Tip-Top your hats to the historians

I've always been intrigued by Forgotten-NY's post about the remnant of a former Brooklyn Dodgers ballpark in the borough, the ballpark they used before Ebbets came along. Curious, I'd long had it in the back of my mind one day to seek out the wall that was said to have been part of Washington Park and see it for myself.

But now, it appears that the wall was not part of the ballpark when the Dodgers played there, though it came to be for the brief 1914-15 existence of the Federal League as home to the Brooklyn Tip-Tops. And, it turns out, it was modeled on Wrigley Field. This brings another level of intrigue, I think, in that it joins Wrigley as the only structures remaining that not only hosted Federal League games (a distinction the Brooklyn wall held even when it was believed to have been there in 1912), but that were built specifically for the upstart circuit.