A Brooklyn Dodgers Fan Who Never Gave Up on Ebbets Field
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Version 0 of 1. Nobody ever accused Rod Kennedy Jr. of thinking too small. A Brooklyn Dodgers fan who took a beating in a Pelham, N. Y., schoolyard in the 1950s defending his team’s honor against partisans of the New York Yankees and Giants, he began making his living 35 years later by manufacturing tiny tin replicas of ballparks. His favorite, naturally, was Ebbets Field, the Dodgers’ longtime home in Flatbush, where he saw Sandy Koufax pitch as a rookie in 1955 and where, he said, his “nervy” mother once slipped into the team’s locker room — “a room of half-naked men” — to collect autographs. Dissatisfied with recapturing Brooklyn’s past in miniature, however, Mr. Kennedy soon enlarged his ambitions by many orders of magnitude, embarking on a quixotic quest to build a one-quarter-scale replica of Ebbets Field to house a Dodgers museum. To further his aim, he teamed up with Marty Adler, who ran the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, which had no home. The first major-league challenge was to locate the long-lost plans of Brooklyn’s cathedral of baseball, where the Dodgers played from 1913 to 1957, before famously breaking the borough’s heart by decamping to Los Angeles. The ballpark was demolished in 1960 by a wrecking ball painted with curving seams to resemble a gargantuan baseball. At the Brooklyn office of the city’s buildings department in 1992, Mr. Kennedy said, he and Mr. Adler were told by a skeptical official that hunting for the Ebbets blueprints was “‘like looking for the plans to the pyramids.’” After the two Dodgers die-hards struck out in their search, they were told that there was a “subbasement archives where the really old stuff was,” but that they needed special permission to gain access. Fortunately for them, other sons of Brooklyn who’d once screamed themselves hoarse rooting for the Boys of Summer had since grown up to become men of local prominence. One was Robert E. Adamski, the head of the topographical bureau at the Brooklyn borough president’s office, who as a child had marched to protest the Dodgers’ departure. “Howard Golden, the borough president, was a big Dodgers fan, so it was no problem getting help,” said Mr. Adamski in a phone interview from Florida, where he was attending spring training until it was suspended by concern over the coronavirus. Mr. Kennedy, who is now 75, plumbed the depths of the Brooklyn Municipal Building subbasement by himself, he said, an experience that “was like walking into a Bela Lugosi tomb.” Opening a big metal door, he entered a “dimly lit room filled with stacks of plans of old Brooklyn,” he said. “Papers were strewn all over the floor,” and everything was covered in such filth that his Indiana Jones-like subterranean exploration gave him a respiratory illness. Making his way along a rack of grimy rolled-up plans from 1912, Mr. Kennedy said, he peeled back the corner of each one until he found a blueprint bearing the thrilling words, written with florid penmanship, “Proposed New Grand Stand for Brooklyn Base Ball Club. Charles H. Ebbets President. Clarence R. Van Buskirk Architect.” “It was one of the great moments of my life,” Mr. Kennedy said. After he returned to scoop up plans for 1931 and 1946 ballpark expansions, he said, Paul Di Natale, the buildings department’s Brooklyn commissioner — another old Dodgers fanatic — allowed him to take the Ebbets documents in order to find a suitable home for them. But none of the cultural institutions he approached would take the trove, according to Mr. Kennedy, each demurring, either because the items didn’t fit the institution’s mission or because of concern that they could not be archived properly. Discouraged, he stuck the original blueprints of one of the national pastime’s most revered, early 20th-century ballparks in a mailing tube under his bed, where they remained for most of the next 20 years. In the meantime, though Mr. Kennedy had never built a stadium larger than a bread box, his vision of reconstructing Ebbets Field grew still grander, all the way to a full-size replica to house a professional ball club. And as improbable as this ever-expanding dream may sound, serious people took him seriously. In 1992, the architect Der Scutt, who had designed Trump Tower, went so far as to solicit cost estimates on an Ebbets reconstruction from Lehrer McGovern Bovis, a firm that had served as project manager for the recently opened Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the first in a wave of new retro-style ballparks. In a letter to Mr. Scutt, a Lehrer