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.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Babe Ruth
- · Hank Aaron
- · Jackie Robinson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Allard Plantation
New Orleans, LA
This land was once the Allard plantation, tied to some of colonial Louisiana's founding families. Purchased in the 1770s by Don Santiago Lorreins from the estate of Francisco Hery — called Duplanty, who built New Orleans's first Cabildo in 1769 — it passed to Louis Allard and, in 1845, to the philanthropist John McDonogh, who gave it to New Orleans in 1850. Like other Louisiana plantations of its era it was worked by enslaved laborers, and the tract later became the heart of the city's City Park.
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
New Orleans, LA
This memorial in downtown New Orleans honors the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who led the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His campaigns for voting rights, desegregation, and economic justice reshaped the American South before his assassination in 1968.
Place de Henriette Delille
New Orleans, LA
This spot in New Orleans honors Henriette Delille, a free woman of color born in the city's Creole community in the early 19th century. In 1842 she founded the Sisters of the Holy Family, a Catholic order of Black women who taught, nursed, and cared for the enslaved and elderly at a time when such work by African Americans was fiercely constrained. Her cause for sainthood has since made her one of the most celebrated figures of Afro-Creole New Orleans.
St. Louis Hotel & Slave Exchange
New Orleans, LA
The luxurious St. Louis Hotel operated here from 1838 to 1862, its domed rotunda ringed by a bank, ballroom, and trading exchange. Beneath that same dome, auctioneers sold land, goods, and thousands of enslaved men, women, and children — making this elegant space one of the largest slave markets in the antebellum South.