Exorcising the Brooklyn Dodgers -- New York Magazine

Exorcising the Dodgers

Fans demonstrating in 1957 to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.

(Photo: Diamond Images/Getty Images)

Between us on the table was a deteriorating plastic bag, probably 30 years old, inside of which was an even older envelope, its paper crispy and torn, which in turn contained a handful of dirt the rabbi had scooped in 1956 from the third-base line at Ebbets.

“There is an ancient custom,” he said. “When a traditional Jew dies, they sprinkle some soil from Jerusalem over him. I told my wife, Jerusalem is fine. I lived for a year in Jerusalem, I’ve washed enough soil from Jerusalem out of my chinos. Jerusalem is okay—I’m going along with tradition. In addition to that, this goes into the casket with me. Sacred soil from Ebbets Field. One can be a Brooklyn Dodger fan eternally.”

I suggest to him, as tactfully as possible, that this might be a little over-the-top. He responds that I’m a product of my era, in which baseball is accepted as merely another bizutainment instead of what it truly is: the instrument of a kind of ecstatic communal spirit bordering on the sacred.

Like many Dodger fans, Kushner sees O’Malley’s defection as the Watergate of American sports—not just a local betrayal but evidence that the entire system was incurably corrupt.

“When the Dodgers left Brooklyn,” he said, “I swore off professional athletics. I could no more root for a baseball team than I could root for U. S. Steel or General Motors. It’s a private, profit-making corporation taking advantage of the innocent lambs who are foolish enough to be their fans.”

To this day, he refuses to speak the name of the L.A. Dodgers aloud. “It’s like Voldemort,” he said. “My kids know never to say the name in my presence.” He refers, when strictly necessary, to “the Los Angeles National League team.”

With Atlantic Yards, we are witnessing the birth of post-mythic Brooklyn, an 81-square-mile metaphor for nothing.

the most powerful emblem of the death of Old Brooklyn is the fate of Ebbets Field itself. On September 24, 1957, the last Dodger pitch snugged itself, at roughly the speed of a sedan screaming down the Long Island Expressway, into the pocket of the last Dodger glove at Ebbets field. Over the next couple of years, the stadium hosted a ragtag lineup of small-fry events: soccer matches, high-school-baseball games, demolition derbies. Then, in 1960, Ebbets itself was demolished by a wrecking ball painted (with signature Brooklyn tact) to look like a baseball. In 1962, as the Dodgers were christening their luxurious new stadium in Los Angeles, and the concrete bowl of Shea was beginning to rise in Queens, the city replaced Ebbets with a complex of bland 25-story towers of sand-colored brick—a housing project designed (in the spirit of Moses) to serve as a rational hive of low- and middle-class living. The middle, however, had dropped out, so, like most such projects, the Ebbets Field Apartments quickly deteriorated into a magnet of urban blight.

Marty Adler, another Long Island superfan, spent many years in the shadow of these towers. His life has been like a brilliantly sustained piece of performance art about the fate of Brooklyn’s Lost Generation. He grew up, surrounded by his entire extended family, in Borough Park, commuting frequently to Ebbets by subway or trolley or bike, eating homemade sandwiches in the stands, playing a couple of magical high-school-baseball games there, and (during the glory years of the mid-fifties) getting himself fired for inattentively selling peanuts. Like Rabbi Kushner, Marty was 20 when the team left. Eight years later, he joined the exodus to Long Island, where he became arguably the world’s most fervent Dodgers evangelist—he founded the Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Fame, wrote the Brooklyn Dodgers Newsletter, organized reunions among the surviving players, and lobbied to Dodgerize the names of New York’s roads and bridges and schools. To make a living, however, he commuted every day back to the epicenter of Fallen Brooklyn, where he served for twenty years as the assistant principal of Crown Heights middle school. His office window looked out at what used to be the stadium’s grand entrance rotunda. But the view had changed: It was now just the vertical block of sand-colored bricks. The place where he’d seen a hundred-odd life-defining baseball games was now one of the city’s rougher slums.

“Tough place,” he told me. “The cold months, seemed like every Monday morning you’d find a body. The roof was blacktop, and, since heat rises, junkies’d go up there to sleep. They’d get sick or mugged or thrown off the top. Monday morning, you call the police station up at 6:10, 6:15. ‘We have one break-in, a window on the south side. There’s a drunk on the corner—please send a patrol car, the kids are coming to school soon. I think there’s a body, someone was screaming.’ Every Monday, routine.”