There Was Almost a Ballpark Here

You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush, a fine documentary about the fabled club that HBO began airing last night (this is the 50th anniversary of the year the team abandoned the borough for Los Angeles, an unforgivable slight that is very much an open wound for many of the aged interviewees). But it probably helps to be a Brooklyn resident. There is a lot of wonderful period footage of city streets, some of it in color, and for me an interesting tidbit.

Rather than move the Dodgers across country, owner Walter O'Malley wanted to build them a replacement stadium for the crumbling Ebbetts Field, on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues--or pretty much across the street from where we live. This had been the site of the Fort Greene Retail Meat Market, which was slated to close, and was more importantly located near many subway stops (as it is today, second only to Times Square in the entire system) and the prize, the Long Island Railroad stop, Long Island being where so many Brooklyn residents had decamped once Robert Moses built all his highways and thoroughfares leading the way out of town. There are scenes of O'Malley, a dead ringer for the imperious character actor Edward Arnold, dickering with Moses, who carries himself like Jabba the Hutt and emerges as the true architect of Dodgers fans' despair (along with, in a way, Rosalind Wyman, the scrappy 22-year-old Los Angeles councilwoman who planted the seed of California in O'Malley's head, and who is alive to voice disbelief that city authorities would let the Dodgers get away just two years after winning the World Series).

The somewhat desolate-looking Flatbush/Atlantic area of the era is just about unrecognizable today, as another stadium project looms for the neighborhood. But I'd rather have O'Malley's planned geodesic-domed wonder than what's being concocted in backrooms for the Nets.