From 1898 to 1900 Tucson Street Railway ran a line from the Southern Pacific depot to the University of Arizona campus via Congress, Stone and 3rd Streets with a branch line west on Pennington. Service was expanded around 1900 via South 4th Avenue and 17th Street to Carrillo Gardens, location of today's Carrillo School. This site, renamed Elysian Grove 1902 was a 25 acre park noted for its floral displays, amusement park and man made lake.
It would seem Elysian Grove also was a 'ballpark' (webmaster)
At least thirty times old-timers who were there have told me the story of the game at the Elysian Grove ball park on the Sunday afternoon when the third and deciding game of the series was played (about 1903). I had been told the story by my dad once when I asked him about it, but Tax Shelton and others have made it sound much more glamorous and exciting.
The old Elysian Grove was located only a block from our Main Street home, and with the passing of the Grove, which my father operated, we had no interests in that part of town, except for the Mexican kids whom I was crazy about. For several years I would come back and fly kites, play marbles and visit in their homes.
: Old Main Street was quite a thoroughfare in its day. It was very wide and eventually the streetcar line was extended to run down Main from 17th Street to Congress Street.
While my dad operated the Elysian Grove he always employed some type of musical group to play for the show productions or provide music at the beer garden as roving troubadours. These musicians were invariably Mexican. How they could play the old favorite numbers of those days, such as La Paloma, Quatro Milpas, La Golandrina and many more.
They were very fond of my dad, and many nights we were awakened at one or two o'clock by the gentle strains of the popular melodies of that time. The musicians would gather around my parents' bedroom window and serenade them for thirty or forty minutes as they were wandering home from the Grove.
Just prior to the closing of the Elysian Grove a film producer came to Tucson and worked out a lease with my dad and his partner for the old pavilion to be used as a studio for the production of moving pictures. The company, under the name of Chinese Six, also constructed a set for which they used hundreds of yards of white, lightweight canvas. One or two pictures were made at the Grove, but the company soon was having financial troubles which eventually caused them to default on their lease. My dad ended up with enough canvas to build a circus tent, so we kids made small tents of it and also used it as sleeping bags for our hiking and camping trips while we were Boy Scouts.
The man who lived across the street from us, George Adkinson, was a cattleman and owned the first automobile I ever saw. Its engine was under the front seat and had to be cranked from the side of the car. He and his family took Sunday drives, much to the envy of every kid on the block. And I think our parents were envious also. But our family was much too poor to afford an automobile, or for that matter even a horse and buggy.
Occasionally my dad borrowed or rented a buggy and took us for a drive along the Old Santa Cruz River, which used to run nearly year-round then. A favorite spot was Silverlake which was just a mile or so south of the Grove, along the Santa Cruz River. It was later washed out by one of those early-day floods and became only a pleasant memory.