Renting in Brooklyn

Walter O’Malley (New York Daily News photo)

Less than three months after selling Ebbets Field to estate developer Marvin Kratter, the Brooklyn Dodgers 67 years ago today sign a five-year lease to continue playing in a ballpark they occupy since its opening in 1913.

This seemingly would be good reason for celebration by the Dodgers’ rabid fanbase.

Seemingly, anyway.

Leases being leases, of course, always seem to have loopholes and Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley certainly finds one as 1957 turns out to be only year he honors in the lease.

Instead of five seasons, O’Malley within a year uproots his team from Brooklyn to the untold riches that await him in Los Angeles.

After a few years of farming out Brooklyn’s hallowed grounds for college baseball games and soccer matches, Kratter’s company eventually demolishes Ebbets Field in February 1960 to make room for an apartment complex that remains standing today.

“O’Malley wanted to move the Dodgers out of Brooklyn, because he saw the promised land,” Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf later says. “He was right about that, but to this day I think he was wrong to take the Dodgers out of Brooklyn.”

Ebbets Field, after the Dodgers move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles