crowds of whites as well as blacks. They also took to the road to play around the country, competing against both black and white opponents. For more, see the blog post on basketball in 1920s Harlem.

Sunday afternoon was the time for cricket and baseball. The two sports had shared the same fields in Harlem, but those venues were no longer available by 1920, requiring players and spectators to travel further afield. Cricket was the sport of West Indians, played mostly at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, where by the late 1920s up to six games took place at the same time in front of small crowds. Games against touring teams from the West Indies, and against white teams, were played at venues with larger capacities such as New York Oval on East 145th St and the Harlem River, Innisfail Park and Starlight Park in the Bronx, and Dyckman Oval in Washington Heights, and attracted several thousand spectators. Such crowds were more typical at baseball games.

Harlem had its own black professional baseball team, the Lincoln Giants, controlled by a series of white owners. In the 1920s, watching the Giants required a long journey by subway to 177th Street and then a streetcar trip to get to the Catholic Protectory Oval, at East Tremont Avenue and Unionport Road in the Bronx. The team also played occasional games at other stadiums in Washington Heights and Upper Manhattan, and in the homes of white major league teams, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Thousands of blacks journeyed to watch baseball in the early 1920s, but crowds waned later in the decade as disputes bedeviled the Eastern Colored League in which the Lincoln Giants competed, the team enjoyed limited on-field success, and basketball grew in popularity in Harlem. As with basketball, professional baseball drew white spectators as well as black, around a quarter of the crowd in most estimates. They came particularly for contests between black and white teams, but also for Colored League games. For more, see the blog post on Harlem and baseball in the 1920s.

In the mid-1920s, as baseball drew smaller crowds, the Rens, the neighborhood’s professional basketball team, shifted its regular games from Saturday evenings to Sunday evenings. Promoters had hit on the idea of combining games with dances, a formula that made the team viable (and became a template followed by others organizing basketball games).