Wrigley Field was built at this location in 1925 by chewing gum magnate William Wrigley as a baseball park. Over the next 40 years, the 21,000-seat stadium was home to minor and major league baseball teams, football games, boxing matches, and musical concerts, and it also served as a popular backdrop for film and television shows. On May 26, 1963, three months before the famous March on Washington, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed one of the country's largest civil rights rallies here, then known as the Los Angeles Freedom Rally, before a crowd of over 40,000 as part of a full day of support for racial equality in Los Angeles. The original ballpark was demolished in 1969, and a community health facility and park now occupy the site. The park was named after Gilbert W. Lindsay, the first African American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and the baseball diamond was named Wrigley Field in honor of the legacy of the historic ballpark.
