Stone Ridge, N.Y.
BLOOMBERG FIELD, the billion-dollar stadium that will not be appearing on the West Side of Manhattan, is the second super ballpark not to be built in New York City in modern times. The other, O'Malley Downs, would have housed the Brooklyn Dodgers under a dome at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. Had that scheme worked, most Brooklynites today would be rooting for their Dodgers. Californians meanwhile could well be trying to work up enthusiasm for an erratic baseball team called The Los Angeles Mets.
Walter O'Malley, the man who moved the Dodgers west, was a lawyer by trade but a buccaneer at heart. He grew up in New York and lived in Brooklyn for many years; when he wrested control of the Dodgers from Branch Rickey in 1950, he told the press, "I'm really just another fan."
Our paths crossed at a small Brooklyn prep school called Froebel Academy where I was a student and O'Malley was chairman of the board. This became a mixed blessing later when I started covering the Dodgers for The New York Herald Tribune. Because of the old-school tie, O'Malley often fed me exclusive information. But when he disliked one of my stories he growled in a Tammany basso that seemed to carry clear to Coney Island, "I'm surprised a Froebel boy would write something so negative."
In 1953, he told me, the Dodgers grossed $5.9 million for an operating profit of $2.2 million, very big baseball numbers at the time. (Jackie Robinson, the greatest drawing card in the game, never earned more than $43,000 a season.) But profits had to stay high, O'Malley said, to sustain a winning franchise. "I've studied the history," he said. "In Brooklyn the ball club is either in first place or in bankruptcy."
In 1955, a few days after the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series, O'Malley summoned the press. He had commissioned "Buckminster Fuller of Princeton" to design a new Dodger Stadium as a geodesic dome. The basic idea, he said, came from ancient Rome. "I wondered about the Coliseum, did the Romans call off battles between gladiators when it rained?" he went on. "I did some research and found out they did not. The Romans developed a retractable canvas dome. When rain started, slaves cranked winches opening the canvas and Roman citizens did not get wet. Or overheated. A hole in the center of the canvas let warm air rush up and out, and that also blocked the rain. A dome worked in Rome. It will work in Brooklyn."
O'Malley sold Ebbets Field for $3 million in 1956 to a real estate developer named Marvin Kratter. He also sold ballparks the Dodgers owned in Fort Worth, Tex., and Montreal for $1 million each. "That $5 million," he said, "is money that will, one way or another, go into our new Brooklyn ballpark." But he also invested some money into acquiring the Los Angeles franchise in the Pacific Coast League. He now owned territorial rights in both Brooklyn and Los Angeles. O'Malley was ready to play his special game: stroke and tomahawk.
He wanted air rights over the Long Island Railroad station in downtown Brooklyn and also some surrounding parcels condemned. This put him nose-to-nose with Robert Moses, the most powerful figure in city government. Years later, at lunch in a California restaurant called Perino's, O'Malley recalled their fateful meeting. Moses said the new Dodger Stadium would surely cost more than $5 million. O'Malley said in that event he would raise extra funds by selling bonds to the citizens of Brooklyn "backed by the full faith and credit of our great franchise," adding, "We are not asking for any public monies." Further he was negotiating with a company called Skiatron to put Dodger home games on subscription TV. Coin boxes would be affixed to television sets. If you wanted to watch the Dodgers in your living room it would cost you 50 cents. Those funds would pay down the bond issue.
As O'Malley told it, Moses wasn't buying it. "I just don't want to see a baseball field in downtown Brooklyn at all," he said. "The streets will never handle all the cars. Your domed stadium would create a China Wall of traffic."
"Where would you prefer that we relocate?" O'Malley recalled saying,
Moses replied, "I have a lovely land parcel in Flushing Meadow, at the old World's Fair site in Queens."
Walter O'Malley looked steadily at Robert Moses. "If my team is forced to play in the borough of Queens, they will no longer be the Brooklyn Dodgers."
Dodger Stadium finally rose, sans dome, in 1962, but the setting was 2,500 miles west of Flatbush and Robert Moses. Los Angeles gave O'Malley 307 acres and half the mineral rights to whatever lay below. I didn't ask him if he intended to drill for oil. He never had to.