Today, in conjunction with the Columbus Bicentennial, the subject here is two banner centuries in sports. More specifically, this is about the ground beneath our cleats, sneakers and skates. It attempts to chronicle — with a certain level of thoroughness, if not exhaustiveness — where Columbus played, and plays yet.

Along the way we shall run into a few old friends — some recognizable, some long forgotten, others who remain partly hidden in the shadows of time.

The beginnings of our city roughly coincide with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, a prevalent link in this case. As workers moved from the rural fields to urban factories, they organized and lobbied for shorter work weeks.

What was a “shorter” work week in the 1800s? According to the Economics History Association, Americans worked as many as 70 hours a week during the first half of the century. Federal surveys of manufacturing hours, conducted in 1880 and 1893, indicate the work week was down to 60 hours by the turn of the 20th century.

That might sound like the average American city-dweller went from indentured servitude to merely backbreaking overtime, but in the context of the period, it was a boon.

By the end of the Civil War, America was gripped with a sports craze that went well beyond the lawn games and equestrian pursuits of the upper classes. Columbus (population 31,274 in 1870) was a manufacturing center with its share of six-stein Joes, and those Joes now had more time on their hands, for sports and leisure.

National pastime

Baseball, the new American game that was pollinated by soldiers during the Civil War, flowered in peace. Columbus was fertile territory.

The Buckeye Baseball Club played its first game on April 6, 1866, on the grounds of the Franklin County Insane Asylum, at the corner of Broad Street and Parsons Avenue. Six other clubs were quickly formed, among them the Capitals, who played on the west side of South High Street, opposite Schiller Park — then known as City Park.

The Buckeyes’ first professional game, and the first pro baseball game played in Columbus, was staged at the Union Depot Field on April 25, 1876. Then, the field was between the depot and High Street. Now, it is the site of the Greater Columbus Convention Center.

The Buckeyes, trying to keep up with the famed Cincinnati Red Stockings, relocated to a better patch of land at Recreation Park in 1883. The site is now part of the I-70/71 interchange. So, the next time you are stuck in the east split, remember the park well, for it had one of the first grass infields in the country. It also was home to some legendary players, including Ed “Dummy” Dundon, a deaf player for whom umpires invented hand signs that are used to this day, and Patsy Cahill, who some have argued was the inspiration for the famed poem Casey at the Bat.

A second Recreation Park, in German Village, was among the most important patches of grass in Columbus history.

This was the place where Harry M. Stevens bought the rights to sell scorecards in 1887. He coined the phrase, “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” He also sold peanuts — and invented the sports concession. In 1901 or 1906 (depending on the historian), Stevens brought “red hot dachshund sausages” to the Polo Grounds and sold them during New York Giants games. He was the Henry Ford of hot dogs.

Recreation Park II also was the site of the first Ohio State home football game, played on Nov. 1, 1890. A commemorative sign is posted on Whittier Street to preserve the history. The park is now a parking lot for a Giant Eagle supermarket, where they sell organic vegetables, as well as red hot dachshund sausages.

Recreation Park II also holds an important place in early NFL history. It was among the sites for home games (rare as they were) for the Columbus Panhandles, who in 1920 played the first game in the history of the league. Alas, that game was held in Dayton, not German Village.

The Panhandles, who also played at Neil Park and Indianola Park, were managed by Columbus native Joe Carr, the NFL’s first president, who ran the league out of an office in the Hayden Building at 20 E. Broad Street until his death in 1939.

Western Park, at the corner of Parsons and Jenkins avenues, was home to the best Columbus team, the Senators, from 1896 to ’99. Hall of Famers Rube Waddell and Wahoo Sam Crawford played on these teams. One night in 1900, the grandstand was dismantled and moved, by streetcar, to a lot on the corner of Cleveland and Buckingham avenues. And so Neil Park was born, on the future site of the Kroger bakery. (Was this a trend? Were supermarkets stalking parks, waiting to move in on them?)

By 1904, Neil Park featured one of the first concrete-and-steel stadiums in the country, though the old grandstand was still used to handle large crowds. In 1917, however, at the Senators’ home opener, it collapsed, injuring dozens of spectators.

The most iconic ballpark in Columbus history is, of course, Red Bird Stadium — known in later incarnations as Jet, Franklin County and Cooper Stadium. St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon took advantage of Depression-era prices to build one of the best minor-league parks in America. It was made of the finest brick and California redwood, and it opened in 1932.

When one thinks of the present-day Cooper Stadium, one conjures the strange, spaceship-like quality of the current grandstand, which is awaiting conversion for use in an auto racing park. One ought to conjure the original structure, which came from the brain of Howard Dwight Smith, the same architect who designed Ohio Stadium and City Hall, among other iconic Columbus landmarks.

The Coop was once hailed as the best ballyard in the game. Over eight decades, more than 22.6 million fans crossed the turnstiles to watch minor-league and Negro League baseball.

Ohio’s pastime

Before the Horseshoe, there was Ohio Field (also known as University Field), which was at the corner of Woodruff and High. There, the Buckeyes played from 1898 to 1921. Today, a boulder, known as Harley’s Rock, with a plaque affixed, marks the ground.

One could say that the Coop and Ohio Field are among the most important athletic venues within city limits, past or present. Ohio Stadium has to be on the list, too, perhaps right at the top. The Fairgrounds Coliseum (known officially as the Ohio Expo Center Coliseum, and unofficially as “The Barn”) also rates.

