ST. LOUIS — Robin Proudie remembers working concessions at the old Busch Stadium as a teenager, selling popcorn and peanuts to hungry baseball lovers. Her favorite memory is the seventh game of the Cardinals' 1982 World Series.
After the final out, she joined hundreds of frenzied spectators who poured on the field to congratulate the new champs. She remembers star shortstop Ozzie Smith picking her up in celebration. Cardinals fans walk through Ballpark Village, at Clark Avenue and South Broadway, as they head toward Busch Stadium for a game on Saturday, June 8, 2024.
The area was once home to slave prisons run by trader Bernard Lynch, and advocates are pushing for a marker or memorial to educate people about the site's history. But there is a part of Busch Stadium history that Proudie only recently learned about, a dark history linked to the building that was so dear to her. Historians say some of St.
Louis’ most notorious slave prisons — known as the Lynch slave pens — sat near the intersection of South Broadway and Clark Avenue, where the new Busch Stadium, Ballpark Village and the InterPark Stadium East garage are now clustered. Thousands of men, women and children were held in Bernard M. Lynch’s underground slave prisons before the Civil War, incarcerated in rooms with dirt floors, no beds and bars on the windows.
Some were chained to basement cells, waiting to be sold to local buyers or “down river” to work in cotton and sugar cane fields. Remnants of the p.