Over the centuries, Crown Heights has been a kind of laboratory of race and class: Seventeenth-century Dutch farmers with black slaves gave way to freed slaves in shanties, who gave way to rich white mansion-builders who gave way to the distinctive early-twentieth-century old Brooklyn hodgepodge. Today’s neighborhood is overwhelmingly Caribbean, with a strong pocket of ultra-Orthodox Russian Jews, and the two cultures co-exist in a kind of Anti-Ebbets self-segregation—a tension that erupted, in 1991, into three days of race riots. The Ebbets Field Apartments are seedy but are rumored to be getting better. They weren’t exactly the decrepit shooting galleries I’d imagined based on some of the stories I’d heard. In fact, they looked like most other large apartment buildings: nondescript towers with satellite dishes and air conditioners jutting out the back.

I walked the perimeter four or five times, always instinctively in the direction the players used to run the bases. Even after I studied vintage photos of the area, it was hard to imagine Ebbets Field here. There were a couple of Dumpsters near the spot where Jackie Robinson used to dance off third base to distract the pitcher. In Duke Snider’s center field, now a parking lot, a car’s entire hood was covered with the flag of Saint Lucia. Just beyond the old right-field wall, at what used to be the gas station where the Dodgers used to park their cars, and where Yogi Berra hit a heartbreaking World Series grand slam, was now a combination KFC/Pizza Hut. The cashiers stood behind a sheet of thick, counter-to-ceiling bulletproof glass. I felt something, briefly, when I stood in right field, the Italian Carl Furillo’s old territory, which now looked into a vast interior plaza between the buildings, over which a sign read NO BALL PLAYING.

The people coming in and out of the apartments generally ignored me. A community clearly existed here, but—no matter how many times I touched the sacred wood block in my pocket—it was clear that I was not a part of it: a double-edged exclusion that was probably more socioeconomic than racial. There were no long conversations with locals about baseball and race relations and 21st-century demography and life in the Caribbean. Instead, two old men told me curtly, in lovely, lilting accents, that they had never seen the old stadium. A 79-year-old who called himself “Pop,” sitting on a battered red foldout stool near the old rotunda, told me he remembered listening to the crowd from the sidewalk outside, and the smell of roasted peanuts, but that he preferred boxing. I approached some kids watching basketball at the Jackie Robinson Playground, but when I asked if they knew about Ebbets, they immediately got up and left. The only one who stayed said, “Don’t mind them, they’re rude,” then told me she knew all about Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers because she went to Jackie Robinson Middle School, Marty’s old school.

When I got back on the subway, and the train car’s population re-gentrified itself stop by stop as we approached Manhattan, the holy relic in my pocket suddenly didn’t resonate at all: It felt like a crappy old piece of wood, and I was embarrassed to have brought it all this way.

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Sam Anderson
• Table of Contents: Sep 24, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!