CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland is finally set to restore League Park, at least two decades after city officials first discussed returning the piece of hallowed baseball ground to glory.

The old ballpark, once home of the Cleveland Indians and the 1945 Negro League champion Cleveland Buckeyes, and adjacent parkland will undergo $5 million in renovations, said Ken Silliman, chief of staff for Mayor Frank Jackson. Silliman said work will begin late this spring or in early summer and be finished in about a year.

League Park, at East 66th Street and Lexington Avenue in the Hough neighborhood, hosted its first baseball game in 1891, with pitching legend Cy Young on the mound for the Cleveland Spiders. The park is on the National Register of Historic Places.

City Architecture is wrapping up plans that include restoring the ticket house and a bleacher wall and creating a Major League-size diamond in the same place as the original. Home plate will go in the exact spot where it rested the day that Babe Ruth whacked his 500th career home run in 1929.

Plans also call for a community building with a museum, a youth baseball diamond and a field for football and soccer. If bids are low enough, the city could add a pavilion and splash park.

Previous Plain Dealer coverage

Cleveland City Council approves spending to get historic League Park project started

The Cleveland Buckeyes played their home games in League Park

Babe Ruth hits 500th home run at Cleveland's League Park: Plain Dealer front page from Aug. 12, 1929

Fans from around the world have expressed interest in visiting after the restoration is finished, said Russ Haslage, director of the League Park Society, a nonprofit group of preservation advocates.

The Indians used League Park from 1900 through 1946, continuing to play some games there for 15 years after Municipal Stadium opened. It was the team's home field during the 1920 World Series.

Besides Young and Ruth, greats such as Bob Feller, Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie, Tris Speaker and Shoeless Joe Jackson passed through the park.

Indians second-baseman Bill Wambsganss executed his famous unassisted triple play at League Park in the 1920 World Series. Yankee Joe DiMaggio stroked the last hit in his 56-game streak at the park in 1941. Alta Weiss, a teenage girl, pitched there for a men's semi-pro team in the early 1900s.

Tim Wiles, director of research for the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., was in Cleveland about 10 years ago for a conference sponsored by the then-Cleveland-based Society for American Baseball Research. He and about 20 other baseball historians took a side trip to League Park and stood on what remained of the diamond.

"I just got out there and felt a very powerful historical-slash-archaeological presence," Wiles said in a telephone interview. "There was a vibe."

The old Cleveland Rams played professional football games at League Park in the 1940s, and it served as a practice field for the Browns until 1951, when the city bought the property and converted it into a community park. The park eventually disintegrated.

Talk of restoration dates to at least the early 1990s. Then-Councilwoman Fannie Lewis envisioned League Park as a catalyst for a Hough renaissance and championed the cause until she died in 2008.

Silliman, who also worked for former Mayor Michael R. White, said White presented a $2 million plan in 2000. Jane Campbell, who succeeded White two years later, offered a proposal costing $18 million, a figure that Silliman said was "never doable."

After Jackson took office in 2006, he instructed Silliman to reconfigure the project. Money will come from bonds issued over three years.

Paula Gist heads the League Park Heritage Committee, a neighborhood group that Councilman T.J. Dow, Lewis' successor, formed to lobby for improvements. The committee is to help raise another $1.7 million for a track and other work.

Gist grew up in Hough and fondly remembers a vibrant middle-class neighborhood that existed prior to riots in the summer of 1966. Her father, now 94, attended Negro League games at League Park.

She said the project will provide a focus for an area that has seen dozens of new houses built in recent years. She hopes League Park also will become a regional attraction, hosting minor league baseball games and other special events.

"This is important to us, to our neighborhood," Gist said. "We don't want just a ballpark; we want a revitalization."

Plain Dealer News Researcher JoEllen Corrigan contributed to this story.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: tott@plaind.com, 216-999-5739

On Twitter: @thomasott1.