Celebrating the Dodgers' World Series victory in 1955.   (Photo: Bettman/Corbis)

Eventually, as the neighborhood spiraled further from his childhood memories of it, Marty had the school’s name officially changed to Jackie Robinson Middle School. He incorporated Dodgers history into the curriculum. And he swears that, in the evenings, when he was alone in his office, particularly in October and April, he would suddenly hear, with his actual ears, the ghost of the Dodgers’ announcer reading out the old lineups. “Batting first for the Brooklyn Dodgers: Jim Gilliam,” Marty said. “And Robinson and Cox and Snider and Hodges and Campanella, and—all the names. You live this all your life, and you listen and you hear the names.”

Marty has since retired; he lives now in a gated subdivision, directly off the L.I.E., that represents the full Robert Moses vision of exurban bliss, a parody of old brownstone Brooklyn. (The town is called, in an appropriate reversal, Lynbrook.) A few weeks ago, he took a trip to California to see all five of the state’s baseball stadiums. Except for an occasional visit to Coney Island for a Brooklyn Cyclones game (a Mets’ minor-league affiliate), he never goes back to Brooklyn.

Today, Brooklyn is undergoing another massive social shift—the biggest, in fact, since the Dodgers left: a real-estate boom, renewed cultural relevance, unprecedented diversity, a Leave It to Beaver murder rate, and even—in what seems like a karmic reversal of the Dodgers fiasco—a new major sports team on the way. At some point in the last decade, the borough scored its most lucrative contract since the Navy Yard closed: It became the main off-site production facility for Manhattan’s hipness. But as any reflexively anti-Establishment blogger will tell you, what looks on paper like the dawn of a new Golden Era might actually be the death rattle of Brooklyn’s authenticity. Historically, Brooklyn has been the antithesis of everything Manhattanites value most: a handy bulwark against the voracious real-estate-industrial complex across the river. Now it’s beginning to feel like an extension of Manhattan, the city’s shabby-chic east wing. The colonizers’ crimes against the spirit of Brooklyn are legion and heavily blogged. Williamsburg is a hipster theme park soon to be augmented by luxury waterfront high-rises. Park Slope is a parody. There are $2.2 million brownstones in Fort Greene. The old Navy Yard now houses a film studio. Red Hook is now a dock for the world’s largest cruise ship and will soon be home to the nation’s largest Ikea. The new frontier of gentrification extends deep into Bushwick. The lower-middle-class rabble, lifeblood of the Ebbets crowd, is being squeezed out and resegregated. The latest census shows a decrease in Brooklyn’s black population. If (as the chorus of old-timers insists) the Dodgers ripped Brooklyn’s heart out 50 years ago, we seem to have been left with the giant churning liver of gentrification, filtering out the toxins of poverty. We are witnessing the birth of post-mythic Brooklyn, an 81-square-mile metaphor for nothing.

The most obvious (and calculated) candidate to replace Ebbets is the massive Atlantic Yards project, the $4.2 billion, sixteen-tower, 6,400-unit Gehry-designed commercial-residential-office complex that will redefine Fort Greene and Prospect Heights, ramp up gentrification, and (pretty much incidentally) be home to basketball’s Nets. Depending on whom you talk to, this is either Brooklyn’s long-awaited salvation—a Second Temple to atone for the destruction of Ebbets—or the most cynical use of a sports team ever, the worst thing to happen to Brooklyn since the Dodgers left. It’s impossible to say, of course, whether the development will draw the surrounding neighborhoods together, giving modern Brooklyn the civic center it so clearly lacks, or whether it will just act as a gigantic crinkly metal wall. But as a metaphor, it’s the exact opposite of Ebbets. Ebbets was a tiny, neighborhood-uniting orthodox baseball temple that was built, in less than a year, on an old dump crisscrossed by goat paths. Atlantic Yards is a huge, neighborhood-raping megadevelopment, pinned between two of its developer’s own malls, that violates every design principle of the borough’s small-scale, organic history. Construction is scheduled to take ten years. It is pure real estate, with sports as a footnote. The Nets haven’t grown, like the Dodgers did, directly out of the Brooklyn soil—they’ll be transplants, a squad of mercenaries paid to sell the neighborhood’s new regime. It’s hard to envision the natives finally bonding with the gentrifying hordes over $50 seats at a Nets game. (Bruce Ratner has skillfully scrambled the racial politics of the project, enlisting—some say buying—widespread black support and casting opponents as selfish gentrifiers.) Atlantic Yards is Dodgers nostalgia run amok: New Brooklyn getting rich on the dying myth of Old Brooklyn—a supposed tribute to the borough that may well end up defacing the Brooklyn it’s pretending to honor. The Nets are less a karmic reversal of the Dodgers tragedy than its logical conclusion. O’Malley ruined the borough by leaving; Ratner will ruin it by moving in.

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