Stadium Size, Football Droppers, and Deemphasizers: NYU

This series reviews the program history and stadiums of colleges that dropped or deemphasized football. Click here for the series introduction. The schools included in the review are listed below.

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NYU began playing football in 1873, before football was football, since American football's rugby-derived rules did not arrive until 1876. During its early football playing days, NYU's sole campus was in the Washington Square area of Greenwich Village, on the lower west side of Manhattan. Overcrowding led to NYU acquiring a 23-acre tract of land 10 miles north in the Bronx in 1894, where they located some undergraduate colleges. The next several years witnessed the construction of the University Heights campus, including its athletics facilities at Ohio Field. The track team held its first meet there in the spring of 1896, but the football team played at Berkeley Oval in Harlem that year.

A bird’s eye view of the planned University Heights campus with a grandstand-less Ohio Field. (NYU Archives)

The football team's first game at Ohio Field came in 1897, and by then, they likely had built the grandstand, though I cannot confirm it was there until 1899.

Ohio Field and Grandstand c. 1915 (NYU Archives)