Riverfront Stadium

The name is shared with grander places — a Cincinnati bowl that held ten times as many people and came down in 2002, a Newark ground pulled apart in 2019 — but the Riverfront Stadium still standing is the small one in Waterloo, Iowa, and it has outlasted both.

It opened in 1946 as Municipal Stadium, a plain civic name for a plain civic purpose. What has passed through in the decades since is the argument for the place. The Waterloo Hawks played here. So did the Waterloo Diamonds. The University of Northern Iowa used the diamond for its college baseball until 2009, when that connection ended and the ground was left to its summer tenant.

That tenant is the Waterloo Bucks of the Northwoods League. The seating figure has held at 5,000 through all of it — enough that a good night feels like a sell-out crowd, small enough that the players hear it.

The surface is natural grass, as it was at the start. Waterloo kept what it had. The ballpark is still in use, still a standard diamond, still the one in town.