September 24, 1957: The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0 at Ebbets Field. It is the last game at that ballpark.
Team owner Walter O'Malley had decided, justifiably, that Ebbets Field was too small (it seated 31,497 people), didn't have enough parking spaces (only 700), and didn't have good highway access. He had wanted to build a domed stadium across from the Long Island Rail Road's Atlantic Avenue Terminal (where the Barclays Center now stands), thus eliminating the need for so much parking.
The proposal for the Brooklyn Sports Center
Robert Moses, who controlled several governmental agencies in the City of New York, and also in the State of New York, would have had to condemn the property on the site at the time, and chose not to. So O'Malley looked elsewhere, and was convinced to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles.
Since 1957, people have blamed O'Malley for the loss of the Dodgers, and have blamed the loss of the Dodgers or the end, or the "death," of "the Old Brooklyn."
Walter O'Malley, Villain Number 1.
Had the Harry Potter stories existed in 1957,
he could have been called "Lord Waltemort."
What was so great about Old Brooklyn? It seemed to be a place of community, where people cared about each other. A place of family and faith, "the Borough of Churches" -- and synagogues. (Mosques? At the time, an afterthought for most people living there.) Home to Prospect Park and Coney Island. A melting pot where people of all races and religions could get along.
The myth is that, once the Dodgers left, that Brooklyn was lost forever: Without the unifying force of the Dodgers, Kings County immediately fell into a morass of poverty, crime and despair. As if it hadn't always been poor, and there hadn't always been crime (Brooklyn was the birthplace of Al Capone and the home base of the Jewish gang known as Murder, Incorporated). But without the Dodgers to pay attention to, people began to notice the poverty and the crime more.
Brooklyn remained a no-go zone for people not from Brooklyn, until the 1994 Crime Bill helped to turn things around. By the dawn of the 21st Century, many of the Borough's neighborhoods had come back strong. Williamsburg even took the title of the hipster capital of the New York Tri-State Area away from Hoboken, New Jersey, and still holds it. Bringing the Nets to Brooklyn is a part of this renaissance, even though they'll never be as loved as the Dodgers were.
There were, of course, mitigating factors in the Dodgers' move, including demographics and Robert Moses' intransigence. But there can be no question that Walter O'Malley was the person most responsible for the Dodgers moving: If he thought he could make more money by staying in Brooklyn, he would have found a way to get around Moses. He had the ego to think that he could, and he had the intelligence to back it up. It was his greed that got in the way. Moses was an ass, but, on the list of people to blame for the Dodgers' move, he is Number 2 at most. O'Malley is Number 1.
But was the loss of the Dodgers really responsible for the end of the Old Brooklyn?
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame the Move of the Dodgers for the "Death" of "The Old Brooklyn"
5. The Rest of the City. Nobody blames the move of the New York Giants for any "damage" done to the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem (to the south of the Polo Grounds) and Washington Heights (to the west and north). Sure, something of New York City was lost with the loss of the Giants, but nobody has ever suggested that it had a deleterious effect on an entire Borough, or even one neighborhood.
Kids in Harlem may have embraced Willie Mays because he played stickball with them, but even the neighborhoods on either side of the Polo Grounds never treated the Giants as "their team" or a "local institution." They were a team for the entire City, just as the Yankees were, and remain. The Bronx is proud of being the home of the Yankees, but it's never been pathological like it was with Brooklyn and the Dodgers.
Speaking of the Bronx and their Bombers: Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway, connecting the George Washington Bridge with eastern Westchester County and the Connecticut Turnpike, had already cut a swath through The Bronx and partially opened to traffic in 1955, 2 years before the Dodgers moved. That, literally, destroyed neighborhoods.
Robert Moses, Villain Number 2
There was no need for the New York Yankees, the team that called that Borough home, to move for "the Old Bronx" to be "killed." Moses also chopped up sections of Queens and Staten Island, and tried to do the same with Manhattan.
Similar things happened in New Jersey: The New Jersey Turnpike did a lot of damage to the city of Elizabeth; the Garden State Parkway did the same to East Orange, Irvington, and, between them, the Vailsburg section of Newark; and the widening of N.J. Route 18 took out a big chunk of New Brunswick, rendering the string of housing projects that went up alongside it one of the nastiest ghettoes in New Jersey from the 1950s to the early 1990s.
Fortunately, Moses' Mid-Manhattan Expressway (connecting the Lincoln and Queens-Midtown Tunnels, which would have wrecked Midtown) and his Lower Manhattan Expressway (the "LOMEX" would have connected the Holland Tunnel with the Manhattan Bridge, and ruined Tribeca and SoHo) generated so much opposition in the 1960s that the projects were canceled in 1970 and 1971, respectively, by which point Moses had long since been fired by Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
4. The G.I. Bill. On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. Remembering from his role as Assistant Secretary of the Navy that returning veterans from World War I did not have an easy time going back to a peacetime economy, resulting in a severe recession in 1919 and 1920, he called for what he called "a G.I. Bill of Rights," and got it fairly easily.
