In a sense, there are two New York City teams in the World Series.
As the New York Yankees prepare to face off against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night, it’s clear that one team represents the Big Apple.
But long before the Yankees were formed in 1903, there was another New York City team: The Dodgers were Brooklyn’s darlings until 1958, when they moved to Los Angeles.
My 91-year-old grandfather, Kenny Frishberg, is still upset about losing “Dem Bums,” as the team was once fondly nicknamed.
“My love for the Brooklyn Dodgers started, I’m going to guess, in 1939 when I was 6 years old,” he told me recently. When they left, “I felt betrayed. Heartbroken.”
But nearly 70 years after Dem Bums last played in New York, relics and tributes to their time here still remain — if you know where to look.
Ebbets Field (Crown Heights)
The Brooklyn Dodgers’ legendary final home was completed in 1913 and demolished in 1960, shortly after the team went west and broke the borough’s heart.
In its place rose the Ebbets Field Apartments complex, a sprawling rental development that looms where there used to be a ballpark (and before the ballpark, a garbage dump named Pigtown).
There’s little to remind passersby of what once was at the Bedford Avenue address, except the name and, for those who know to look, two plaques. One, in the shape of a base, marks home plate, and the other simply states “This is the former site of Ebbets Field” beneath a baseball inscribed with the number 1962 — the year the apartments were completed.
The Old Stone House (Park Slope)
Before the Dodgers were even the Dodgers, this Brooklyn landmark in Washington Park in Park Slope served as their original clubhouse. At the very beginning of the team’s history in the late 19th century, the “Brooklyn Baseball Club” (as they were then known) were based out of the original 1699-built Old Stone House. It was destroyed in 1897, and the current replica of it was built in 1933. Starting in…
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