The televised crowd-pleaser in '46 was a Diamond Gloves boxing tournament, the kind of splashy headliner destined to become a stadium stock-in-trade for about a decade after the war. Hinchliffe in the early 'fifties continued to host major and minor regional outdoor sports like motorcycle races and demolition derbies, plus star-studded musical and comedy acts. Some of these clearly strained physical facilities and probably did little for the bottom line.
In January '63, the Paterson Board of Ed, which had always managed the stadium, received the deed for a single dollar and assumed full ownership. That year Board Secretary Charles Riley raised enough money to bring in more fill and enlarge the field, lengthening the track to a full quarter-mile. The project also included repairing the bleacher seats, resodding the football field and repositioning the baseball diamond. To the special applause of sportswriters, it also relocated the too-short right field boundary till it stood "some 270 feet from home plate with a six-foot snow fence...," giving the Hinchliffe homer a little more class.
Of course it was not much more than a facelift. The much-loved stadium, once a mecca of entertainment described as a "15-minute walk" away for most Patersonians, had become "a hard place to park" for people with cars-and with other entertainment choices. As Hinchliffe lost the trade that had once made it a "paying investment," chances are that even creative marketing and expensive upgrades couldn't have kept the wolf from the door.
Still Hinchliffe remained the much-loved scene of the great local rivalry: Eastside vs (now) John F. Kennedy H.S. (Central High, renamed and relocated in 1964 to a new building in the Totowa section, not far from the stadium). In 1983, popular Mayor Frank X. Graves came up with funding for a "repair and restoration" project that included Astroturfing the field. The investment briefly paid off when the New Jersey Eagles of the American Soccer League made Hinchliffe home ('88-'89).