A wooden ballpark seating roughly ten thousand, one of the few parks in the country built expressly for a Black professional baseball team. Its defining feature was left field: a brick streetcar car barn stood only about 269 feet from home plate, and the left-field wall was built hard against it, giving the park a famously short porch. The grandstand wrapped the infield in the manner of the small commercial ballparks of the era.
The St. Louis Stars of the Negro National League built Stars Park in the middle of the 1922 season as their home ground, at Compton and Laclede Avenues — one of the few ballparks in the country put up specifically for a Black professional team. The Stars, who had grown out of the earlier St. Louis Giants, fielded some of the greatest players in Negro league history, among them the future Hall of Famers James "Cool Papa" Bell, George "Mule" Suttles, and Willie Wells, and won league pennants in 1928, 1930, and 1931. The park made a virtue of its cramped left field: balls hit over the trolley car barn were ruled ground-rule doubles. On September 2, 1930, it received the first permanent lights for night baseball in St. Louis. When the Stars disbanded after the 1931 season the park was torn down, and the city later used the ground as a playground. The site is now the baseball field of Harris-Stowe State University, which rededicated it as Stars Park in 2021 with a monument to the team.
