Normal Park is the name of a former football field in Chicago, Illinois. It was on Racine Avenue between 61st and 62nd Streets, extending to Throop Street. Normal Avenue (or Normal Boulevard) is also sometimes given as one of its bordering streets, although Normal Avenue (500W)is about 7 blocks east of Racine (1200W), at least under the current city grid configuration.
Normal Park was the home of the Chicago Cardinals, who started out as the "Morgan Athletic Club" in 1898 and changed their name to "Racine Normals" after they began playing at the field.
Soon after, they became the "Racine Cardinals". According to legend, they assumed that nickname upon acquiring some reddish hand-me-down jerseys from the University of Chicago football team, the Maroons.
The Cardinals joined the new American Professional Football Association (soon renamed the National Football League) and continued to use Normal Park as their home field for several years and continue to be called the Racine Cardinals for a while. They changed their name again, to "Chicago Cardinals", to avoid confusion after the National Football League fielded a team in Racine, Wisconsin.
Starting in 1922, they split time between Normal Park and Comiskey Park before finally abandoning the old field in the late 1920s. The park no longer exists.
Famous quotes containing the words normal and/or park:
“A few ideas seem to be agreed upon. Help none but those who help themselves. Educate only at schools which provide in some form for industrial education. These two points should be insisted upon. Let the normal instruction be that men must earn their own living, and that by the labor of their hands as far as may be. This is the gospel of salvation for the colored man. Let the labor not be servile, but in manly occupations like that of the carpenter, the farmer, and the blacksmith.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Therefore awake! make haste, I say,
And let us, without staying,
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the Park a-maying!”
—Unknown. Sister, Awake! (L. 9–12)