O’Rourke House Demolished in Bridgeport

For years the empty house stood alone in a vast vacant expanse of land visible from the Connecticut Turnpike. It had been built in 1891 for the city’s only member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, James O’ Rourke (1850-1919). The first man to get a hit in National League history, in 1876, O’Rourke continued to play baseball into his 50s, appearing in his last major league game in 1904 at the age of 54 and in a minor league game at age 60.

A local group of baseball enthusiasts, called The First Hit, Inc., tried to make the house a museum to O’Rourke. They commissioned plans showing display areas on the ground floor and a caretaker’s apartment above, but couldn’t raise the money or get control of the site, which was located in the middle of a prime redevelopment site.

A maritime community in the 19^th century, the neighborhood is generally known as Steel Point in honor of a steel mill once located there. Since the early 1990s the area has been the subject of several redevelopment schemes variously called Harbour Place, Harbour Pointe, Steel Point and Steel Pointe Harbor. None of the proposals ever seemed to go anywhere, so the city cleared the entire site, hoping that vacant land would prove more enticing. However, the historic buildings could have been the raw material for a new and attractive development.

When only the O’Rourke house remained, it seemed inconceivable that with so much open land a new development couldn’t be designed around one little house, but officials insisted that the site be totally clear, and so on June 15 O’Rourke’s house finally came down.

Steel Point’s current developer, Bob Christoph Sr., has pledged $50,000 toward a life-sized statue of O’Rourke to be erected at Harbor Yard, Bridgeport’s baseball stadium.