JACKIE ROBINSON WAS THE FINAL BROOKLYN DODGER BATTER in the last game of the 1956 World Series. He struck out. He was thirty-seven years old, had battered knees, and after the 1957 season, in which he fought with manager Walter Alston, he decided he was going to retire. He sold his exclusive story to LOOK magazine for $50,000. But he neglected to tell general manager Buzzie Bavasi of his plans, and a few days before the article was to appear, Bavasi traded him to the New York Giants for Dick Littlefield and $30,000. Robinson was in a bind. The Giants were offering him $60,000 to play, more than the Dodgers had ever paid him. The pressure was to keep playing, but what about the article saying he was quitting?
Bavasi told reporters that, in his opinion, Robinson’s retirement article had been a ploy to wrest more money from the Giants. To be accused of greed by Bavasi—and, by implication, his boss Walter O’Malley, himself an avaricious man—was too much for Robinson to bear. He went through with his retirement. Robinson, the player who broke the color barrier, had been signed by Branch Rickey, a man O’Malley resented for doing so. O’Malley had even tried taking credit for it. But Rickey was gone, and Robinson’s retirement drew little comment from O’Malley, even though Robinson had led the Dodgers to six National League pennants and one World Series. Instead of cheers, he was leaving amid controversy. Play for the Giants? Robinson just couldn’t bring himself to do it. How could Bavasi and O’Malley even ask him to do such a thing?
Walter O’Malley, left, discusses subscription TV in the 1950s, years ahead of its time. Library of Congress
What nobody knew was that Walter O’Malley was looking to the future. In 1953 the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee. O’Malley couldn’t help notice that County Stadium sat 43,000 fans—10,000 more than Ebbets Field—and featured 10,000 parking spaces for automobiles. Ebbets Field had fewer than a thousand.
Said O’Malley, “How long can we continue to compete on an even basis with a team that can outdraw us two to one and outpark us almost fifteen to one, which pays its park a token figure, and pays no city or real estate tax? If they take in twice as many dollars, they’ll eventually be able to buy better talent. Then they’ll be the winners, not us.” The Braves had won the 1957 and 1958 National League pennants, and the 1958 World Series.
O’Malley had been talking about building a new ballpark even before he took over as Dodgers president in 1950. The Yankees packed 75,000 fans into their games. The Giants drew 56,000 at the Polo Grounds. Ebbets Field sat only 33,000. He wanted a new 55,000-seat stadium in order to compete. Every year between 1950 and 1957 attendance topped 1 million, second-best in the league. But O’Malley kept insisting the Dodgers weren’t making money.
And there was something else O’Malley noticed. The white fans who had moved to the suburbs were not going to Dodgers games anymore. Said sports reporter Harold Rosenthal, “The people who were buying season tickets, the furniture companies in Jamaica, Queens, and the manufacturers on Long Island couldn’t give their tickets away to customers because it was too difficult to get there.”
Black fans were going to the games, but they were not united with the white fans. The black fans tended to root for the black players, even those not on the Dodgers.
BILL REDDY “After we did the big job in ’55, the talk of the Dodgers moving was rampant all over the borough. Nobody wanted to believe it, but deep in your heart you knew it was true. The white families were moving out of Brooklyn, and they were the backbone of Ebbets Field. We didn’t have enough blacks to replace them. We had a lot of Jamaicans and West Indians coming in who didn’t appreciate baseball as we did. They were cricket players. And until the Hispanics could find jobs and get enough money to go out to Ebbets Field, they didn’t have hard-core baseball fans. They would hang out at the Parade Grounds, where they could see free baseball. Attendance did fall.
“But I think O’Malley planned it that way. He didn’t push for attendance like MacPhail and Rickey, where Red Barber would be talking on the radio, ‘Hey, we’re close to a million.’ And everybody in Brooklyn was running out to go again to make sure they made it.
“O’Malley wasn’t pushing for the big attendance. He didn’t want it. He wanted to justify his move to California. And I think he had that in the works long, long before the first inkling was let out to the public.”
THE HINTS HE WAS LEAVING BEGAN DURING THE 1955 SEASON. HE COMPLAINED THAT the area around Ebbets Field was a “bad neighborhood” and that after a night game you better get the hell out of there fast. During mid-season O’Malley announced that seven Dodger games would be played in Jersey City the following season. He wanted a new stadium, and soon.
In 1956, O’Malley stepped up the pressure on the city to build a new ballpark for the team. He wanted it built over the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road at the Atlantic Yards near downtown Brooklyn. Robert Moses, who had the last word on such a move, said no. Moses said the new stadium should be built in Flushing, Queens. O’Malley didn’t want it there. He wanted it in Brooklyn. It was an impasse that would not be broken.
