Weird Island

59. CYCLEDROME: And the First New England NFL Champions

Episode Summary

In 1925, a massive bicycle racing track was built on North Main Street in Providence. Later that year, it would become home to the Providence Steam Roller, remembered today as New England’s first NFL Champions.

Episode Notes

Episode Source Material

Episode Transcription

There’s something magical about reading fantasy or science fiction. It feels like these genres unlock hidden worlds that you can imagine exist just beyond your understanding of the ordinary, the everyday. I like believing that something different exists that I just haven’t tapped into yet. But I might, at any moment. Like when I was 10, Harry Potter came out. And for a year I really thought that maybe it was real life masquerading as fiction, I would get my invite to Hogwarts when I turned 11, like Harry did, and I’d be brought into the fold of people who knew spells and wizards were real. My invite never came, but that year sure did feel magical.
Recently I’ve realized, it’s not just fantasy and science fiction that can help you unlock hidden worlds. History can, too, and the worlds you find–they were real, at one point. The place where today you see a Dunkin Donuts may have once been a train station, and before that maybe it was a school. Or a home. You can start peeling back layers of things that were, but no longer are, there.
I spend a lot of time on North Main Street in Providence. It’s where my gym is, and I’m constantly driving up and down the street, and running up and down the street, and sometimes carrying weights up and down the street. And North Main street has been so many different things. There’s one thing that really caught my attention, back when I was researching Drive In movie theaters. I read that where today the Ocean State Job Lot and Peter Pan bus terminal are, there was once one of the earliest Drive-In Theaters. Not just in the state, but in the country. And I thought, “How wild is it to picture a Drive-In here?” Because it’s just not anything like what’s there today. And then I started reading about the drive-in, and back when it was built, news stories noted how it would be placed on the site of the old Cycledrome. And I was like, “What is a Cycledrome?” As it turns out, it was a giant bicycle racing arena that could seat over 10K people, and frequently did, back when bike racing was a favorite summer sport.
I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I’m going to be telling you all about the largely forgotten Providence Cycledrome and this underdog sports team that played on a field that was nestled right in the center of the bicycle racing track.
Okay, so it’s June 3, 1925. It’s the roaring ‘20s, the economy is surging, there’s a new era of consumerism. F Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel “The Great Gatsby” was just published. Mount Rushmore will be dedicated later in the year. And the first Sears Roebuck store is about to open in Chicago.
And you’re in Providence, surrounded by 9,000 or so other people who are all dressed up and gathered together on a Tuesday night to witness the opening of an eagerly anticipated stadium. The newly built Providence Cycledrome. It’s the busiest North Main Street has been in years. The stadium is huge, possibly the largest bicycle track anywhere in the country, if newspaper accounts are to be trusted. One reporter will describe it as a mammoth bowl. It’s possible the length of the track is 5 laps to a mile, instead of 5 laps to a kilometer, like many other tracks at the time. So, the cyclists can be seen taking practice runs before the race, cruising around the wooden track with its steeply-banked ends in order to get used to its unusual proportions.
And then, after a rousing send off, the races and festivities begin. There are a number of events, but the biggest one is the 30-Mile Race, and everyone’s thrilled with the quality of cycling. There are gasps and cheers at the tight finishes and close brushes. Local favorite, Vincent Madonna – known by some as the Babe Ruth of Bicycle Racing–places 4th in the headlining race. And then the evening comes to a close, and you realize the whole event, with the cycling, the band, the singing and floral tributes, it took three hours but it feels like it passed in the blink of an eye.
That’s what it would have been like to attend opening night at the Providence Cycledrome. It would have been a big event.
The 1920s are often looked back on as the Golden Age of Sports. The post war economic boom, social revolution and the emergence of the United States as a global superpower lead to the rise of the first real celebrity athletes. This was the time of Babe Ruth and heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey, who were two of the most well-known and highly paid professional athletes at the time. But cycling was also in its golden age as a spectator sport. Thousands of people showed up to see races that were absolutely brutal and thrilling. Cyclists would pedal at top speeds, there would be spectacular crashes and drama, and there were even races that went on for days. Yes, days.
One of the most popular and hyped bicycle races at the time was called the Six-Day Race. It took place annually in New York’s Madison Square Garden, and was broadcast nationally on the radio and covered in newspapers. And I'm telling you, this was as big as the World Series. The schtick was this–you literally rode for six straight days, and the winner was the person who completed the most laps of the track in that time. Wild! I mean, people were like falling asleep and crashing into the stands. It started as an individual event, but would later evolve into two-person teams when New York outlawed individual athletes from competing more than 12 hours in a day. Six-Day racers became some of America’s big sports stars. And arenas for racing, which were technically called velodromes, popped up all over.
