There Used to be A Ballpark

(Originally posted Nov 2, 2017)

There used to be a ballpark, where the field was warm and green

And the people played their crazy game, with a joy I’d never seen

And the air was such a wonder, from the hotdogs and the beer

Yes there used to be a ballpark, right here.

Brooklyn, New York.  1950’s.  As upper-middle class Brooklynites begin taking to the suburbs on Robert Moses’ new highways, looking for the new “American Dream;” one that involves a front yard, a driveway, and the notion that a better life is out there in the suburbs, Ebbets Field began falling into disrepair.  The field, home of the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers since 1913 had been in desperate need of updating for years, and as more and more Dodgers fans left the city, it was harder for owner Walter O’Malley to find the funds to update the historic ballpark.  Now that so many fans were driving to games, taking the hour-long drive on the brand new highways rather than taking the trolley cars or walking to their beloved ballpark, parking spots became scarce and harder to find in the surrounding areas of Ebbets Field.  O’Malley realized that the only way to fix the Dodgers ballpark was to build a brand new, updated, more modern stadium with plenty of parking and also centralized to public transportation hubs like the subways and the Long Island Railroad.

And O’Malley, believe it or not, planned on doing just that. O’Malley had found the perfect location to build his modern, dream ballpark for the beloved Bums. But there was one man standing in his way: Robert Moses.  Moses was the city planner of the New York Metro area who heavily favored highways rather than public transportation.  This love for highways and his notion that the automobile was the way of the future in fact helped create the Long Island suburbs that are still thriving.  His resume, impressive as it may be, has conveniently left out “moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles.”  Moses was the man who decided what was and wasn’t built in the boroughs of New York and, due to his affinity for highways and the automobile, would not allow O’Malley to build his new ballpark on the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues (ironically, the location where the present-day Barclay’s Center is situated).  Although this location made the most sense: it was right above a stop for the Long Island Railroad, had ample parking for those fans driving in from the Long Island suburbs, and was a central location in Brooklyn, Moses said no.  If the Dodgers were to stay in New York, it would be where Moses wanted a new ballpark to be, not where O’Malley had planned.  

Moses had a location in mind for a brand new stadium—in Queens’ Flushing Meadows on the former site of the campus that Moses had helped build for the 1939 World’s Fair.  This way, fans of the Dodgers would drive along his highways to get to games and wouldn’t have to deal with the headache of driving their new car through the narrow city streets of Brooklyn.  O’Malley had been pleading with Moses since early 1953 to claim the land on Atlantic and Flatbush under Title I eminent domain so he could purchase the land from Moses and build his new stadium for the Dodgers on the cheap.  Letter after letter was sent to Moses’ office in hopes of negotiating, and response after response was sent to O’Malley telling him it would not happen.  If O’Malley wanted to keep the Dodgers on the east coast, it would be where Moses wanted.  O’Malley believed that taking the Dodgers out of the heart of Brooklyn would destroy the team’s (and fan’s) identity.  The Dodgers were Brooklyn—not Queens.  Identity and faith didn’t mean much to Moses, however, who was more concerned with his highways and bridges than fan and team loyalty.

Finally, in 1956, O’Malley felt he had a winning hand.  Or at least a fighting chance.  He returned to the Mayor of New York and Moses in yet another meeting stating that if he doesn’t get the land located at Atlantic and Flatbush, Los Angeles, California has offered to build the stadium of his dreams.  This, he felt, was the bargaining chip that would keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.  He believes that Moses will finally see things his way and almost be forced to claim the land under Title I eminent domain and sell it to O’Malley for his new ballpark.  As we know, though, his plans backfire and Moses still insists that if the Dodgers area going to play in a new ballpark in New York, it will be in Queens, not downtown Brooklyn.  This leaves O’Malley no choice but to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles where they will have a brand new ballpark, ample parking for cars, and all the accommodations they need. This, of course, is Dodgers Stadium at Chavez Ravine, currently one of the longest tenured ballparks in the Majors, opening its doors to Los Angeles Dodgers fans for the first time on April 10, 1962.

