I have often wondered about this ballpark and its actual location. It's almost invariably described as being at "Lafayette & Helen," but I've never been able to find a map that shows precisely where it stood [[it doesn't show on any of the Sanborn maps of the period), and I don't believe that any pictures of it exist.

A lot of my father's family are from that general neighborhood, and my grand-mother and great-grand-mother were both born nearby. I actually went to middle school a couple of blocks away from there, and being a kid fascinated with baseball history back then, walked around there a couple of times looking for the possible location of the ballpark. But I've never been able to gather any serious evidence of the place's actual location. All I really have is my grandfather's remembrance of his father telling him about going to ballgames on the Boulevard not far from Belle Isle. Of course, the big deal at the time was that the ballpark was built outside the city limits so that you could watch baseball, and drink beer, on Sundays.

Looking at that area more recently, the factory on the southwest corner of Lafayette and Helen, between Helen and Canton, was for a very long time the Gray Marine Engine works. I had a great-uncle who worked there for many years. Looking back at older reference materials, the building also seems to have been used by the Peninsular Screw Co., and perhaps the short-lived Northern Motor Car Co. The buildings facing Canton seem to date back before 1910, since they show on a 1910 Sanborn. These buildings are still in use as a storage facility. I've been in there a few times, and they do appear to be quite old factory buildings of wood frame construction.

Older maps show the Helen & Lafayette corner portion of this site as occupied by the car barns of the Fort Wayne & Elmwood streetcar co. But these appear to have been torn down some time around 1900.

On the northwest corner is the Indian Village laundry and dry cleaning plant that my grandmother worked at as a young person. The building behind it, at the corner of Lafayette and Canton, appears from Sanborn circa 1910 - 1915 as having been the Massnick-Phipps Engine factory. Later it was F.L. Jacobs, an auto parts company that also built washing machines and vending machines. It was built between 1900 and 1910.

The southeast corner appears to have been always occupied by residences and small shops. My father got his haircuts from a barber in this block for a very long time [[well into the 1980s). That guy had pictures in his shop of the building from the 1920s or even earlier.

However, I have always assumed, for lack of better evidence, that the ballpark stood on the northwest corner of Lafayette and Helen, between Helen and Grand Boulevard. This is mostly because the place was called Boulevard Park and my grandfather's second-hand reminiscences placed the ballpark within sight of the Boulevard. That block appears empty on older maps, and doesn't appear at all in the 1897 Sanborn. In 1901 the present-day Church of the Messiah was moved to that site from downtown, meaning that it was most likely empty at the time.

Could that have been because the baseball team had by then moved to Bennett Park at Michigan and Trumbull? Years ago I had good friends who were involved with Church of the Messiah and questioned them about this, but from their searches apparently their archives give no indication of the previous use of the land the church sits on. Just that the Episcopal Diocese bought the land in 1900 [[although it is unclear from whom) and moved the church there shortly thereafter.

I'm sure there's someone out there who knows more than me about this ballpark, which seems to be one of the most obscure parts of Detroit's baseball history. I'd certainly love to find out anything I can.