Rick's Love Child

Bush Stadium in downtown Indianapolis was built in 1931 as a field for Negro and minor-league baseball teams. Today, it’s a historical relic holding hundreds of rusting vehicles traded in under “cash for clunkers,” a spooky memorial to waste.

If you’re a fan of baseball movies, you’ve seen Bush Stadium. It stood in for Comiskey Park in the movie Eight Men Out. In its heyday, it resembled a minature Wrigley Field, with ivy-covered outfield walls and an Art Deco stone entry. It’s been vacant since 1996, left to rot by an indifferent city that rented it to junkyards needing someplace to park vehicles trashed in 2009 during cash for clunkers. More recent photos show the herd has thinned, but hundreds of derelict vehicles remain in a slow-motion race of decay from the elements.

Preservationists have for years sought some way of saving Bush Stadium, which appears on the National Register of Historic Places. But despite several proposals, some as recently as October, it appears the stadium will go the way of the vehicles on its infield, scrapped before being used to its fullest.





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