What does this all mean for Brooklyn, though?  With the suburbs becoming more and more popular in post-World War II America, the Dodgers were one of the few threads that connected those new suburbs to Brooklyn. Without them, what was the incentive for these new suburbanites to come back into the city on a Sunday afternoon?  There’s a saying in real estate (and in life), “Follow the money,” and all roads leading to money were heading out of Brooklyn in the 1950’s.  As the Brooklyn Naval Yard continued to downsize, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (the last remaining newspaper) finally printed its last issue, the borough was quickly losing its identity.  1956 saw the end of the Brooklyn trolley cars as well.  Not to mention the fact that Coney Island fell into disrepair. For those who could afford it, Long Island became ever more enticing: out of the run-down, tired, small apartments sandwiched together in Brooklyn and in to a place where children can run around on cul-de-sacs and front yards.

 Brooklyn began the decade of the 60’s with the demolition of Ebbets Field and only struggled from there. The borough’s economy weakened and crime increased throughout a number of neighborhoods.  Then, in December of 1960, Park Slope is literally hit with a jet plane.  A DC-8 jet liner crashed into another passenger plane over Staten Island, falling into the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn and causing yet another giant gash in the borough.  

It appears that Park Slope and additional neighborhoods of Brooklyn were hit harder than others in the early 1960’s by an unusual economic downturn the rest of the country didn’t quite experience.  In a 2010 New York Times article by Emily Rueb, she states that “Banks had red-lined the area, citing underground streams and lack of off-street parking as reasons not to lend.  The Federal Housing Administration was not backing mortgages in the whole borough, which meant that even middle-class couples looking to buy could not get financing.  Lured by the promise of a cheap house with a yard for their children and a driveway for their car, many families migrated to Long Island.  Many of the managers at Dime Bank, the Williamsburg Savings Bank and others lived out there, too.  ‘Brooklyn was, in their mind, the land of crime, gangs and arson,’ [former state Assemblyman] Mr. [Joe] Ferris said.”

It’s somewhat farfetched to say with certainty that if the Dodgers stayed in Brooklyn, the Long Island suburbs would not have been as popular and Brooklyn wouldn’t have seen an economic decline or a crime increase through the 60’s, 70’s, and into 80’s.  Baseball, even in its heyday, didn’t have that much clout in any city.  But it is fair to say that with the removal of the heart and soul of the borough, it made the decision to move to the suburbs a lot easier for those Brooklynites who could afford to.  This lead to even more abandonment and disrepair which spiraled downwards until the revival of the late-80’s with artists, writers, poets, and new, young professionals with money and the gumption to rebuild the area.

Following in Brooklyn’s footsteps, a number of cities were looking for their next big renaissance in the late 80’s and early 1990’s too.  Cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver just to name a few had a few pockets of thriving city life while an overwhelming majority of the city was in disrepair and desolate.  While not every city could count on young professionals and other groups with money to come in and save their downtown neighborhoods, many took their fate into their own hands and decided to do something about the state of their downtowns.  There needed to be a year-long draw for people to live back in the downtown neighborhoods of these cities.  Football only saw eight home games a year.  Hockey wasn’t nearly as popular and basketball wasn’t as a big of a draw.  

Baltimore in 1989 recognized the potential for a ballpark, a brand new baseball stadium to turn around their downtown and create a resurgence in the city’s economy.  Baltimore’s Camden Yards also kick-started the trend of building new “throwback” ballparks in downtown areas of cities like Jacob’s Field in Cleveland and Coors Field in Denver.  These stadiums, architecturally, were limited by the space available to Populous, the Kansas City-based architecture firm that spearheaded many new inner city ballparks. According to the Populous website, In 1992 the Baltimore Orioles challenged Populous with the task of creating a baseball-specific facility in an urban environment that was unique to the evolution of the sport. While creating this baseball-specific stadium, Populous also had to honor the historic area in which the new ballpark would be located. The site’s adjacency to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor Development and the existence of the B&O Warehouse buildings imparted a unique and challenging nature to the planning process.” Cities, and Major League Baseball wanted to start trending away from multi-sport, cookie-cutter stadiums that were built on the outskirts of town with plenty of parking and absolutely no character whatsoever (think: Giants Stadium, Veterans Field, Riverfront Stadium, and even Shea Stadium).  Boring, circular, and nowhere remotely close to any sort of downtown neighborhood, these stadiums were what cities wanted in the 1960’s and 70’s.  But by the early 90’s, city planners realized that there was potential for a homely, neighborhood ballpark planted right in the middle of downtown to bring people back into the cities and spend their money at the ballgame and hopefully the restaurants, bars, and retail stores in the neighborhood before and after the game.  And why did this renaissance start with baseball of all sports?  Because in the early 1990’s baseball was going through a resurgence of its own.  Plus, out of any of the big four major sports (football, baseball, basketball and hockey), baseball has the most home games.  This meant that 82 times in the season, the ballpark would be used and the neighborhood would thrive.  Not a bad start.  

