Along with Jasper Oval (right across Convent Avenue, also now demolished), Lewisohn was used throughout the academic year for many of the college's uptown campus outdoor intramural sports.

The CCNY Varsity Rifle Team had its indoor, 50' small bore range under the stadium steps, entered through a doorway at the north end.

[6][7][8][9][2] For the admission price of merely twenty five cents, concertgoers at the amphitheater were treated to appearances by leading performers from the world of Jazz, Classical music and Opera.

[10][11][12] His Italian Night concerts often attracted an audience of over 13,000 guests for a single performance and featured noted soloists from the operatic stage including Licia Albanese and Richard Tucker.

[24] Over the decades, a wide variety of noted soloists also appeared at the amphitheater including: Marian Anderson,[25] Louis Armstrong,[26] Harry Belafonte, Jack Benny, Leonard Bernstein,[27] Jorge Bolet,[28] Van Cliburn, Placido Domingo, Joan Field, Ella Fitzgerald, Kirsten Flagstad, Benny Goodman, Thomas Hayward, Jascha Heifetz, William Kapell,[29] Lotte Lenya, Yehudi Menuhin, Jan Peerce, Roberta Peters, Leontyne Price, Paul Robeson,.

On August 16, 1946, the stadium was the site of a benefit concert for Sergeant Isaac Woodard, an African-American soldier in the U.S. Army who, upon being honorably discharged and returning home from service in the Pacific theater of World War II, had been brutally attacked and blinded with a blackjack by a white police officer in South Carolina earlier that year.

The sold-out concert, organized by the New York Amsterdam News as the atrocity was gaining national attention, included performances by musicians Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Carol Brice, Woody Guthrie,[36] and Billie Holiday.

[37][38] The stadium appeared as the setting of the final scene of the 1945 film Rhapsody in Blue in which Oscar Levant performs the title composition, with an orchestra conducted by Paul Whiteman, as a memorial to the composer.