The Fairgrounds Coliseum has been a workhorse since it opened in 1918. The Ohio State basketball team began playing there the next year and did so until St. John Arena opened in 1956 (except for three seasons during World War II). Before the Coliseum, the Buckeyes played in places such as the Goodale Avenue Auditorium and the Armory and Gymnasium on OSU’s campus.The Fairgrounds also housed the Columbus Athletic Supply team, which in 1937 was a founding member of the National Basketball League — the forerunner of the NBA. It has been a Mecca of high-school basketball, not to mention a way station for all manner of minor-league sports.

The Barn also was the city’s hockey incubator. The Columbus Chill, the last of four minor-league iterations, sold out 83 consecutive games in the 1990s and helped fertilize the idea that the town was ready for the NHL.

The Coop, Ohio Field, the Horseshoe, the Barn — when ticking off the most important venues within our city limits, one would have to add at least one high-school football stadium, or two. Channeling Chic Harley is a good way to do it.

Harley played his first East High football game at the second Recreation Park, in 1912. He played his last high-school game, and suffered his only high-school loss, against North High in 1914 at Ohio Field. Some years later, East’s field became known as “Harley Field” (it just received a beautiful new sign, re-marking it as such). Such was Harley’s legend.

He went on to play at the corner of High and Woodruff, where that plaque on the rock reads: “Site of Ohio Field (1903-21) where Charles W. “Chic” Harley, All-American halfback in 1916-17-19, performed those feats which made him an Ohio State football legend and sparked the public enthusiasm which led to the construction of Ohio Stadium.”

Harley Field in the Eastgate neighborhood and North’s Hagely Field on Arcadia Avenue remain as the most hallowed high-school gridirons in the city.

Hagely Field was designed by our old friend H.D. Smith and paid for with community bonds. It was the site of the first night game in Columbus high-school football history, in 1929, the birth year of Football Friday Night in Ohio.

Rolling greens, sweaty gyms

Columbus is littered with golf courses, but two of its undisputed grand dames are Scioto Country Club and Columbus Country Club. The great Donald Ross laid out Scioto, which is one of four courses nationwide to have played host to the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, the Ryder Cup and the U.S. Amateur. Bobby Jones won the Open there in 1926. Oh, and Jack Nicklaus took his lessons there.

Ross also laid out Columbus Country Club, which was founded in 1903 and is the oldest course in central Ohio. Bobby Nichols won the PGA there in 1964.

The great Robert Trent Jones Sr. laid out Raymond Memorial on the west side. It is among the best and most played municipal courses in the country.

The heart of the city’s boxing culture can be found in the Linden neighborhood, where Buster Douglas, Jerry Page and Hilmer Kenty (among others) learned their trade at the Windsor Terrace Recreation Center.

Kenty won the World Boxing Association lightweight championship in 1980. Page won Olympic gold four years later. Douglas shocked the world in Tokyo, where he knocked out Mike Tyson in 1990. Within a few years of Douglas winning the heavyweight title, the most coveted crown in all of sports, Windsor Terrace was gone and replaced by a new recreation center named for his mother, Lula Pearl Douglas, who died just before the Tyson fight.

The Douglas center is one of 30 recreation or community centers run by the Columbus Recreation and Parks Department, which has always put recreation first. The first parkland owned by the city was Livingston Park, which originally was a graveyard. The graves were moved (most to Greenlawn Cemetery) to make way for open space in 1885. Goodale, Schiller, Jefferson Avenue (now Thurber) and Franklin parks were added by the early 1900s.

Driving Park is worth mentioning, as well, though the current park mostly shares only a name with the place that made it famous. The Driving Park complex, which was located just south of Livingston Avenue on the east side, began as a horse track in the late 19th century and also served as a racetrack for those newfangled automobiles in the early 20th century. Barney Oldfield, the first legendary race-car driver, set world speed records at the track.

In 1910, in a 100-mile race at the park, Oldfield was defeated by Eddie Rickenbacker — who grew up just a few blocks down on Livingston. This victory began Rickenbacker’s rise to national fame. He went on to become America’s ace of aces as a fighter pilot in World War I, started his own auto-manufacturing company and bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (he put the bricks down at the Brickyard). Then, he resurrected Eastern Air Lines.

The track at Driving Park closed in 1925, was torn down and became the Driving Park neighborhood. The park at the east end of the neighborhood is one of 215 city parks on 10,000 acres.

So many places to play, and we have not even mentioned the bicycle racing of the early 1900s (Oldfield started on a bicycle), the roller-skating craze of the ’20s (the one-mile championship was held in Columbus) or the bowling alleys of the ’50s (one sprang up in every neighborhood). The decades since have seen crowds that jammed Scioto Downs to watch harness racing, legendary pickup basketball games at Poindexter Village and Weinland Park, packed courts at Whetstone Park during the tennis boom in the late ’70s and cars racing through the streets of Downtown for the Columbus 500 (can we resurrect that wicked-cool race?).

Our sports landscape has changed dramatically. The Lou Berliner Athletic Complex on the South Side, with its 32 fields, is the biggest softball complex in the country. At the same time, unofficially, there are now more soccer pitches in Columbus than baseball fields. Our city, once starved for a major indoor facility, now has two — Nationwide Arena and the Schottenstein Center — and a gorgeous new home for triple-A baseball, Huntington Park. Venerable St. John Arena is now an afterthought, and Cooper Stadium grows weeds.

The Shoe fits in a much bigger picture. We will take another snapshot 200 years hence.

marace@dispatch.com