Ebbets Relics in Brooklyn
With the Los Angeles Dodgers playing the Yankees in the World Series, it’s appropriate to mention some remaining Dodger relics in Brooklyn. Few sections of Brooklyn have changed more than the eastern end of Downtown, about where it meets Fort Greene, at the confluence of Flatbush and Atlantic Aves. I was a daily commuter to this part of town beginning in 1971 and for about 10 years after that, attending Cathedral Prep High School and later Saint Francis College.
At that time this was home to the crumbling Long Island Rail Road terminal, constructed in 1908 but then left to deteriorate; its demise came in the early-1980s when only the underground section of the terminal remained, and a new station building didn’t appear in the early-2000s until it was constructed as part of the Atlantic Terminal shopping mall project. For 20 years, an enormous hole in the ground replaced the terminal building. In the 1970s, meat wholesalers still occupied Atlantic Ave. frontage, and I occasionally walked to school dodging hooks on which meat carcasses were swinging.
The “V” formed by Atlantic and Flatbush Aves. was home in those days, and into the 2000s, to a used car lot as well as the Underberg kitchen supplies office building. In the late-2000s, the controversial Atlantic Yards project wiped out blocks of factory buildings and dwellings along Pacific St. on the south side of the railyards, and Barclays Center, the home of the Brooklyn Nets and beginning in 2015, the New York Islanders, appeared.
When Barclays opened in 2012, an item harking back to Brooklyn’s last major league sports arena was installed at the corner, the Ebbets Field flagpole that was the last one in place after the 1957 season, after which the Dodgers left for Los Angeles. When Ebbets was demolished in 1960 the flagpole was moved to an American Legion hall on Utica Ave. in East Flatbush, which later became a casket company and a community church. Original Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner acquired the flagpole in 2007, and it was re-dedicated when the arena opened in 2012.
The Dodgers, also known as the Robins for a few years (for manager Wilbert Robinson), played at the stadium owner Charles Ebbets built in the block surrounded by Bedford Ave. (the outfield fence), McKeever Pl., Sullivan Pl. and Montgomery St. from the 1913 to 1957 seasons; before the Jackie Robinson era began in 1947, their time at Ebbets was mainly a period of futility marked by just three National League pennants, and three World Series defeats, in 1916, 1920 and 1941.
Both Ebbets Field and the Dodgers’ enemies, the New York Giants’ homes have both been taken over by housing projects, Ebbets Field Houses and Polo Grounds Houses in upper Manhattan. Ebbets Field was razed in 1960 while the Polo Grounds became the temporary home of the New York Mets, surviving till after the 1963 season. A single staircase that took spectators from the Polo Grounds up Coogan’s Bluff remains.
During the Robinson era he was joined by Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Don Newcombe, Carl Furillo and many other stars, and the Dodgers had a run of domination in the National League. For the most part, they were stymied by the Yankees, with the sole exception of 1955 when the unheralded Johnny Podres defeated the Bombers in the seventh game. The Dodgers suffered declining attendance and when plans for a new stadium downtown were thwarted by Robert Moses, Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley made a business decision to accept an offer to move the club to Los Angeles—where the Dodgers almost immediately won the World Series, defeating the Chicago White Sox in 1959.
Charles Ebbets, along with early newspaper baseball chronicler Henry Chadwick, are interred near each other in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Chadwick’s stone is a hoot, topped by a granite baseball and has a bronze catcher’s mask, bat, ball and glove. His ID plaque is diamond-shaped.
In many ways Jackie Robinson was the most compelling player in major league baseball history. He was selected by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey to break the MLB color barrier in 1947 after a sterling athletic record at UCLA, where he had lettered in track, football, baseball and basketball. Rickey needed a can’t-miss prospect, as well as a person who’d be able to endure the inevitable racism that would arise in a sport where many players were from the deep South.
Robinson was a five-tool player who hit for average and power (averaging 16 home runs per year), possessed decent speed, and was excellent on defense. Advancing age and diabetes slowed him down in 1956 and 1957; the Dodgers traded him to the Giants, who like the Dodgers were moving to California, but Robinson chose to retire. He passed away in 1972, shortly after addressing a World Series crowd in Cincinnati. He’s interred in Cypress Hills Cemetery, through which passes the parkway later named for him. In 1997 his uniform number, 42, was retired by every major league team, except for players already wearing it; the last one, legendary Yankee reliever Mariano Rivera (see below), retired in 2013.
No borough-wide memorial was named for him until 1997, when upon the 50th anniversary of his ascension to the Dodgers, New York State designated the entire route of the Interboro Parkway in his name.
For 18 years, playing for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Mets, native Indianan and first baseman Gil Hodges was the epitome of silent strength, compiling 370 home runs and over 1200 runs batted in, playing impeccable defense for a Brooklyn Dodgers team that repeatedly made the World Series but only captured the ring once. Breaking in as a catcher in 1943, Hodges saw combat in World War II, losing two seasons to the war, but hit his stride once he switched to first base in 1946. Hodges made the All-Star team eight times, received Most Valuable Player votes nine times and was finally elected by the MLB Veterans’ Committee to the Hall of Fame in 2021, some 49 years after his death.
After his playing career ended in 1963, Hodges turned to coaching and managing, helming the Washington Senators from 1964 to 1967 and the New York Mets from 1968 until his death in April 1972 at 47, overseeing the Mets’ unlikely run to a World Series victory in 1969. Always a heavy smoker, Hodges succumbed on the golf course to a heart attack.
Hodges embraced his status as a Brooklyn transplant and maintained a residence with his family on Bedford Ave. from his Dodgers days until his death. A short stretch of Bedford Ave. between Aves. M and N in Midwood is co-named for him, as was the Marine Parkway Bridge connecting Flatbush Ave. with the Rockaway peninsula.
In 2002, a new shopping complex called Gateway Center was built east of Spring Creek, and north of the Belt Parkway and the Fountain Ave. Landfill (since turned into Shirley Chisholm State Park) in what was formerly a marshy no man’s land south of East New York. Big-box retailers like Best Buy, Home Depot and Old Navy leased space. Unusually in a mass transit city Gateway Center is inaccessible by subway (similar to Ikea in Red Hook).
Housing was constructed along newly built Vandalia and Schroeders Aves. and Egan St., which had been on hopeful planning maps for years, and several new north-south Streets were constructed, one of which was Erskine St., a main artery leading to the shopping center as a new exit/entrance to the Belt Parkway connects it. It was named for a second Indianan to star with the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers from 1948 through 1959, Carl Erskine.
The Brooklyn accent is nearly extinct, but its hallmark was a dislike of the letter R, so that Erskine came to be affectionately called Oisk in Brooklyn. He won 122 games for the Dodgers and two more in World Series games, winning 20 in 1953 and tossing two no-hitters, in 1952 and 1956. During the first one, he had to wait out a rain delay and came back in the game, a rarity in today’s game. He started the first major league game ever played in Los Angeles.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013).