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polo in the big apple

Manhattan is the birthplace of American polo. Herbert Spencer reflects on the sport’s glory days in New York City

Today when New Yorkers want to take in a polo match, they must travel out to clubs on Long Island or in Connecticut. Not so in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the game was played both on grass and in indoor arenas in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. New York City can proudly lay claim to being the birthplace of American polo.

The sport, already being played in other countries from India to Argentina, was unknown in the USA before 1876. In the summer of 1875, the wealthy New York publisher and sportsman James Gordon Bennett watched matches at London’s Hurlingham Club and fell in love with the game. He brought sticks, balls and Hurlingham’s new Rules of Poloback home with him. In the winter of 1876, not content to wait for the snow to melt to allow playing on grass, he staged America’s first polo match indoors, right in the heart of Manhattan.

That exhibition at Dinkel’s Riding Academy at Fifth Avenue and East 39th Street was not only the first polo match in the USA, but also the first played indoors anywhere in the world; a forerunner of the arena version that became popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The country’s first polo match on grass the following summer was at Jerome Race Track in the Bronx.

In the late 1870s the Manhattan Polo Association built its City Polo Ground just outside the northeast corner of Central Park between Fifth Avenue and Sixth (now Lenox Avenue), at East 110th Street. By 1880, however, baseball had replaced polo there, although a succession of baseball stadiums continued to be known as the Polo Ground. Thereafter polo on grass was played instead in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

Meanwhile the indoor game also flourished in the city, at venues like the Squadron A Armoury at Madison Avenue and 95th Street and the Squadron C Armoury in Brooklyn. These fortress-like military establishments with their vast indoor ménages for cavalrymen were perfectly suited to arena polo. During the 1920s and 1930s, championships of the Indoor Polo Association of America saw triumphs of city teams like Squadron A, New York Athletic Club and NY Riding Club.

There are few physical reminders left of the Big Apple’s glory days of polo. The Polo Ground is gone, and its name lives on more in connection with baseball. Jerome Race Track has long been replaced by a city reservoir. Only the spectacular façade of the Squadron A Armoury remains. Other sports are played in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, but not polo.

If you explore the archives of the New York Times, however, you will discover just how seriously New Yorkers took the sport for more than half a century – from the 1870s through the 1930s. During that time polo stories appeared regularly on the sports pages, rather than the social pages as they do now. ‘I Love New York’ could be paraphrased for that bygone era to read: ‘New Yorkers Love Polo’.