Metropolitan Park (New York City) Metropolitan Park (New York City) Metropolitan Park is a former baseball ground located in East Harlem, Manhattan, New York. The ground was the part-time home to the New York Metropolitans of the American Association in 1884. The wooden ballpark was built a few blocks east and south from their first home, the original Polo Grounds, on a piece of land bounded by 109th Street (north), the East River (east), 107th Street (south), and First Avenue (west). The Mets played their first game at Metropolitan Park on May 13, 1884, amid a degree of publicity. However, the field proved unsatisfactory and
New York City dominated by Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish and German immigrants. Several prominent American literary figures lived in New York during the 1830s and 1840s, including William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, John Keese, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Public-minded members of the contemporaneous business elite lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which in 1857 became the first landscaped park in an American city. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, of whom over 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, upwards of a quarter of