Freeway baseball

In these days you rarely see pickup baseball games. When I was a kid we played pickup baseball all the time. So did me Pops. In fact, he and his friends played a very rare type of pickup ball. They played it on the Lodge Freeway.

Not once it was open for traffic, of course. But when the Lodge was being built in the early 1950s it ran right alongside of the house he grew up in. When the roadway had been graded but not yet paved, he and his friends would go down on Sundays, set up bases, and play baseball on the Lodge.

A nearby bridge, the Warren Avenue bridge in fact, had already been completed. It overlooked their makeshift diamond. Pops said that every time the guys went down to play, a crowd would eventually form on the bridge (and also along the service drives in place) and watch the games, cheering the young men on as they pitched, hit, and took the field.

They were only able to do it for a few weeks one summer, until the freeway construction had progressed to where play was not possible. But boy, I bet that was a sight to see. It was exactly the sort of thing which happened when neighborhoods were neighborly.