executive noted that “the original stadium was close to 36,000 seats, so a stadium half that size might cost 18,000 x 2,000 = $36 million.” By 1995, Mr. Kennedy had targeted a stretch of Dumbo waterfront as the proposed site of his new old stadium. “I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever been presented as a revitalization project,” recalled Joan Bartolomeo, who was president of the Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation. “He was such a historian of Brooklyn, and not in a stupid nostalgic way, but in understanding how Brooklyn’s past could help inform its future.” Ms. Bartolomeo typed up the ideas Mr. Kennedy had written in his chicken-scratch handwriting. But a proposal sent to the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, which controlled some of the proposed site, elicited a response that crushed Mr. Kennedy’s ambitions as decisively as the Yankees pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game had stymied the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series. “Even if the agency was interested in giving up the site as a public park (which it is not), or if there were no objections from area residents (which we imagine would be considerable), the fact remains that the rebuilding of Ebbets Field on this site would require the total destruction of the Empire Stores and the Tobacco Warehouse,” wrote E. Edgar Cosman, the department’s deputy regional director. “These buildings are designated historic structures.” Earlier in 1995, Mr. Kennedy had written Bob Mandt, a New York Mets executive, suggesting that the proposed Ebbets replica in Brooklyn “could serve as a new home” for the team. Though he never received a response, the Mets did design Citi Field, their new stadium in Queens, in homage to Ebbets, which team co-owner Fred Wilpon had adored as a young fan in Brooklyn. The new ballpark opened in 2009. “The idea of Ebbets as the inspiration, I think that was in Fred’s mind all along,” said Jack L. Gordon, an architect whose firm worked formally on the feasibility and design of a new Mets stadium beginning in 1996. He added that he began discussing the new park with Mr. Wilpon around 1990. Recreating the intimacy of Ebbets Field involved seating “that brought fans closer to the playing field, including cantilevering the bleachers over right field,” according to Mr. Gordon. Notably, the Romanesque arches at Citi referenced the Ebbets exterior, as did the soaring new entry rotunda named for the Dodgers star Jackie Robinson. In 2012, Mr. Kennedy grew concerned that if he died, the Ebbets Field plans would wind up on the curb and be lost forever. So he entrusted the documents to Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn’s official borough historian, whose home basement is stuffed with Dodgers memorabilia. “He says, ‘You have connections — find a permanent home for these,’” Mr. Schweiger said. “And as much as I would have liked to keep them, I couldn’t.” Instead, he donated them to Brooklyn College. The drawings revealed unknown aspects of the ballpark’s design to Mr. Schweiger. “Photos are usually taken from some distance away, and when you stand back from the entrance you see little tiny round things on the roof of the ballpark,” he said. The blueprints showed that these rooftop decorations, known as antefixes, were in fact baseballs, ornaments that echoed the baseball-adorned terra-cotta spandrels above the pilasters. The lot plan also showed that McKeever Place, on the park’s third base side, was named Cedar Place in 1912. The Brooklyn College library displayed the blueprints in 2012, but after the exhibit was publicized, “I got a call from the Municipal Archives saying that the plans belonged to them,” said Marianne LaBatto, an associate archivist at the library. The drawings now reside under lock and key in a city map cabinet at 31 Chambers Street in Manhattan. They can also be viewed online. “Did I fail?” Mr. Kennedy asked wistfully the other day, reflecting on his dead dream of bringing his childhood ballpark back to life. “The only thing that came out of it was that I found the plans.” But in the judgment of the Brooklyn borough historian, the discovery of those blueprints amounts to a major triumph. “They’re a part of baseball history, a part of New York City history, a part of Brooklyn history and a part of black history, because Jackie Robinson played his first game there,” Mr. Schweiger said. “Who knows what would have happened if Rod didn’t find these — maybe they would have been destroyed.” And New York would have lost Ebbets Field a second time. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. |