The ghosts of “Dem Bums” still linger in Brooklyn.
It’s been decades since the Brooklyn Dodgers left the subways and New York City for the highways and Chavez Ravine in California — but baseball fans and locals haven’t forgotten the team’s East Coast roots.
As LA was trying to knock out the rival Yankees in the World Series with a commanding 3-0 lead in the series Tuesday, baseball fans were flocking to Flatbush at the site of the Dodgers’ old home stadium to step on a “home plate” monument where Brooklyn legends like Jackie Robinson once stepped into the batter’s box.
“This is one of the last items on my bucket list,” said retiree and US Air Force veteran Larry Nelson, 74, who was in town from Portland, Oregon.
“I came here to step on home plate,” he added. “To see where Ebbets Field was before it was torn down.”
Ebbets Field was converted to housing projects after the Dodgers played their final home game in the borough in 1957, but the monument still attracts tourists regularly — especially when the Dodgers are in town, said Ezra Asket, a 28-year-old maintenance manager at Ebbets Field Apartments.
“I give them a bat so they can take a picture with it at the plate,” Asket said. “You know, to help them remember. Some of them might have come here as kids, the older gentleman,”
On Tuesday, ahead of the Dodgers and Yankees game at Yankee Stadium crowds of two or three people were coming every half hour, he said.
Despite being native to Wisconsin, Asket has done what he can to learn about the grounds history, but continues to be blown away by the fans who seem to know it all.
“I know the history,” he said. “I really learned it from the people who come here about when they tore the stadium down and when they built this, these apartment buildings. The people who are coming here seem to know it all.”
his bucket list dream by standing at the Home-plate of the historic
Ebbets Field. Paul Martinka
Nelson said more of Ebbets should have been preserved.
“They should have left more for people to come and see. More of the old stadium,” he said.
“But I understand they had to build this, so I’ll be thinking of this place tonight when I go up to Yankee Stadium.”
Many residents in the Flatbush area have been coming to the field for decades.
“First sport I ever learned to play was right here. Stickball right here on the patio. It was the easiest one,” Israel McCrea, a 44-year-old lifelong resident of the Ebbets Field Apartments, said.
McCrea, a proud Baltimore Orioles fan, was planning on rooting for the Yankees despite acknowledging that it is “not looking like they’re going to beat the Dodgers.”
For the residents of the Ebbets Field Apartments, though, whether or not the Dodgers came out victorious was almost inconsequential.
In the 67 years since the Dodgers called Ebbets Field their own, many of the original fans who remember the team’s time in Flatbush have started to pass away. The families nearest to the old stomping grounds hold onto the memories passed down and remain steadfast in their dedication to preserve the legacy of the Brooklyn Dodgers for as long as they can.
“This generation, it’s more about basketball and football. They’re not really into baseball like the way we were,” Robert Driver, 56, who has lived in Ebbets Field Apartments since he was 7-years old, said.
“And a lot of these kids, they don’t even know what this was,” he went on. “They don’t know how special Ebbets Field was. This younger generation it’s kind of lost on them, the stories aren’t being passed down because all those older folks are dying off. This is a landmark place but the stories are starting to fade. They’re fading with the older generation fading away.”
