Hinchliffe Stadium

Hinchliffe sits on top of the Great Falls of the Passaic, inside the historic district that later became a national park — the setting does the work most stadiums need a facade for. It opened on 8 July 1932, and the first professional football match, Silk City Bears against Elizabeth Pros, followed that September. The name honours John V. Hinchliffe, Paterson's mayor through the planning and construction years.

What set the ground apart came after the ribbon-cutting. Through the 1930s and into the 1940s it served as home ground for New York Black Yankees, with New York Cubans and Newark Eagles also playing there — three Negro Leagues clubs sharing one field, with the Colored Championship of the Nation decided here in 1933. Alongside the baseball, Paterson Panthers and other local sides — the Giants, the Nighthawks — brought football through the same gates, and midget car racing ran on the track through the 1930s, '40s and into the '50s.

The ground closed in 1997 once a sinkhole opened beneath it and the structure was judged unsafe. It stayed shut for 27 years. Reconstruction, costing roughly 100 million dollars, brought it back in 2023 — natural grass replaced by AstroTurf decades earlier had by then given way to synthetic turf again, and capacity settled at 7,500, down from the original 10,000. New Jersey Jackals now play there, alongside Eastside and Kennedy High School's teams — the same site, after a generation apart, back in daily use.