Ebbets Field
Ebbets Field was a Major League Baseball stadium in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York. It is mainly known for having been the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team of the National League. It was also home to Negro league baseball's Brooklyn Eagles of the Negro National League II and to six gridiron football teams, five of which were professional and one of which was collegiate. The professional football teams consisted of three NFL teams, one AFL team, and one AAFC team ; Long Island University's football team used Ebbets Field in 1939 and 1940. The stadium was demolished in 1960 and replaced by the Ebbets Field Apartments, the site's current occupant. It was located east of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Washington Avenue, north of Empire Boulevard, west of Bedford Avenue.
History
Construction
After locating the prospective new site to build a permanent stadium to replace the old wooden Washington Park, Dodgers' owner Charles Ebbets acquired the property over several years, starting in 1908, by buying lots until he owned the entire block. Ebbets Field was bounded by Bedford Avenue to the east, Sullivan Place to the South, Cedar Street to the west, and Montgomery Street to the north.The land included the site of a garbage dump called Pigtown, so named because of the pigs that once ate their fill there and the stench that filled the air. At the groundbreaking, the site was described as containing several old houses, shanties, goats, and tomato cans, and although the streets bordering the field were mapped, two of them had not been built yet.
Construction began on March 4, 1912. The cornerstone, a piece of Connecticut granite that held newspapers, pictures of baseball players, cards, telegrams, and almanacs, was laid on July 6, 1912. At the laying ceremony, Ebbets said that the ballpark was going to be ready for play on September 1, and that Brooklyn was going to win the National League pennant in 1913.
Neither of Ebbets' predictions was correct: on August 29, 1912, as the deadline drew near and it was obvious that due to an ironworker's strike the ballpark was not even close to being finished, it was announced that Ebbets had sold a 50% interest in the team to brothers Stephen W. and Edward J. McKeever, who had built their fortune in contracting and were able to speed along the construction. Though the sale led to management troubles years later, by early 1913 Ebbets Field was ready, and would become the home of some of baseball's greatest dramas.
Newspaper coverage in the spring of 1913 was filled with glowing praise about the new park, calling it "A Monument to the National Game" and predicting it could last 200 years: in the end it only lasted 47 years, failing to survive the exit of the Dodgers for Los Angeles in 1957.
Opening
The first game played was an inter-league exhibition game against the New York Yankees on April 5, 1913, played before an overcapacity of 30,000 fans, with 5,000 more who had arrived but were not able to get in. After a loss against the Yankees in another exhibition game on April 7 in front of about 1,000 fans on a very cold day, the first regular season game was played on April 9 against the Philadelphia Phillies, with Brooklyn losing, 1–0.When the park was opened it was discovered that an American flag, keys to the bleachers, and a press box had all been forgotten. The press box level was not added until 1929. The original double-decked seating covered all of right field, rounded home plate, and extended past third base, with an open concrete bleacher stand continuing to the left field wall.
The ballpark was built on a sloping piece of ground, raised above street level in right field, which resulted in short foul line there of just ). When it opened, the field was very large for its time in both left field and center ; with additional seating the playing field shrunk to in left, in center, and to right, which gained a screen above its fence and a scoreboard. At its peak it had a capacity of around 32,000.
As with Boston's Fenway Park and Detroit's Tiger Stadium, two ballparks that had opened one year earlier than Ebbets Field, the intimate configuration of some of each park's dimensions prompted some baseball writers to also refer to Ebbets Field as a "cigar box" or a "bandbox."
