Goodbye to a ballpark

The formal end of an era begins 64 years ago today as Brooklyn's beloved – all but abandoned since the end of the 1957 season – Ebbets Field meets the wrecking ball.

Among those looking on is the great Roy Campanella, the Hall of Fame catcher who later receives an urn of dirt from his old position behind home plate.

The site soon becomes home to a group of apartment buildings, where longtime Dodgers center fielder Duke Snider once poses for one last catch.

“We wept,” Snider says after the demolition of the place where in 1947 he begins his Hall of Fame career.

“Brooklyn was a lovely place to hit,” Snider says. “If you got the ball in the air, you had a chance to get it out. When they tore down Ebbets Field, they tore down a little piece of me.”

The Dodgers, though, stretch into the community beyond the confines of Bedford Avenue, Sullivan Place, McKeever Place and Montgomery Street – where Ebbets Field sits from 1913-60.

“In Brooklyn,” says lifetime Dodger and Hall of Fame pitcher Don Drysdale, “it was as though you were in your own little bubble.

“You were all part of one big, but very close family,” Drysdale says, “and the Dodgers were the main topic of everybody’s conversations, and you could sense the affection people had for you. I don’t know that such a thing exists anymore.”