Rickwood Field
- Payton Heyman
- Feb 12, 2018
- 2 min read
Rickwood Field, located at 1137 2nd Avenue West, was one of the most authentic looking places we went to on our trip.
This baseball stadium was featured in a film about Jackie Robinson called 42, doubling as both major and minor league parks from the era, and it is the oldest baseball park in the United States. Since the movie takes place in 1946, and the stadium was built in 1910, it was a perfect fit.
When I visited, there were several signs stating that the field was temporarily closed for repairs, so unfortunately most of my pictures were taken through the holes of a fence.
On one side of the stadium is an entrance that leads to both the field and the bleachers. For 42, however, the right wall was painted brown and a sign was placed above the opening that read “COLORED.”
On the back walls of the stadium surrounding the large black and white scoreboard, are signs and advertisements that were also changed to be relevant to the setting of the movie. A detail that I thought to be quite interesting was the fact that they changed a Budweiser sign that was placed on the far right end of the streak of advertisements with simply a different Budweiser sign that looked more like it was from the 1940s.
Using digital imagery, the filmmakers were able to recreate Ebbets Field, Shibe Park, The Polo Grounds, Crosley Field, and Forbes field as they appear in old photographs and blueprints of the different stadiums. Originally, Rickwood Field was only supposed to be used to recreate these old parks that no longer exist, but after Brian Helgeland (writer/director of 42) discovered that Jackie Robinson had actually played there against the Birmingham Black Barons in a 1945 Negro League game while he was apart of the Kansas City Monarchs, he decided to include Rickwood Field with only a few minor changes.
They also used Engel Stadium in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Comments