Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/114

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN Dickel's Riding Academy which stood at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. When the importation from India began to catch on with Bennett's crowd, they built a playing field at Jerome Park. But the park was too far out in that day and a new field was constructed at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. The polo crowd used it only occasionally and when the Giants were organized the team was able to rent the grounds for baseball. Within seven years the new elevated railway had so expanded the city that the polo ground was cut up into building lots and a third field built under Coogan's Bluff at Eighth Avenue and 155th Street, then the terminus of the "L." The Giants moved with the polo players and in a few more years the growth of organized baseball drove polo off its own field into the suburban reaches of Long Island, Westchester and Jersey.

Casey's reception on his debut made me appreciate that I had a parlor trick of sorts in him, but I never thought of using the poem regularly in the theater until the second season of "Wang", that of 1892–1893. We were playing over the same territory as the first season and I thought the show needed an added fillip. I tried Casey on an audience, found it what