Bicentennial Park (Allentown)

The ballpark opened in 1939 as Fairview Field, home to the Allentown Dukes, a Boston Braves Minor League farm team. The Dukes, a founding member of the Interstate League, won both the regular-season pennant and defeated the Sunbury Senators in the playoffs.[4] The 1939 Dukes featured future Major League Baseball players Joe Antolick, George Hennessey, and Tony Parisse.[5]

The following year, the Dukes were replaced by the Allentown Fleetwings, which were affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals.

In 1941, the team as taken over by the Philadelphia Phillies and renamed again, as the Allentown Wings; they reverted to the Cardinals in 1944 and played their final season at Fairview in 1947. Allentown played for the Interstate League title three times in four years, in 1944, 1945 and 1947, but lost each time. The team moved to Breadon Field, a new ballpark just north of the city in Whitehall Township, on August 6, 1948 after playing on the road until then due to construction delays.[6][7]

Fairview Field was renovated in the mid-1970s and reopened as Bicentennial Park in 1976 for use as a softball field. The renovation effort was led by Earl F. Hunsicker who raised an estimated $1,400,000 over an 11-year period, aided by Mayor Joseph S. Daddona and the Allentown Recreation Commission.[8]

After the Eastern League's Allentown Red Sox played their final season in 1960, the city was without pro ball until the Allentown Ambassadors of the independent Northeast League arrived in 1997.

Dwindling attendance, hurt by increasingly poor on-field performance, led owner Peter Karoly to fold the Allentown Red Sox shortly before the 2004 season; the franchise wound up as a travel team for a year (as the Northeast League Aces) before becoming the Worcester Tornadoes in 2005. Over its six seasons, twenty-one MLB players played for or managed the Ambassadors, including Ed Ott, Luis Andujar, Kim Batiste, Scott Bullett, Brian Drahman, Angelo Encarnacion, Mike Figga, Jason McDonald, Darryl Motley, and Brad Pennington.

From 2006 through 2009, Bicentennial Park returned to a softball configuration, hosting the Philadelphia Force of National Pro Fastpitch professional women's softball league.

In 2009, a controversy emerged over the land the stadium sits upon. LANta, which at the time owned 0.2 acres of the property extending from the left field parking lot to the left field base line, announced plans to build a new garage using federal stimulus money and later expand the site and buy the remaining property the stadium sits on from the city of Allentown.[9] The plan, which would result in the demolition of the stadium, ran into opposition from the family of Earl Hunsicker as well as owner Terry Schadler, who tied up the proposal in the Allentown City Council.

After a four-year lease renewal was awarded by City Council to new stadium owner Dylan Dando in 2016, the matter was resolved in 2017. The property was returned from LANta to the City of Allentown in exchange for existing adjacent land, which had been vacant and used for stadium parking and which LANta intends to use for expansion of their existing facility near the stadium and allows for the stadium to remain open.[10][11]