Hinchliffe is one of only two stadiums still standing that were used by the Negro Leagues.

PATERSON, N.J. (AP) – The concrete stands and walls are crumbling and covered in graffiti, the old locker room windows are shattered and weeds wind around the pitcher’s mound.

For 65 years, long before it fell into disrepair, Hinchliffe Stadium was home to the New York Black Yankees. Soon, shouts of “Play ball!” may echo again at the ballpark, one of only two left standing from the Negro Leagues.

The stadium was added last month to the National Register of Historic Places and is slated for a restoration project that will make it the centerpiece of a $25 million sports business academy.

“Hinchliffe can be said to have hosted some of the most prodigious baseball in America,” Flavia Alaya, a local historian, wrote in the application for the stadium’s historic listing. “This significance resonates not just in local and regional or even national sports history, but in national social history, given the enormous social significance both of sports and of the racial segregation of sports at the time.”

The 7,500-seat stadium was built for $240,000 in 1932 during the Great Depression. It was a public works project authorized by Mayor John V. Hinchliffe and was home to the Black Yankees in the 1930’s and 40’s.

Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and other black baseball legends played at Hinchliffe, which overlooks a bend in the Passaic River where Paterson’s Great Falls plunge 77 feet.

The water’s churning rumble, like the ghosts of cheering fans past, is audible from home plate on all but the river’s driest days.

“On Sundays, the ballpark would be full, black and white,” recalled Bob Scott, 74, who pitched and played first base for the Black Yankees. “It was great that they could associate with one another.”

Hall of Famer Larry Doby played baseball and football at Hinchliffe for Paterson’s East Side High School.

Doby was scouted at the stadium before going on to break the American League’s color barrier with the Cleveland Indians in 1947, shortly after Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first black major league player.

Hinchliffe fell silent in 1997, when the last organized game (among high school teams) was played there.

The National Park Service’s listing of Hinchliffe on the national register in March gave it some protection against demolition or alteration.

That will not be an issue in Hinchliffe’s historically accurate restoration and incorporation into the sports academy, said Edwin Duroy, superintendent of Paterson’s public schools, which is spearheading the project.

“Every kid that’s housed at the academy will have a clear understanding of the history of the stadium,” Duroy said.

The entire project will be funded with state grant money and is expected to be completed over the next three years.

The other stadium remaining from the Negro Leagues is Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., according to Ray Doswell, curator of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo.

The home of the Birmingham Black Barons, which was built in 1910 and is believed to be the country’s oldest ballpark, was placed on the national register in 1993.

“I’m thrilled that someone would think about the Negro Leagues that played in those old ballparks,” Scott said. “It’s too bad that our young kids don’t know about American history. They need to know.”

Hinchliffe was designed by architect John Shaw, combining elements of classical architecture with the art deco style more clearly evident in his later design of an elementary school adjacent to Hinchliffe.

Alaya, a professor emeritus at Ramapo University and a member of the state Historic Sites Council, co-founded the Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium two years ago with Brian LoPinto, a sports TV production assistant who grew up near the ballpark and played there while in high school.

The two campaigned for Hinchliffe’s preservation and historic designation.

“It’s recognition of history on many levels,” Alaya said, the history of sport, of course; the social history of Paterson and many other areas that were using sport as a way of surviving the Depression; and of African-American history.”

AP-ES-04-23-04 2018EDT