Wayback Houston: Buffalo Stadium
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Busch Stadium, formerly Buffalo Stadium, in 1959. Photo: Ray Covey/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
For our newsletter's Wayback Houston series this week, we asked readers to identify what now occupies the land where a storied Houston baseball stadium once stood.
- And the answer is ... nothing! Well, for now.
The intrigue: What was once the home of the former Houston Buffaloes baseball team is currently an empty field with big plans for its future.
- The site is located in southeast Houston at the intersection of Interstate 45 and Cullen Boulevard.
Driving the news: Four of our Axios Houston readers — Steven R., Thor L., Alan H. and Joshua D. — correctly identified the prevailing feature in the 1944 aerial photo as Buffalo Stadium, where the team played until 1961.
Flashback: The Buffaloes' roots date back to 1888 as baseball, which was mostly popular in the Northeast at the time, headed west.
- Houston was heavily segregated then and had a Black baseball team called the Houston Monarchs, which later changed monikers to the Black Buffaloes.
Zoom in: The Buffaloes played in several ballparks across town before the St. Louis Cardinals, which had partial ownership of the team, in 1928 spent $400,000 for the 14,000-seat Buffalo Stadium.
- The Black Buffaloes primarily played at the 1,500-seat Monarch Stadium in Fifth Ward and were allowed to rent out Buffalo Stadium on weekends only when the Buffaloes were out of town.
- Other Black teams, like the relocated Black Eagles from New Jersey in the 1940s, also played there until the Negro league dissolved in 1948.
Buffalo Stadium was home of the Buffaloes until 1961, when the Houston Sports Association purchased the team to secure exclusive baseball rights for MLB's new expansion team.
- The stadium was purchased and demolished by Houston furniture magnate Sammy Finger in 1963, who then opened Finger Furniture on the site until it closed shop in 2012. The building was demolished around 2020, and the site is now a vacant lot.
Yes, but: Some of our readers guessed the 1944 photo depicted the former Colt .45's stadium, which was a similar-looking but completely different ballpark built where NRG Stadium now stands.
- Houston was one of two cities to land MLB expansion teams in 1962. Colt Stadium was the MLB team's home from 1962 until 1965, when the Harris County Domed Stadium opened next door and the team rebranded to the Astros.
What's next: Lovett Commercial, a Houston developer, has plans for new retail space on the former Buffalo Stadium site.