Former ballpark · 1969 – 1976
Parc Jarry
Montreal, QUE
Also known as Jarry Park.
- Opened
- 1969
- Closed
- 1976
- League
- NL
The lore
La Piscine de Willie
A municipally-owned corner of a Montreal park, a right-field fence, and a swimming pool that belonged to Willie Stargell.
La piscine de Willie
Beyond the right-field fence at Parc Jarry, past the scoreboard, sat a municipal swimming pool. On July 16, 1969, Pittsburgh's Willie Stargell hit an estimated 495-foot home run into the water, and French-speaking Montrealers named the pool for him — la piscine de Willie. The name held for as long as the park stood.
The stadium occupied a corner of a 36-hectare urban park in Montreal's north-central Villeray neighborhood. It was a municipally-owned project: construction began in the winter of 1968 and was not completed until May 1969. Temporary grandstands expanded the seating to 28,000, making Jarry Park the last single-deck stadium in the major leagues. Beyond the right-field fence and scoreboard was the pool — a public amenity that happened to sit where home runs landed.
Snowbanks and standing rooms
The Expos drew nearly 30,000 fans for their first home game on April 14, 1969. Two seasons later, on Opening Day 1971, winter had not fully released the city. Plowed snow mounds ringed the stadium, and fans without tickets climbed the banks in right field to watch for free. From 1969 through 1976, it remained what it had been at the start: a corner of a city park, fitted with temporary grandstands, holding major-league baseball.
The last weekend
The final major-league games at Jarry Park were played September 24 through 26, 1976, a closing series against the Philadelphia Phillies that ended with a Sunday doubleheader. The Phillies clinched the National League East in the opener on the 26th, and the Montreal crowd rose and applauded them.
Reporting: SABR, Baseball Reference, Ballpark Digest. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.
By the Desk · filed 2026-07-24 — the piece reads as of its filing; the park record around it is live · every fact in this piece comes from a filed, sourced research pack and clears an independent fact-check, and nothing is edited after filing.
Where it stood
Montreal, QUE. We don’t have exact coordinates for this park in the historical record — we’d rather say so than pin the wrong spot.
Sources
- Retrosheet · as of 2026-07-23
The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.