During the 1956 World Series one of O’Malley’s guests was Kenneth Hahn, a member of the Los Angles Board of Supervisors. O’Malley had contacted him. He told Hahn he was looking to move.
After the Series, the newspapers revealed that the city of Los Angeles was prepared to offer O’Malley a sweetheart deal if he moved his team to the West Coast. How could O’Malley do this to his loyal fans? Irving Rudd was the director of public relations for the Dodgers. He had watched O’Malley closely and knew exactly how he could do this.
IRVING RUDD “Sentiment meant nothing. Everything was business. It was a winter’s night, and I was alone with him in his office, and I don’t know why, but he let his hair down with me. I was confiding in him that I was having trouble with a man who had once done me a big favor. But lately he had become a real pain, and though I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, I really didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore.”
O’Malley told Rudd he was having the same problem with an old friend, George McLaughlin, without whom he would not have been an owner of the Dodgers, but that he no longer consulted with the man.
IRVING RUDD “‘So in the future, Irving,’ O’Malley said, ‘you’ll find that it’s great to have loyal friendships from the past, but sometimes you have to cut the cord to seek new horizons, and you can’t be tied down by the past.’
“And he did feel badly about it, and yet, fuck it, on to Los Angeles, if you know what I mean.”
In the summer of 1957 O’Malley announced the Dodgers were leaving at the end of the season. The final game at Ebbets Field was played on September 24, 1957. Fewer than seven thousand fans came out to watch the Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 3-0. Gil Hodges was the last Dodger batter, and he struck out. After the game Gladys Gooding, the organist, played “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” but before she could finish, a recording of the Dodgers theme song blared on the loudspeaker.
Oh, follow the Dodgers
Follow the Dodgers around
The infield, the outfield
The catcher and that fellow on the mound.
Oh, the fans will come a-running
When the Dodgers go a-gunning
For the pennants that they’re fighting for today.
The Dodgers keep swinging
And the fans will keep singing
Follow the Dodgers, hooray!
There’s a baseball club in Brooklyn
The team they call “Dem Bums”
But keep your eyes right on them
And watch for hits and runs.
When the final line faded out, Gooding began to play “Auld Lang Syne.” Amid tears, fans were looting the park and destroying the field. In Brooklyn they were called “Dem Bums,” but the editor of one of the Los Angeles papers vowed that “Dem Bums” would never appear in his newspaper. These would be a more serious Dodgers.
When the Dodgers left, the borough lost the one passion people had in common. It also lost its national presence. Brooklyn would fade into becoming just another bedroom community.
STAN KANTER “The end of the golden era for Brooklyn came in 1957, when the Dodgers announced they were leaving Brooklyn. The Dodgers had played games in Jersey City, and attendance was dwindling, but it still came as an enormous shock. There’s a quote in Bums, where Pete Hamill says the three greatest villains in history are Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley. I still feel that way. To me, O’Malley is up there with Hitler. This was a greedy guy who destroyed a borough, and the borough has never been the same since. It used to be such a good feeling where you could walk through the streets and listen to the Dodger games coming out of the windows. You could meet the toughest thug, who might be ready to beat you up, and you’d say, ‘Did you see the Dodger game today?’ Suddenly, you’re pals. No longer. It just wasn’t the same place.
“After they moved, I watched the Los Angeles Dodger scores, because I wanted to know how Hodges and Snider and Pee Wee were doing, but my heart wasn’t in it. You just couldn’t care about them, and to this day I root against anything from Los Angeles. You just can’t shake these habits. I don’t have a team.”
The departure of the Dodgers may have been Brooklyn’s most tragic loss, but it wasn’t the only one. Pete Hamill, who grew up in Park Slope in the 1940s, experienced not only the loss of his beloved Dodgers, but the demise of the Brooklyn Eagle and the closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and many of the factories that had hired his dad and his dad’s generation. The widespread injection of heroin into New York City’s subculture didn’t help either.
PETE HAMILL “There were four events starting in the mid-1950s that really shook Brooklyn to its core. The first was the closing of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1955. I wasn’t around for that, because I was in the navy. But for most of my life, getting the Eagle, which would arrive in the afternoon, was part of the rhythm of the day.
“The Eagle was a broadsheet. In its early history it was conservative, but not right-wing. It wasn’t anti-immigrant. I don’t know whether it supported Roosevelt or not, because we read it for the sports. They covered the farm teams of the Dodgers. So we heard about Robinson in the Eagle in 1946 because he was playing in Montreal. That year he came down and played against Jersey City.
“We read about guys who never made it. There was a player named Maynard DeWitt, who stole sixty bases one year in the minors. We said, ‘Oh man, wait till this guy comes.’ Of course, he couldn’t bunt for a base hit.