Use
Ebbets Field was the scene of some early successes, as the Dodgers, also called the "Robins" after long-time manager Wilbert Robinson, won National League championships in 1916 and 1920. The seating area was expanded in the 1920s, a boom time for baseball when many ballparks were expanded. The double deck was extended from third base around the left field corner, across left field, and into center field, allowing right-hand hitters to garner many more home runs. By the 1940s, a big scoreboard had been installed in right field, as well as a screen atop the high wall which made home runs to right field a tougher accomplishment. Additional rows of seating across left field reduced that area by about 15 feet, aiding right-handed hitters.The park's first night game was played on June 15, 1938, drawing a crowd of 38,748. Johnny Vander Meer of the visiting Cincinnati Reds pitched his second consecutive no-hitter, a feat that has never been duplicated in Major League Baseball. It was also in 1938 that Hilda Chester, one of the earlier sports "superfans," became a regular attendee when promotional wizard Larry MacPhail brought Ladies' Days to Ebbets Field, welcoming women for only ten-cents.
After the Dodgers early successes the team slid into hard times. It remained there for two decades, until new ownership first brought in MacPhail in 1938, and then, after MacPhail's wartime resignation, player development specialist Branch Rickey in 1943. In addition to his well-known breaking of the color line by signing Jackie Robinson in 1948, Rickey's savvy with farm systems produced results that made the Brooklyn Dodger "Bums" a perennial contender through their exit to California after the 1957 season.
The Dodgers won pennants in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956. They won the 1955 World Series, their only world title, and were within two games and a playoff heartbreak of winning five National League pennants in a row, challenging the five time World Champion cross-town Yankees during that stretch. Ebbets Field also hosted the 1949 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
Demise
The Dodgers found themselves victims of their own success soon thereafter, as Ebbets Field never seated more than 35,000 people, and the constraints of the neighborhood made its expansion impossible. It also had almost no automobile parking for Dodger fans who had moved east to suburban Long Island, though it was near a subway station. Walter O'Malley, who obtained majority ownership of the Dodgers in 1950, announced plans for a privately owned domed stadium at the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, where a large market was being torn down.New York City Building Commissioner Robert Moses refused to help O'Malley secure the land, instead wanting the Dodgers to move to a city-owned stadium in Flushing Meadows in the borough of Queens. O'Malley refused to consider Moses' proposal, famously telling him "We are the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers!"
As a result, O'Malley began to flirt publicly with Los Angeles, using a relocation threat as political leverage to win favor for a Brooklyn stadium. Ultimately, O'Malley and Moses could not come to agreement on a new location for the stadium, and the club moved west to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. During their last two years in Brooklyn, the Dodgers played several games each year in Jersey City, New Jersey's Roosevelt Stadium, which was a tactic by O'Malley to force Moses to acquiesce and allow a new stadium to be built.
Ebbets Field was sold by O'Malley to real estate developer Marvin Kratter for about $2,000,000 on October 31, 1956. The deal included a five-year lease that allowed the Dodgers to move out as soon as a proposed Downtown Brooklyn stadium was ready for business and Kratter to raze the ballpark and redevelop the land for a $25 million housing project beginning in 1961. When stadium plans fell through the team left for Los Angeles after the 1957 season.
To avoid being the only team west of St. Louis, O'Malley urged Horace Stoneham, owner of the Dodgers' long-time crosstown rivals, the New York Giants, to also move west: Stoneham, who was having stadium and financial difficulties of his own, agreed, and moved the Giants to San Francisco after the 1957 season.
The departure of the Dodgers was followed by a "twilight" phase in which the park sporadically hosted soccer, as well as high school, college, and a handful of Negro league baseball games featuring a team formed by ex-Dodger star Roy Campanella. In one of those games pitcher Satchel Paige made a special guest appearance.
The demolition of Ebbets Field began on February 23, 1960. More than 35 years after the Dodgers had left Brooklyn, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York presiding over a case deciding the use of the Brooklyn Dodgers' trademark called O'Malley's relocation of the franchise from its historic home to Los Angeles "one of the most notorious abandonments in the history of sports".
An auction of Ebbets Field's structure and contents was held on April 20, 1960. An estimated 500 people bid on locker room stools, benches, team banners, seats, bricks, bats, caps, team photos, balls, and a brownstone cornerstone of the stadium.