The Brooklyn Bandbox
The Overlook
By Tom Clavin
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There is still no spring training, so to fill that void I can at least write about baseball. In this instance: Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of Ebbets Field being demolished.
There are not many people left who attended the stadium owned by the Brooklyn Dodgers and even fewer who know how it came to be. The handful still around who rooted in those stands recall that Ebbets Field was on Bedford Avenue and that the site upon which Charles Ebbets built his ballpark included a garbage dump called Pigtown, so named because of the pigs that once ate their fill there and the stench that filled the air. Construction began on March 4, 1912. At the cornerstone-laying ceremony, Ebbets said that the ballpark was going to be ready for play on September 1, and that Brooklyn was going to win the National League pennant in 1913.
Neither of Ebbets's predictions were correct. On August 29, 1912, as the deadline drew near and it was obvious that the ballpark was not even close to being finished, it was announced that Ebbets had sold shares in the team to Stephen and Edward McKeever, brothers who had built their fortune in contracting and were able to speed along the construction to make up for an iron workers' strike during the summer. Ebbets also sold them 50 percent of the team. Finally, early in 1913, Ebbets Field was ready for baseball. Newspaper coverage was filled with glowing praise about the new park, calling it as “Monument to the National Game" and predicting it could last 200 years.
The first game played was an inter-league exhibition game against the New York Yankees on April 5, 1913 before an over-capacity of 30,000 fans. The Brooklyn club won 3-2, helped by a home run slugged by outfielder Casey Stengel. The first game that counted was played on April 9 against the Philadelphia Phillies, with Brooklyn losing, 1–0. When the park was opened, it was discovered that the press box had been forgotten. One was not added until 1929. The seating area was initially a double deck from past third base, around home plate, and all the way down the right side. There was an open, concrete bleacher stand extending the rest of the way down the third base side to the outer wall, but no seating in left field or centerfield. The right field wall was fairly high due to the short foul line (around 300 feet). The ballpark was built on a sloping piece of ground. The right field wall made up the difference, as the right field corner was above street level. The intimate configuration prompted some baseball writers to refer to Ebbets Field as a "cigar box" or a "bandbox."
The ballpark was the scene of some early successes, as the Dodgers, also called the "Robins" after long-time manager Wilbert Robinson, won National League championships in 1916 and 1920. The seating area was expanded in the 1920s, a boom time for baseball when many ballparks were expanded. The double deck was extended from third base around the left field corner, across left field, and into center field, allowing right-hand hitters to swat many more home runs. By the 1940s, a big scoreboard had been installed in right field as well as a screen atop the high wall which made home runs to right field a tougher accomplishment. However, additional rows of seating across left field reduced that area by about 15 feet, to the delight of right-handed sluggers.
The park's first night game was played on June 15, 1938, drawing a crowd of 38,748. Johnny Vander Meer of the visiting Cincinnati Reds pitched his second consecutive no-hitter in that game, a feat that has never been duplicated in Major League Baseball. It was also in 1938 that Hilda Chester, one of the earlier sports "superfans," became a regular attendee when Larry MacPhail brought Ladies' Days to Ebbets Field, only charging women a 10-cent admission.
The last hurrah for the legendary ballpark was when the Brooklyn Dodgers finally defeated their rivals the Yankees to with the World Series in 1955. They were dethroned by the Yankees the following year, then lost Ebbets Field too.
Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, had pressed for years for a new stadium. Not only was Ebbets Field in a rundown condition by the mid-1950s, it held the fewest number of fans of any stadium in the National League. He was thwarted – especially by the “power broker” Robert Moses – in his efforts to find a site in Brooklyn for a new stadium. O’Malley finally gave up and moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.
Ebbets Field became the equivalent of a ghost town. Then the time came, in 1960, to tear it down to make way for a housing project. On February 23, a brass band played “Auld Lang Syne” as 200 people watched a two-ton cast-iron wrecking ball – painted to resemble a baseball – knock Ebbets Field apart, one pitiless blow at a time. Roy Campanella, the great Dodgers catcher, by then in a wheelchair, was present and given an urn filled with dirt from behind home plate.
The year before, the Dodgers had become the first baseball team west of St. Louis to win a world championship. Chavez Ravine, the new stadium for the Dodgers in Los Angeles, opened in 1962. By then, the site of the former Ebbets Field contained apartment buildings.
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including, most recently, Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival, published by St. Martin’s Press. The trade paperback edition of Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier (with Bob Drury) is to be published on March 15. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.