“The Eagle had a very good sports writer by the name of Tommy Holmes and an older guy named Harold C. Burr. We would read the sports, and I would read the comics, and the Eagle would cover the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Reporters would cover Bensonhurst, Midwood, all these places, so you got a sense that there was a Brooklyn beyond where you lived. It gave you a sense of being part of a place that was more than just the Dodgers and was certainly different from the William Bendix stereotypical Brooklynite. I thought we sounded like Red Barber. That was the voice of Brooklyn. We weren’t dees, dems, and dose guys. There were people like that, but they weren’t the only people. My parents didn’t talk like that. They didn’t even have strong Irish accents, because they were from cities. The thick Irish accent came from the countryside.
“A newspaper is like a plaza in South America, a zocalo where at one table they talk about soccer, and at another table about politics, and the next one women, and sometimes all at once. So no matter where you lived in Brooklyn, there was something in the paper about you. Not you specifically, but your part of Brooklyn.
“There were funny things in it. People would read the obituaries as an apartment guide. ‘So-and-so died at 21 East 3rd Street.’ This was after the war, when there was a shortage of housing, and immediately you’d think, If some guy would only die, we could move someplace. There were grifters who were still around from the Depression, and they would read the obits and show up at the wake. ‘Ah, geez, Lenny was a wonderful fucking guy.’ He’d eat the free food and drink and leave. He had never met the guy in his life.
“When the Eagle folded, the presses were bought up and shipped off to Ecuador. The function of the Eagle was never picked up by other papers. The Post picked up the Bronx Home News, but they never covered Brooklyn. And that was too bad.
“The second great loss to the borough was the Dodgers. It was not that the Dodgers were a baseball team, but that they were an excellent baseball team. They were a team built on all sorts of urban values. They were not perfect. They never had a great pitching staff, but they made it up in other ways, with the engine of Robinson. There were Furillo fans and Gil Hodges fans, because Gil was nice to everyone as he passed through the neighborhood to go to Ebbets Field. And they loved Duke Snider. They also loved Willie Mays, though they never quite connected with Mantle. It was Snider, Mays, and Mantle. It was like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam fighting over the same city, Jerusalem. And on a much higher level, because it’s more important to argue over who’s the best center fielder than whether God exists. We spent our time standing on street corners, not sitting and watching television, so there would be theological debates. A guy comes to me and tells me, ‘Kill your son to prove you love me.’ I’d say, ‘Fuck you. Who are you?’ Abraham and Isaac didn’t work in Brooklyn. Nor did ‘turn the other cheek.’ But there was a kind of rough intelligence I remember. People might not have been as well-educated as they could have or should have been, but they were smart.
“Heroin began to hit the white neighborhoods while I was in the navy in 1955. When I came back, heroin was there, and people started dying. Seventeenth Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, had always been a kind of alcoholic street. Public drunks would roister around, but in the ’60s it became a pretty big junkie street.
“It became dangerous. If a guy staggered drunk out of Ratigans on Seventh Avenue, the cop was not going to lock him up. He’d take him home and stick him at the door, and he might make it to the second floor and fall asleep. But junkies, they didn’t care. They would come to your house and rob your mother. It was a terrible thing when that began to happen. And it was the beginning of the end for the Mob, like in Goodfellas. Once the children of these Italian drug dealers began using, then they had no bench. They had a bunch of gavones standing in front of places they couldn’t keep up. They were third-generation immigrants and second-generation hoodlums, and they were like the Hearsts: the farther you got away from the old man in generations, the more incompetent they were.
“And the fourth blow was the closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard around 1966. Robert McNamara was the guy who closed it down, but before that it was closing in stages. I had a cousin David who worked there, and to protect his pension he ended up having to go to Philadelphia for a couple years, because the navy moved a lot of the functions to the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
“When I was working there, there were seventy thousand jobs. Through the Korean War they were working three shifts. It was a madhouse then just trying to get on the subway to get home. All those bars along Sands Street and down that way were all booming, because a shift would end at four, another ended at midnight, and during lunch break the guys would run over and have a couple of whiskeys and head back. That many jobs was like having three Ford plants in your town, and when it closed, that was the end of the blue-collar era, because other factories were closing as well.
“The world of factories is basically gone. I don’t know whether it’s better now or not. I’m not against gentrification, because it’s better than junkies.
“Part of why the factories closed was they fled first to the South, where there were no unions and it was cheaper to run. We had unions in New York, and that’s why people got a reasonably decent pay and pensions in addition to social security. But they went to the South first, and some of them just went out of business, because whatever they were making died. And then came outsourcing. Forty years ago companies started moving to Mexico and other countries. They tried setting up deals in Puerto Rico, where they paid no taxes for ten years, but then as soon as they had to pay taxes, they left there too.
“These were the key events: the closing of the Eagle, the Dodgers moving, heroin, and the closing of the Navy Yard and the factories, which led to a decline of the city.”