Baseball and Knoxville opera have something in common. What is it?
A – By most accounts, they both arrived the same year.
B – They were both focused on Gay Street.
C – They both drew participants who were combat veterans of the Civil War.
D – All of the above.
Answer:
D – The year was 1867, when the first well-documented baseball games were played at the “Old Base Ball Grounds”—on the east side of the 400 block of Gay. Just three and a half blocks to the south, by 1872, was Staub’s Opera House, central to the larger operatic events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
