Ebbets Field / Brooklyn Dodgers / 1913-1957

Seating: 18,000 (1913), 26,000 (1924), 28,000 (1926), 35,000 (1937), 32,000 (1938), 34,219 (1940), 34,000 (1941), 32,000 (1946), 31,902 (1952)
Original cost: $750,000 (1913)

Ebbets Field was an opulent palace of baseball when it opened on April 9, 1913, as the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. When the working-class Brooklynites showed up to cheer on the Dodgers, they entered the ballpark through a legendary 80-foot-wide rotunda, walking across a floor of Italian marble decorated like the stitching on a baseball, their path illuminated with light from a mammoth chandelier featuring 12 arms shaped like baseball bats.

Why the show? The Dodgers weren't the top attraction in New York baseball in the 1910s: in 1913 the New York Giants ruled the roost. The team had moved into its own baseball showcase, the fireproofed Polo Grounds, and the Giants' attendance picked up while the Dodgers' attendance at Washington Park, at Third Street and Fourth Avenue in the Red Hook area of South Brooklyn (which isn't actually the southernmost part of Brooklyn, but that's a whole other story), slipped away. Washington Park was small  So Dodgers owner Charlie Ebbets decided to build something grand and magnificent to draw attention to what had become a pretty decent team. After obtaining some land in the borderline -- but inexpensive -- area of Flatbush called Pigtown, Ebbets mapped out. It was a grand dream, and beyond Ebbets' financial wherewithal: he ended up selling half the team to the brothers who built Ebbets Field.

Who, by the way, didn't do that great a job designing a ballpark, or opening it, for that matter. When Ebbets Field opened for an exhibition game against the New York Yankees in early April 1913, team officials and incoming reporters realized that for some reason a press box was never planned or constructed. (It is possible that Charlie Ebbets wasn't that fond of the press: it wasn't until 1929 that a press box was constructed.) No one could get into the left-field bleachers because they were locked up and no one had a key. More curious was the omission of a flag pole in center field.

Still, despite located in Pigtown, Ebbets Field had a great location. Flatbush Avenue was the main drag through Brooklyn, and two subway/rail stations were located within three blocks of the ballpark. The area was served by nine trolley lines that connected to 32 others. (This is how the Dodgers got their name: Brooklyn residents were forever dodging the trolley cars.) Nobody drove to a Dodgers game: most came by foot. Pete Hamill remembers walking to Ebbets Field as a kid:

Nobody we knew owned a car, so we went there on foot from where I lived, walking across the hills and meadows of Prospect Park. By the time we reached Flatbush Avenue, there was a convergence of all the tribes of Brooklyn: the Jews and the Irish and the Italians, immigrants and their American children; oldtimers who had moved from the waterfront neighborhoods to the higher slopes to be near the great ballpark; tough lean men who had survived Iwo Jima and Anzio and the Hurtgen Forest, places where they had lost the hyphenated prefixes of origin and had become Americans; and of course, all those black Americans, including men with gray hair who had waited for too many decades to see Jack Roosevelt Robinson walk on big league grass....

As kids, we used free tickets from the Police Athletic League to get in, or brought one of our friends who had been crippled by polio and played on the sympathies of the special cops, who always let us in, with a growl and a wink. Then we climbed dark ramps, higher and higher, climbing to the distant reaches and the cheapest seats in the ball park. Finally we were at the top level, and walked through a gate, out of the darkness, and there before us was the field. No grass has ever been greener. Each time I went back to Ebbets Field, and made that climb, and saw that field, my skin pebbled once more, at the sight of all that beauty.

The original design to Ebbets Field was a two-story grandstand that curved in back of home plate, extending all the way down to the foul pole on the first-base side and to just past the infield on the third-base side; a deck of bleachers went from there to the foul pole. There initially were no outfield bleachers, but there sure was a lot of playing surface: left field extended 419 feet down the left-field line and 477 feet to dead center. Only right field was friendly to batters, with the fences only 301 feet down the right-field line.

Ebbets Field underwent two major renovations before settling into a final configuration. In 1924, outfield bleachers were added to left field in front of the the fences. Before the 1932 season, the grandstand was extended all the way down the left-field line, across to left field and then to center field. This pushed the capacity to 32,000, but more importantly it dramatically changed the nature of the ballpark and the playing field. Whereas Ebbets Field began life as a pitchers' park because of the generous dimensions in left field, it had become a hitter's paradise by 1932: it was 348 feet down the left-field line, 389 feet to dead center, and 297 feet down the right-field line. The power alleys were also similarly hitter-friendly: only 360 feet to left and 315 to right.

Add to those dimensions a number of quirks, and you've got a nightmare for opposing outfielders. A19-foot screen in right field sitting on top of a 19-foot fence kept a number of balls in play, and the weird right-field wall -- which was crooked away from the playing field -- led to a number of odd bounces over the years. Because the Dodgers were used to playing under such odd conditions, they quickly gained a home-field advantage.