When it was built, the Providence Cycledrome actually wasn’t even the first bicycle track in Rhode Island. There had previously been tracks in Warwick, and a big one in Cranston that closed just before this one was built. But this track put Providence on the map in the cycling world, and helped professional bicycle racing grow into one of the busiest and most successful professional sports in the city, with races typically held every Tuesday and Friday night.
The stadium had been financed by Peter Laudati, who had moved from Italy to RI when he was young, and became prominent both in real estate and as one of the city’s leading sports promoters. He had also built a baseball field called Kinsley Park, which was home to the Providence Grays. So, he had a pulse on the popular sports at the time. And he also had his hand in this super underdog professional sport. One that really wasn’t that big yet, but would grow to be the most popular sport in America. American football.
It’s shocking to call professional football an underdog sport, but at the time it truly was. The sport as a whole was young, having evolved from soccer and rugby in the late 1800s on University campuses. By the 1920s, college players were beginning to have national reputations, but professional players and teams weren’t very well known. In fact, most early professional teams were organized by employers as an outlet for men who had been athletes in their college days. For example, there was a team organized by the Staley Starch Company called the Decatur Staleys. They’re famously still in the NFL today, but they’re now called the Chicago Bears.
In 1920, ten of those early professional teams gathered in Canton, OH, to organize a new association - the American Professional Football Association - which would evolve into the National Football League, or NFL, two years later.
In these very early days of professional football, Providence had its very own team. Well, it was actually an independent semi-pro club when it was first established by Providence Journal sports editor Charles Coppen and part-time sports writer Pearce Johnson in 1916. That team was called the Providence Steam Roller. That’s singular. Steam Roller, not steam rollers.
And that’s because in the team’s early days, owner Charles Coppen overheard a spectator say during a game that the opposition was getting “steam-rolled,” and he was so inspired by the comment he changed the team’s name. He was very specific that it be Steam Roller because, as he saw it, the team was “one singular unstoppable force of athletic prowess, mowing over opponents like, well, a steam roller.” Those are his words.
1925 was a big year for football and for the team. It’s the first year the NFL really gained notice, when college star Red Grange signed with the Chicago Bears and became the first pro-football celebrity. And that’s also the first year the Providence Steam Roller joined the fledgling NFL. The year prior, management had actually scheduled six games against NFL teams - that was something you could do at the time – and they performed well, winning three of the games and tying one. So, in 1925, Cyclodrome owner Peter Laudati paid a $500 franchise fee and entered the team into the NFL.
That was also the first year the team called the Providence Cycledrome their home. They had previously played on a baseball field, and it’s possible that field was on the site of a former file factory, so there may have been metal shards in the ground that proved dangerous during tackles. So the Cycledrome was a big upgrade. But it was also a pretty unconventional place to play because it wasn’t designed specifically to cater to football. The bicycle track wrapped around the field so tightly that it actually cut off one of the end zones. So, one end zone was 10 yards, but the other was only five.
The locker rooms also weren’t really adequate for a team of football players. They’d been designed to allow one or two cyclists to change at a time, so they were described as being about the size of two phone booths. The coach of the Steam Roller joked that the team suffered more injuries in the locker room, trying to get changed, than on the field. But it was even worse if you were a visiting team, because there were no locker rooms at all. You would have to change at their hotel and arrive at the field ready to go.
And then, during games, temporary seating was set up on the straight-away portions of the bicycle track. And spectators were so close to the field that players would often end up hurtling into their laps. That sounds kind of dangerous, but people also loved it because there really weren’t any bad seats in the Cycledrome.
In its first couple of seasons in the NFL, the Providence Steam Roller played respectably. But it was their 1928 season that put the team on the map–because that’s the year the Providence Steam Roller became the first New England team to win the NFL championship, long before the New England Patriots dominated in the northeast.
If you put the Providence Steam Roller and the Patriots side by side, the teams would look a bit different. In 1928, there were only 18 men allowed on the roster (vs. 53 today), and rules prohibited most substitutions, so players were everymen, playing both offensive and defensive positions. And they averaged quite a bit smaller than you might be used to.
