The baseball nuts in the crowd are going to find this fascinating.
Griffith Stadium off of Florida Ave. NW was where the old Washington Senators used to play baseball, and they were decent in the 1920s, but by the time the team was to move to Minnesota in the 1960s, they were pretty horrible. “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League” went the unofficial motto of our ball club, penned by Charles Dryden.
Clark Griffith, legendary owner of the Washington Senators died in 1955 and control of the team passed into the hands of his nephew, Calvin Griffith. And so began the march to Major League Baseball abandoning Washington twice over a decade, leaving the city without a team to call its own for three decades.
So, below is the document that baseball history nuts will find interesting. It’s the lease requirements for a new baseball stadium in D.C. Click on it for some fascinating details.
The stadium that eventually came out of these requirements was D.C. Stadium, which opened in October 1961. Within a year of opening, it hosted JFK throwing the first pitch at the 1962 All-Star Game before a crowd of 45,480.
Source: Discover DC History