The forgotten confines

Home of the Cubs' glory days (last World Series win, for instance) is long gone and barely remembered. But a team of undaunted fans is about to remedy that.

By Louis R. Carlozo | TRIBUNE REPORTER

May 15, 2008

Mike Reischl, Chicago 10th District cop and chief of the Way Out in Left Field Society, understands if you're a die-hard Cubs fan but can't recall the Spuds, Orphans, Rainmakers, Trojans or Panamas—all former nicknames for Chicago's National League team.

But that you've never heard of West Side Grounds—where the Cubs and their variants played before Wrigley Field—gets him in a lather of near Lou Piniella proportions.

"If you go to the University of Pittsburgh, they have the original [Forbes Field] home plate on display," Reischl says. (It's in Posvar Hall, under Lucite.) Then his laugh morphs into a pro-West Side Grounds rant: "Well, we had four World Series occur here. Cap Anson had his 3,000th hit here to become the first player to get that many hits. Kid Nichols got his 300th win here. And we had the very first interurban World Series game here in 1906; New York didn't do it first, we did it first!

"And we've got this great location that no one knows about." Bordered by Wolcott Avenue (then Lincoln Street) and Polk, Wood and Taylor Streets, West Side Grounds stood as the Friendliest Confines of All—an old steel-and-wood park snugly seating 16,000 where the Cubs played their best baseball. Tinker to Evers to Chance ... 116 wins in a season ... back-to-back major-league titles. That kind of baseball.

The Cubs also hit and pitched there when they last won a World Series, in 1908, which is why Reischl can't believe nothing marks the spot: no statue, no bronze bat. Not even a visit from Ronnie "Woo Woo" Wickers.

"You'll see markers where certain Civil War generals had tea," says fellow Way-Outer Brian Bernardoni, 40, a governmental affairs director for the Chicago Association of Realtors and a Wrigley Field tour guide. "But history is also important to baseball fans."

"The Mall of America has the old home plate" of the Minnesota Twins, adds Reischl, 40. "They have a marker in Seattle where the Seattle Pilots played, for God's sake. How could we not have a marker on the West Side?"

Soon that will change. Perhaps as early as June 1, Reischl and Bernardoni—likely flanked by many of their 125 Society chums—will see a plaque mounted at the site of the old park, occupied by the University of Illinois at Chicago's medical campus. An exact monument site is in the works; Reischl and Bernardoni would like to see it placed at 912 S. Wood St., in or near a flower garden close to where the West Side Grounds center-field flag pole stood.

The pair raised $3,000 for the marker (they collected $5,300, with plans to donate the rest to a local Little League program), then got the landmark approval from the Illinois State Historical Society, an independent non-profit group. The Illinois Medical District also cooperated; as owners of the land where West Side Grounds once sat, they blessed Reischl and Bernardoni's efforts from the outset. The IMD also will make the ultimate decision where the marker will go, in part based on suggestions from the Way Out crew.

For Reischl and Bernardoni, the plaque will cap a nearly three-year joint odyssey to redeem lost Cubs history.

"Wrigley Field is considered such a cathedral of baseball and is so beautiful that people forgot," Reischl says. "But at West Side Grounds, you could see John McGraw and the New York Giants, Connie Mack and the Philadelphia A's in the 1910 World Series. Mordecai Brown going against Christy Mathewson: That's the pitching matchup of the era."

'Best in the world'

The story of West Side Grounds begins, like many a Cubs season, with a loss and a sense of the inevitable.

West Side Grounds opened May 14, 1893, replacing West Side Park at Congress, Loomis, Harrison and Throop. Built for $30,000, it was hailed by one Tribune scribe as "a fine new ballpark, perhaps the best in the world." The steel-and-wood structure had upper-deck box seats and open-air seating along the foul lines.

The park also presaged some of Chicago's baseball traditions. It was steps from a rail stop, now the Pink Line's Polk Street station.

Houses across the alley on Taylor Street erected rooftop stands to watch games. And like Wrigley today, West Side Grounds sat in a hopping area—where Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. and "Wizard of Oz" author L. Frank Baum called home.

Alas Cap Anson's Colts, as the Cubs were known, baptized the new digs in too-familiar fashion. They lost the home opener to the Cincinnati Reds—who rallied with four runs in the 9th to win 13-12.

"Chicago [blew] a grand chance yesterday to turn over a new leaf and let the black bottle of defeats hide itself behind cobwebs," lamented a Tribune reporter. (The player who scored the winning run? Charles Comiskey. As in Comiskey Park.)

The losing ways would not continue. Between 1906 and 1910, the Cubs made four World Series trips—winning back-to-back crowns, if you can imagine that, in 1907 and 1908. For the record: The Cubs' 6-1 win against the Detroit Tigers, on Oct. 11, 1908, marked the team's last home victory in a triumphant World Series.

'No betting allowed'

Compared with Wrigley, West Side Grounds was a more rowdy, earthy place. While today's Cubs fans get chided for tossing too many balls on the field, Grounds fans gambled so much the brass erected "No betting allowed" signs on the field. Overflow spectators sat on the turf.

"It was a tough place to see a game," Bernardoni says. "The capacity was 16,000, but if they let you sit in the field, they could [cram] in another 10,000."

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