But the odd dimensions and the cozy configuration wasn't why Ebbets Field was so beloved in its day or so fondly remembered today. Much of this nostalgia has to do with the very nature of Brooklyn and its relationship to the rest of New York City.

During the heyday of the Dodgers, Brooklyn was the melting pot of New York City. The swells lived in Manhattan, and the working class lived in Brooklyn. This particular working class had a collective chip on its shoulder as big as the Ritz: Brooklynites were permanently underdogs and dared the rest of the city -- and the world -- to knock it off. Yes, they may be bums, but they're the Brooklyn Bums. The Dodgers took this notion to heart and reveled in it: Dem Bums became the team's rallying cry, and the team commissioned New York World-Telegram artist Willard Mullin to put his archetypal Brooklyn Bum on the cover of team publications. Thought the average Brooklynite may have felt marginal in the grand scheme of things, he was king at Ebbets Field, entering through the grand rotunda and then occupying a seat close to the action. (Of course, in a ballpark so small, all the seats were close to the action: "The fans, you joked with them on a first-name basis," said Pee Wee Reese. "You were friends.") And the typical crowd could only have come from the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Hilda Chester is still renowned in baseball circles as the ultimate Dodgers fan: she sat out in the left-center-field bleachers with her cowbell (her doctor forbade her to yell after she suffered a heart attack). (The cowbell was actually a scaled-back instrument for her: she began by banging a frying pan with an iron ladle.) The Brooklyn Sym-phony Band, whose enthusiasm way outpaced their musical skill, still exists to this day: consisting of a trumpet, trombone, cymbals, bass drum and snare drum, the band roamed through Ebbets Field.

Even the outfield ads were legendary: the Abe Stark sign at the base of the right-field Schaefer Beer scoreboard (the Schaefer lettering was functional: the h would light up for a hit, while the e lit up for an error) promised a suit to anyone who hit the sign, but few did -- the sign was low to the ground, which meant that the right fielder usually caught the ball before it could hit the sign. It was all shrewd marketing on the part of the Dodgers, which is partially why Dodger fans were so distraught when the team moved to Los Angeles in 1958: it was their team that was moving away.

Plus, many historical events, played out in Ebbets Field, were etched in public memory. Certainly the most important one was the signing of Jackie Robinson as the first African-American player in the major leagues. Robinson made his debut on April 15, 1947, playing first base for the Dodgers. What could have been a tense situation was defused when Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Robinson before the game, letting the crowd know that he was on Robinson's side in any potential standoff.

In addition, Ebbets Field was the location of the first television broadcast of a major-league game. On August 26, 1939, views of the NBC television network saw the first game of a Saturday doubleheader featuring the Cincinnati Reds and the Dodgers. A young Red Barber called the game.

And opposing players made their mark in Ebbets Field as well. It was here that Casey Stengel famously tipped his hat to the hostile Brooklyn crowd and a bird flew out. Johnny Vander Meer threw his second consecutive no-hitter at Ebbets Field in the first night game ever played at Ebbets.

By the 1950s, however, Walter O'Malley grew dissatisfied with Ebbets Field, first proposing a new stadium for the Dodgers elsewhere in Brooklyn and then elsewhere in New York City. City officials, led by the legendary Robert Moses, weren't too thrilled about building a new stadium for the Dodgers or even giving some desirable real estate for a privately funded stadium; instead, Moses offered a tract of land in Queen's Flushing Meadows. (No, O'Malley replied: "We'll not be the Brooklyn Dodgers if we're in Queens.") But in the end, O'Malley threw in the towell when Los Angeles made an offer he couldn't refuse: free land and a ton of civic support. Brooklyn didn't give up on the Dodgers (attendance in 1957 was well over a million -- pretty good for its day); the Dodgers gave up on Brooklyn.

After O'Malley moved the Dodgers in 1958 to play first at the Los Angeles Coliseum and then at Chavez Ravine (later renamed Dodger Stadium), Ebbets Field sat empty while New York grappled with the issue of the future of baseball in the city with the defection of both the Dodgers and the New York Giants; suddenly the center of the baseball universe had no National League team to call it home. To fill the voice, the Continental League looked at establishing operations in New York, but this effort ended when the National and American Leagues agreed to expand by four team. When the New York Mets settled into the Polo Grounds and groundbreaking occurred at Shea Stadium, it was clear that Ebbets Field had no future as a ballpark. The park was demolished in 1960 (later the same baseball-painted wrecking ball would also be used to demolish the Polo Grounds), with the light poles moved to Downing Stadium on Randall's Island. In its place was constructed a block of high-rise apartment buildings, the Ebbets Field Apartments; down the block is a school named after Jackie Robinson.

More photos of Ebbets Field

Excerpt from The Last Good Season

STATS