One analysis of NFL rosters put the average player these days around 6’2” and 245 lbs, with some positions averaging over 6’4” and 300 lbs. But in 1928, only 6 players on the Providence Steam Roller exceeded 200 lbs. The largest member of the team was only 6 foot tall and 230. The Steam Roller athletes came from a variety of backgrounds. There were some college players, a couple of athletes with NFL experience, and a couple of wrestlers. The two star players on the team were Jimmy Conzelman, a future hall-of-famer who played QB and coached the team, and George Wildcat Wilson, who ran powerfully and passed well in his position at halfback.
The fact that Wilson passed well was notable, because in 1928, forward passes were rare, and overall passing was described as a “secondary skill” especially because the football itself was a little thicker around the middle, more like a rugby ball, and harder to pass. The best-known stars were runners, and the era of the star quarterback wouldn’t start until the 1940s.
Also, in 1928, the championship was determined a little differently than it is today. NFL schedules were managed by the teams, who chose how often they wanted to play and who they wanted to play against. This meant that teams all played a different number of games. So, when it came to crowning a champion, they did it on the basis of a winning percentage. The Providence Steam Roller secured the 1928 championship title by going 8-1-2. They finished their season with a tie against the Green Bay Packers, but it was enough to secure victory, and they celebrated with a banquet at the Biltmore hotel.
The year after their championship win, the Great Depression started, and both fans and players were hit hard. Several players left the team to find jobs that could pay better. One player was a heavyweight wrestling champion who switched to grappling full time. The team’s performance and fan attendance declined and in 1932 the team folded. The owners gave up and turned their franchise back to the NFL. The team only played a total of seven seasons in the NFL, but in that time they made a name for themselves.
Of course, they’re remembered as the first NE NFL champions, but they’re also remembered as the first team to play four regular season games in a six day stretch; and as the first team in the NFL to host a night game under lights. That game took place across town at the baseball field, Kinsley Park, because flooding in the Cycledrome caused a regular season game to be canceled. But the team needed the revenue badly, so they pushed the game out by a couple of days and rigged the baseball field up with giant projectors on tall poles. The newspaper reported that the “monster floodlights” were “just as good as daylight for the players.” But just to be sure everyone could see the ball, it was painted white. The Providence Journal wrote that the ball “had the appearance of a large egg,” and whenever either team passed, “there was a panicky feeling that the player who made the catch would be splattered with yellow yolk." The team lost, but they were pretty happy with the 6K spectators who came to watch. In 1930, floodlights were permanently installed in the Cycledrome, but the players received a pay reduction for night games, to help pay for the cost of installation.
After the Steam Roller folded, Peter Laudati’s records indicate bike and foot races continued for a few more years. But cycling was seeing a decline in popularity, and the Cycledrome was closed in 1934. Three years later, Laudati demolished the stadium and built E.M. Loew’s Drive In Movie Theater on the site. He was certainly a man who knew how to keep up with the trends and adapt to what was hot at the time.
I read that the area around North Main Street was expected to become kind of a sports center in the 1920s. Around the same time that the Cycledrome was built, the RI Auditorium was also constructed nearby, and it was home to basketball, ice hockey, and boxing matches as well as concerts and all kinds of other things. It stuck around a little longer, so you can find quite a few nostalgic stories of childhood memories at the Auditorium on Facebook still. But they’ve both been torn down and replaced, with parking lots, really.
Most people don’t know that the Cycledrome was ever there. I certainly didn’t. And very few remember the Steam Roller, New England’s first NFL champions. Their memory pales in comparison to the big Boston-based sports teams of today. But you might catch a reference to Providence’s athletic history here and there. Local T-Shirt company Milk Can Industries makes a Steam Roller shirt. And New Harvest Coffee has both a Steam Roller blend and a Cycledrome blend.
These references kind of feel like real life easter eggs, like you might find in a Pixar or Marvel movie. They hint at this bigger story, this interconnectedness between the reality of the past and the reality of the present. Sometimes those two things can feel pretty far apart. But those easter eggs might just be enough to make you ask a question, dig in a little, and find out about the histories hidden all around you.
Thank you so much for listening! And thank you to Steve for suggesting this week’s episode! As always, all episodes are written and researched by me, Sara Corben. If you liked this episode, I would love it if you could share it with your family or friends, or you can send me a note at Weird Rhode Island at Gmail.com or on IG at Weird Island Podcast. And if there’s a topic you’d really like to hear about, let me know! See you next time as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island.