Once Upon a Time, Brooklyn Had Its Own Baseball Park

In Brooklyn, they still tell the story of a Dodgers fan who takes his son on a pilgrimage to the site of Ebbets Field.

As they stand on the soft slope of Bedford Avenue, in the shadow of a towering housing project, the father tells the boy, “You know, son, a great baseball team once played here.”

“Oh yeah?” the boy replies. “On what floor?”

There used to be a ballpark here, smack in the middle of Brooklyn. But the site where Jackie Robinson forever changed pro sports has undergone its own transformation since April 15, 1947, when he stepped onto Flatbush’s greenest lawn as the first black player in the majors.

Now the neighborhood is dominated by the Ebbets Field Apartments, a cold brick structure with all the charm of the antiseptic, Astroturfed ballparks that replaced baseball’s vintage stadiums.

Bedford Avenue, once the cobblestoned receptacle for home runs knocked over right field’s Schaefer Beer sign, has joined the disposable ‘90s--fast-food franchises, a drugstore chain, a gas station with mini-mart.

Along the first-base line on Sullivan Street is a mural of South African leader Nelson Mandela. The mural bears another sign of the times: a list of 13 city police officers slain in the last decade.

Beyond the old left-field wall is a monument to another black hero: Medgar Evers College, named for the civil rights leader gunned down in Mississippi 16 years after Robinson’s debut.

At the intersection of McKeever and Sullivan, opposite the old Ebbets Field entrance, is Intermediate School 320, opened on a former parking lot in 1968 and christened four years later as the Jackie Robinson School. Here is the neighborhood’s tribute to Robinson, a full color portrait of him on a wall outside its entrance.

Long gone is the sign posted by Abe Stark, a local businessman who delivered a free suit to any hitter able to rap a liner off his 3-foot-by-30-foot outfield wall ad. Instead, stark red and white signs at the apartment complex deliver messages.

“NO BALL PLAYING,” the signs announce. Where organist Gladys Gooding once played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” another sign cautions, “NO MUSIC.” Where Robinson made history, a third sign advises, “KEEP OFF GRASS.”

It wasn’t that way during the glory days, when the Duke and Roy and Pee Wee were the toasts of the borough.

Edward Rodriguez, 63, remembers Flatbush as fondly as he remembers “Dem Bums.”

“Can you imagine a 9- or 10-year-old going to a game alone?” asked Rodriguez, who now lives in Tampa, Fla. “I did it many times.”

Robert “Hodie” Hodas remembers taking a trolley to the ballpark in the days before the Dodgers broke his 8-year-old heart by moving to Los Angeles at the end of the ’57 season.

“Ebbets Field was like my Mecca,” Hodas said. “Thirty-thousand fans traveling from all corners of the borough to cheer on their beloved Dodgers--the best representatives of the mass of humanity who loved their team as much as life itself.”

The stadium, wedged into a single city block, opened on April 9, 1913, and outlasted the Brooklyn Dodgers themselves. The wrecking ball arrived at Ebbets Field on Feb. 23, 1960.

The biggest change for Brooklyn and the Ebbets Field neighborhood came when the Dodgers left. Tens of thousands of Brooklynites followed over the next 40 years, and the population is down about 700,000 since Robinson’s debut.

To this day, Brooklyn remains the only American community of 2 million people without its own daily paper, major airport, or professional sports team.

“There is no way to calculate the psychological damage,” said Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who is battling to keep the Yankees in his borough. “Brooklyn still hasn’t gotten over the Dodgers to this day.”

Living in Flatbush while the Dodgers were still in town was almost like being in one gigantic family, Rodriguez said.

“To experience this was something so wonderful that I really feel sorry for the kids of today, who will never know what it was like to go see a baseball game when it was a game,” he said.

Baseball? That’s another change along McKeever Street. Basketball is now Brooklyn’s game, played on the asphalt courts, in the shadow of the apartments, where there used to be a ballpark.