A baseball shrine débuted in 1913, one in a string of ballparks ushering in a new era for the National Pastime. Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and Chicago offered modern facilities for the fans. In Brooklyn, a new stadium became a second home for borough residents from Canarsie to Coney Island. Ebbets Field. Home of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
When the Dodgers left Brooklyn after the 1957 season, Ebbets Field’s days were numbered. Their spirit amputated, Dodger fans mourned the loss represented by the soulless void of a silent Ebbets Field.
Obsolete and vacant as a once gloried dominion of baseball excellence, Ebbets Field no longer served a valuable function. What began as the innovative brainchild of then owner Charles Ebbets in 1913 aged into an archaic edifice. Once a nucleic fixture for Brooklyn, Ebbets Field balanced on the precipice of ignominy. Its storied life ended in 1960 with demolition that placed an arctic exclamation point on the end of an already frosty sentence—the Brooklyn Dodgers are no more.
If fans run their fingers over the memories, they feel scars that never fully healed and, consequently, trigger a bittersweet though palpable aura. Bitter for the abandonment. Sweet for the memories.
Vividly, they recall Jackie Robinson’s fiery, pigeon-toed style of running, Carl Furillo’s master of baseball caroms off Ebbets Field’s idiosyncratic right field wall, and Roy Campanella’s powerful swaths of National League pitching.
But the memories are more than homages to a great baseball team that patrolled the verdant pasture at 55 Sullivan Place, an address that no longer appears on Brooklyn’s Post Office rolls. For those who saw the Dodgers play in the Jackie Robinson era, the memories reveal a depth of love betrayed in Shakespearean proportions.
Walter O’Malley’s decision to move the Dodgers a continent away from Brooklyn, a felonious act in the hearts and minds of the Dodger faithful, anchored in a sweetheart deal—the power brokers of Los Angeles gave O’Malley the real estate of Chavez Ravine in an exchange for the environs of the city’s Wrigley Field. Not since Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island for 60 guilders on behalf of the Dutch had a land deal bared incalculable value for the land’s new settlers.
Dodger Stadium eclipsed Ebbets Field in look, feel, and modernity. Its wavy outfield roof, capacity for approximately 56,000, and seat colors evoking a southern California warmth—yellow, light orange, turquoise, and sky blue—did not look anything like Charles Ebbets’s brick-faced structure that was a breakthrough for pre-World War I baseball, but a relic for the Space Age. O’Malley’s new facility represented the post-World War II era, when migration to newly created suburbs forced travel by car, thereby creating a need for parking spaces at stadium. Ebbets Field was a ballpark sandwiched into one city block with a capacity hovering around 36,000 and approximately 700 parking spaces.
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on June 15, 2013.