Populous wanted to create a ballpark for the city of Baltimore that would honor its history and be unique to the city itself.  Incorporating the B&O Warehouse as a façade in right field wasn’t an aesthetic ploy, although the brick building became the iconic image of the ballpark, but a factor of the limited space that Populous had to work with for the ballpark.  Like many of the Populous ballparks, a view of the city skyline was crucial to making each field feel unique to that specific city.  No two city skylines are the same, so it was important for the ballparks to recognize that.

Timothy Chapin, in his 2004 article titled “Sports Facilities as Urban Redevelopment Catalysts” cites Baltimore’s Camden Yards and the inner city revitalization as one of the most noted and successful projects.  Why Camden Yards?  Why did the city of Baltimore and Populous agree on that location?  As Chapin states, Camden Yards “was a dilapidated railyards and warehouse district, littered with vacant buildings and an eclectic mix of businesses.  The city had long been interested in seeing this area of the city reused and integrated into the emerging tourism and entertainment economy.”  With the addition of the Inner Harbor Aquarium, there were now draws to come downtown twelve months out of the year in Baltimore.

Cleveland and Denver soon followed in the footsteps of Baltimore, too.  Cleveland sought to make an all-inclusive sports complex where the Cavaliers (NBA) and the Indians (MLB) were only a few hundred feet from one another.  The city found their location and built Gund Arena for the Cavs and Jacobs Field for the Indians.  In addition, city planners, the mayor, and Sasaki—the urban development team that lead the 28-acre sports complex—added parking for upwards of 2,100 cars.  This brought new life into an area of downtown Cleveland previously run-down and desolate.

Denver’s Coors Field revitalized an area of downtown Denver that was home to drifters, crack houses, and not much of anything else in the mid-1990’s as well.  These ballparks aren’t the sole reason that neighborhoods turn around, though.  There needs to be more than just the attraction of a ballgame to lure those who can afford it back to an area of town that was once type-casted as “dangerous.”  There need to be business owners too, who are willing to take the chance on an “up and coming” neighborhood like Downtown Denver, Pig Town and the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, and Downtown Cleveland.  This primarily led to upscale restaurants and bars opening their doors for the fans to enjoy before, during, and after ballgames.  Downtown Denver, as of 2016, is one of the most expensive neighborhoods to live in Denver.  It’s come a long way from the bombed out warehouses of the 1990’s.  Lofts, restaurants, bars, and tech companies now make their home in Downtown where there was once nothing but drifters.

These ballparks don’t just help rebuild a neighborhood in cities like these three, but it helps create a sense of neighborhood elsewhere as well.  Baseball has come a long way since the cookie-cutter multi-use stadiums of the 1970’s and 80’s where fans would drive out of town to watch the game and then turn around and drive right home.  Riverfront, Veterans Field, Crosley Field, etc. were all located right off highways for easy access to and from.  But what about before game time?  What about once the action was over?  Fans were left with little options besides getting in their cars and driving home.  Fans now want the neighborhood experience of going to a ballgame.  Get there early for dinner, walk to the game, drink local craft beers and locally sourced foods, and then hit a local bar afterwards all within walking distance of the ballpark and public transportation like that of Union Station in Denver—a hub of buses and trains.

Overall, ballparks and the game that’s played in them are not the sole reason for urban revitalization.  They’re also not the sole reason for neighborhoods or boroughs to fall into disrepair.  However, looking at the borough of Brooklyn after the Dodgers left shows us that neighborhood identities and economy can very well be influenced by a ballpark and the neighborhood team.  Granted there are a number of additional factors that go into the Dodgers leaving and the inevitable fall of Brooklyn in the 1960’s, 70’s, and into the 80’s, Ebbets Field being destroyed and the departure of the Dodgers definitely did not help.Transversely, the Inner Harbor and Pig Town in Baltimore and the Downtown neighborhoods of Cleveland and Denver didn’t turn around solely due to Camden Yards, Jacobs Field, and Coors Field.  But, as it has been argued, they are the linchpins and catalyst of urban growth and bringing people back into once-dilapidated neighborhoods.  The ballparks help recreate and bring new life into downtown centers of cities.  Now if we can only get the Orioles, Indians, and Rockies to post a winning record.

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