Heinemann Park / Pelican Stadium
New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
Heinemann Park / Pelican Stadium. Home of New Orleans' first professional sports team, baseball's New Orleans Pelicans. The "Pels" played home games here from the park's construction in 1915 through its demolition in 1957. Negro league teams such as the Black Pelicans and the Creoles used this site for their home games as well. The stadium also hosted many Manor League Baseball spring training camps and exhibition games, which featured such legends as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson.
The Story
From 1915 to 1957, this ground held Heinemann Park, later Pelican Stadium, home of New Orleans' first professional sports team, the baseball Pelicans. Negro league clubs such as the Black Pelicans and Creoles also played their home games here, and the field hosted spring training and exhibitions featuring Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson. For four decades it was the heart of the city's baseball life.
Why it matters
It preserves the story of segregated and integrating American baseball, where Negro league stars and future Hall of Famers shared a single diamond.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
For the first half of the twentieth century, baseball was the great American common ground — and also a mirror of the country's divisions. From 1915 to 1957, this ground in New Orleans held a ballpark, first known as Heinemann Park and later as Pelican Stadium, and for those four decades it was the beating heart of the city's baseball life.
This was the era of the minor leagues as genuine local institutions. Long before television and interstate highways collapsed distances, a city's team was a source of daily identity, its games a summer ritual. The New Orleans Pelicans — affectionately the ‘Pels’ — gave the city its first professional sports team, and this was their home.
But the baseball of that age was also segregated baseball. White organized leagues and the Black teams of the Negro leagues played the same game under the same sun, often in the same ballparks, but almost never against one another. To understand what happened on this field, you have to hold both of those truths at once.
People & events
The Pelicans anchored the story here, playing their home games on this diamond from the park's construction until its demolition. For generations of New Orleanians, a summer evening meant this grandstand, this outfield, this team.
But the field was shared. Negro league clubs, including teams remembered as the Black Pelicans and the Creoles, used this same ground for their home games. That is a quietly powerful fact: in a segregated era, the physical stage of the city's baseball was one and the same, even as the leagues were kept apart. The same dirt, the same fences, two separate baseball worlds.
And then there were the visitors. The stadium hosted spring training camps and exhibition games that drew some of the towering names of the sport — Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson among them. Ruth belonged to the game's booming early decades; Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line in 1947; Aaron came up through Black baseball before his own historic major-league career. That such figures passed through this single New Orleans ballpark links it directly to the largest arcs of the game's history.
Its place in the American story
The story of American baseball in the twentieth century is, in large part, the story of a color line drawn and then broken — and this ground touched both sides of it. For decades the Negro leagues built their own institutions, stars, and loyal crowds precisely because the door to the white major and minor leagues was closed.
When that door finally opened, it changed the country as much as the sport. Jackie Robinson's arrival in the majors in 1947 became one of the signal moments of the era that would grow into the broader civil rights movement, and Hank Aaron's rise carried that story forward into the record books. A single field that hosted Black league teams and also welcomed players tied to integration stands at the exact seam where segregated baseball began to give way to something new.
That is why this is more than a local sports memory. It preserves the double history of a national pastime: the parallel world the Negro leagues sustained, and the slow, contested merging of American baseball into one game for everyone.
If you visit
There is no ballpark here to walk into now — the stadium came down in 1957 — and that absence is part of what makes a visit worth the pause. You are standing where four decades of a city's summers unfolded, where the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd were once as regular as the weather.
Let your imagination do the work the grandstand no longer can. Picture the same outfield hosting the Pelicans one day and the Black Pelicans or Creoles another; picture a spring-training crowd craning to see a legend take batting practice. The most moving thing about the site is how ordinary ground held such an outsized piece of the American story.
For a traveler tracing baseball history or the long road toward integration, this is a meaningful stop — a place to stand quietly, read the marker, and remember that the game's greatest changes did not happen only in the famous stadiums, but on home fields like this one.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Babe Ruth
- · Hank Aaron
- · Jackie Robinson
Themes & tags
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