Celtic Park (Queens)

About

Celtic Park was an athletic facility in Sunnyside, Queens, New York City, that operated from 1898 to 1930 as the home grounds of the Irish American Athletic Club (IAAC). Its members, drawn largely from Irish-American immigrants, won 26 gold, 22 silver, and 8 bronze medals for the United States at the Summer Olympics between 1900 and 1924, and Celtic Park hosted Amateur Athletic Union championships, including the 1912 All-Around championship, won by Jim Thorpe. A 1922 Volstead Act enforcement raid at a labor-union picnic on the grounds wounded four people by gunfire and contributed to the club's postwar decline.

After a brief late-1920s use as a greyhound-racing track, the field was sold in 1930 to the City and Suburban Homes Company and developed as the Celtic Park Apartments, a 756-unit garden-apartment complex bounded by 42nd to 44th Streets between 48th and 50th Avenues that straddles present-day Sunnyside and Woodside. The first apartment building, completed in 1931–32, was designed by Ernest Flagg; the five subsequent buildings, completed between 1933 and 1938, were designed by Springsteen & Goldhammer. The complex was converted to cooperative ownership in May 1986.