This law included a provision for low-interest, zero-down-payment home loans for servicemen, with more favorable terms for new construction, compared to existing housing. This allowed millions of families to move from city apartments into suburban homes.
Levittown, Town of Hempstead,
County of Nassau, State of New York
From Brooklyn's perspective: Some went from ghetto apartments (The word "ghetto" was originally applied to the Jewish neighborhood of medieval Rome, so it is not a purely African-American term) to houses in the Borough; some went to houses in Queens and Staten Island; and others went east to Long Island and west to New Jersey, making the great suburban growth of the 1950s possible. (The education that many of them got enabled the growth of the middle class, which made the extension of the great suburban growth into the 1960s possible.)
This was great for these families -- except for the part about them being Dodger fans. It was hard to get from Long Island to Flatbush -- and even harder to get from New Jersey to Charlie Ebbets' pride and joy.
It was a big reason why O'Malley wanted the new Dodger stadium (note the lower-case S) at the Atlantic Yards site: The idea was that you could drive your car to a Long Island Rail Road station, park it there, get on the train, ride it to Atlantic Terminal, and cross the street to the ballpark. You could be in Brooklyn without really being "in Brooklyn."
It wouldn't have done much good for Dodger fans who had moved to New Jersey, but with so many Irish, Italian and especially Jewish veterans taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, the Dodger fan base left Brooklyn years before the Dodgers did. The key was that they had not left the New York Tri-State Area.
Situations like this elsewhere were why the New England Patriots left Boston for Foxborough, south of the city; why the Buffalo Bills left War Memorial Stadium for Orchard Park, south of the city; why the Detroit Lions and Pistons left the City of Detroit for Pontiac (and the latter, later, for Auburn Hills), northwest of the city; why the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs moved from Municipal Stadium in a black neighborhood to a white neighborhood on the edge of the city; and why, most recently, the Atlanta Braves left their sort-of-downtown stadium for their city's northwestern suburbs: Because that's where the fan base had gone.
O'Malley wanted it both ways: He wasn't going to build a stadium on Long Island, or accept the plan that Moses did offer him, the Flushing Meadow site that became Shea Stadium, and keep the name "Brooklyn Dodgers"; but he could build a stadium in Brooklyn with easy access from Long Island, if only Moses would do him one favor. O'Malley didn't ask for a single taxpayer dollar to build the place: He was willing to spend his own money to build the stadium, as he went on to prove in Los Angeles. At the very least, he deserves credit for that. But he needed the land cleared, and Moses wouldn't do it.
Moses was another reason the growth of suburban Long Island was possible, with his parkways and his parks (Eisenhower Park, Jones Beach, Fire Island, etc.). If O'Malley had put it to him in those terms, who knows? The Dodgers might still be playing in a Brooklyn Sports Center that opened in 1958. And the Giants might have moved into what we knew as Shea by 1960, and to Citi Field in 2009, and L.A. and San Francisco would have gotten expansion teams in 1961 and/or 1962.
But the most ardent of Brooklyn Dodger fans had become commuters. Or, as Horace Stoneham, owner of the also-moving Giants, put it, "I feel bad for the kids, but I haven't seen too many of their fathers lately." Maybe the fans of both teams could have recognized their unwitting role in their teams' move (or demise), and quoted Walt Kelly, author of the comic strip Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
A side note: On October 21, 1944, FDR campaigned in New York City, despite a daylong rain and his health struggles. It included an appearance at Ebbets Field. Although he enjoyed sports, had attended World Series games at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, had seen Babe Ruth's called shot in the 1932 World Series while campaigning in Chicago, and threw out the ceremonial first ball at Griffith Stadium in Washington on an unbreakable record of 9 Opening Days, he had not attended a live sporting events since the attack on Pearl Harbor. He thought it would be bad form.
He told the crowd, "I have a confession to make. I come from the State of New York, and I have practiced law in New York City. But I have never been in Ebbets Field before." For perhaps the only time in his political career, he was booed, although it was good-natured. He brought the crowd back to cheering by saying, "I've rooted for the Dodgers, and I hope to come back someday and watch them play." He never got the chance, as he died right before the 1945 season dawned.
Also: In order to demonstrate his seriousness about wanting a new stadium, O'Malley scheduled 7 games per year, 1 against each of the other National League teams, in 1956 and 1957 in another ballpark, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Although it had just 24,000 seats, considerably less than even Ebbets Field, it had a lot more parking. This ballpark was named Roosevelt Stadium, for FDR, because its construction in 1937 was through his Works Project Administration.
3. The Crime Wave. Poor people making enough money to get out of the Brooklyn ghettos led to new poor people moving into those apartments. And as they were blacks from the South in a second "Great Migration" of the 20th Century, or Hispanics from Puerto Rico, or blacks from the West Indies, and thus new arrivals, they didn't have the institutional memory of any "Old Brooklyn," and thus no ingrained love for the place.
