Past and Present: Polo Fields in Prospect Park

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

The first polo game played in Prospect Park took place on June 11, 1879. It was between the Westchester Polo Club and a club from Queens. Up until that day, the sport of polo had a totally different meaning to Brooklyn’s sports lovers. “Polo” meant ice polo, a game we now call hockey. It had been played in Brooklyn for several years, inaugurated by the Crescent Athletic Club, and other well-to-do sports clubs. They played in the Clermont Rink in Fort Greene, playing clubs from local colleges like Yale and Columbia, as well as other sports clubs.

As Brooklyn was getting richer, so too were her sports. Polo, the game with horses, had been played in Persia for centuries. A version of it traveled to the east, and was in play for hundreds of years in India, before it was encountered by bored aristocratic British officers stationed in that country, in the middle of the 19th century. Two British soldiers started a polo club to introduce the sport to their countrymen, and the game took off and has been popular ever since. It’s basically football on horses.

It’s a team sport, with two teams vying to knock a ball with a mallet through their goal. The other team attempts to capture the ball, turn the game around to the other goal, and do the same, scoring points. It’s a game of skill involving teamwork, moving the ball, maneuvering a fast moving horse, and managing not to hurt yourself or the horse. Team players dress in bright team silks, tight pants, and tall boots. Who could resist?

Polo was called “the Game of Kings” in the Middle East, and has always been a rich man’s sport, for obvious reasons, and so it should come as no surprise that polo in Park Slope was imported from the country clubs of Westchester, by way of Newport, Rhode Island. The game came first to Newport, with English aristocracy bringing to an American aristocracy a game they eagerly embraced. The Brooklyn polo grounds were created in Prospect Park’s Parade Grounds by the Westchester Country Club for their play; their home away from home.

The Brooklyn Eagle announced polo’s arrival in 1879, with an article describing the sport for a readership that was unfamiliar with the game or its accoutrements. Polo was, as the article explained, “not a game that the ‘poor and lowly’ can indulge in; it is for the ‘regular patricians’ of Metropolitan life only; the fellows who have well filled purses and leisure time at command, and who can join coaching clubs and ride with the hounds after scented bags, and all that sort of thing.” The article goes on to voice the complaints of everyday Brooklynites who saw their baseball fields in the Parade Grounds given over to rich boys and their sports, to the detriment of the working lads who had very little time to play, but liked to get in a game, especially on Saturdays. The polo grounds took out the outfields of ten of the thirteen baseball fields in the parade grounds, three days a week.

The polo players, of course, had friends in high places, They were the sons of those high places, so the working man’s complaints fell on deaf ears, and soon the Eagle had joined in the celebration, gushing over the star players, their horses, and the game in general. By 1880, Brooklyn had its own polo team, the Brooklyn Polo Club, and was competing with country clubs, universities, and polo teams from the tri-state area. The games were reported on by both the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Times. The papers reported that the matches were getting more popular, even with those not wealthy, and the crowds of spectators were growing.

The period photographs, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, show polo teams in play, and spectators at the Parade Grounds on a summer day in 1895. The Parade Grounds were a perfect place for polo, with a huge, flat field of play, and plenty of room for spectators. It was difficult to even find literature pertaining to polo in Brooklyn, outside of scores in the papers, so I don’t know when the team disbanded, or when polo was no longer played at the Parade Grounds. Young men with money and leisure time would soon move on. First to bicycles, then to automobiles, and the love affair with cars has never ended. However, if someone brought back polo to Prospect Park, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. GMAP