What did a poor kid whose parents weren't from Brooklyn care about a baseball team that wasn't there anymore? Or the Brooklyn Bridge? Or Prospect Park? Or Coney Island? Certainly, unlike the people who lived in those apartments before, there was nobody in the family, now elderly, who remembered the days before the Consolidation of 1898 when Brooklyn was a separate city from Manhattan, and thus loved it as such.
For them, and also for the poor white kids who were left, who wouldn't have the Dodgers to root for, Brooklyn was just a place where they lived, and were trying to survive, and doing whatever it took to do that. And if that meant stealing cars, selling drugs, or getting into a gang that had no qualms about assaults or even murders, so be it. And so the postwar crime wave, which happened in the rest of the City as well, brought Brooklyn down, too.
2. The Closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At the height of World War II production, what was officially named the New York Naval Shipyard had 75,000 people working there. In 1947, it was down to 10,000 workers. It doubled back up to 20,000 by the end of the Korean War in 1953, but after that war ended, it was back to 10,000 again.
In 1960, with the Yard's workforce 11,000 strong, the aircraft carrier USS Constellation was being built there, and an accident caused a fire that killed 49 people. The investigation showed that the Yard was obsolete, especially since it was determined that, in order to reach the open sea, ships built there had to pass under the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge; and ships going there for repairs also had to pass under those bridges -- and most new ones were too big to do so.
And so, on June 30, 1966, the Yard was closed, and the last 9,500 workers were laid off. This was symbolic of the loss of industry in New York City. The loss of jobs crushed the Borough economically, and was much more damaging to the communities of Brooklyn than the move of the Dodgers. And it wasn't a situation where, "Oh, if only this one thing had changed, it could have been saved." There were too many factors involved for the Yard to be anything but doomed. It was a "when," not an "if."
A recent photo of the Navy Yard,
which has been redeveloped for residential and retail use.
The Williamsburg Bridge is in the background.
But what's the biggest reason you can't blame the move of the Dodgers for the "death" of "the old Brooklyn"?
1. It Never Happened. I don't mean the Dodgers were never moved. Of course they were. What I mean is, the old Brooklyn never became special.
(Ducks to avoid things thrown by old people)
Think about it. People from the other Boroughs usually don't say, "I'm from Manhattan," or, "I'm from Queens." Maybe they do on Staten Island, but, as we've seen, Staten Islanders are, how shall I put this, especially special.
You talk to somebody from Manhattan, and he'll say, "I'm from New York." He might say, "I'm from Greenwich Village," or, "I'm from the Upper West Side." But he won't say, "I'm from Manhattan." Same for Queens. It might be, "I'm from Flushing." "I'm from Forest Hills." "I'm from Astoria." Or, "I'm from New York." The number of people who are going to say, "I'm from Queens" isn't all that big. People from The Bronx generally don't say it, either.
It is true that Brooklyn was once a separate City, but that stopped in 1898. That's a hell of a long time ago. Everybody who ever lived in a separate City of Brooklyn is now dead, just as even the youngest of the Dodger fans from Brooklyn is now an old person.
Did you ever set foot in Ebbets Field?
Either you're lying, or you're at least 70 years old.
So what made Brooklyn "special"? The Dodgers? No. Manhattan had the Giants, but that didn't make Manhattan special. (There is a drink called "Manhattan Special," an espresso soda, but it's always been based and produced in Brooklyn.) The Bronx had the Yankees (and still does), but that didn't make The Bronx special. If those Boroughs are special, it's not because of their baseball teams. The Yankees are proud of their Bronx heritage, but they represent the entire Tri-State Area.
Come on, tell me: What made Brooklyn "special"? The Brooklyn Bridge, was that it? No. Manhattan had half the bridge. Was it Coney Island? Not really: Queens had The Rockaways, The Bronx had City Island, and Staten Island has beaches.
The Coney Island Boardwalk
Was it Prospect Park? No: Manhattan has Central Park, The Bronx has Bronx Park (including the Zoo and the Botanical Gardens), and Queens has Flushing Meadow-Corona Park. Was it the Brooklyn Museum? No: There are loads of museums in Manhattan, and the other Boroughs have museums, too.
The Brooklyn Museum
Come to think of it: The Bridge? Coney Island? Prospect Park? The Brooklyn Museum? They're all still there. If those things did make Brooklyn special, then they still do. And so, while "the Old Brooklyn" may have died, "Brooklyn as a special place" might not have. Therefore, the loss of Brooklyn as a special place never happened.
VERDICT: Not Guilty. While "the Old Brooklyn" is gone forever, it can be argued that Brooklyn is still "special." The move of the Dodgers didn't change that.
Blame Walter O'Malley for the move. Blame him for breaking Brooklyn's heart. But don't blame him for making Brooklyn no longer special.
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