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September 18, 2007
Exorcising the Dodgers
50 years ago, the Dodgers left Ebbets Field for Los Angeles. Isn’t it time their ghosts left, too?
NY Magazine
By Sam Anderson
These days, every thorough examination of Brooklyn Dodgers mythology leads to the creation theory of Atlantic Yards (article):
This is the origin myth of modern Brooklyn, a story hammered as deep into the borough’s collective psyche as the Odyssey to the ancient Greeks’: The Dodgers united a multicultural Eden, but O’Money ate Southern California’s forbidden fruit, and the borough fell into darkness.
...
The Dodgers have been so persistently overinvested with meaning—so puffed up on lofty flights of jock metaphysics—that they’re not even a baseball team anymore. They’re every big idea you’ve ever heard of: Equality, Democracy, Community, America.
...
The most obvious (and calculated) candidate to replace Ebbets is the massive Atlantic Yards project, the $4.2 billion, sixteen-tower, 6,400-unit Gehry-designed commercial-residential-office complex that will redefine Fort Greene and Prospect Heights, ramp up gentrification, and (pretty much incidentally) be home to basketball’s Nets. Depending on whom you talk to, this is either Brooklyn’s long-awaited salvation—a Second Temple to atone for the destruction of Ebbets—or the most cynical use of a sports team ever, the worst thing to happen to Brooklyn since the Dodgers left. It’s impossible to say, of course, whether the development will draw the surrounding neighborhoods together, giving modern Brooklyn the civic center it so clearly lacks, or whether it will just act as a gigantic crinkly metal wall. But as a metaphor, it’s the exact opposite of Ebbets. Ebbets was a tiny, neighborhood-uniting orthodox baseball temple that was built, in less than a year, on an old dump crisscrossed by goat paths. Atlantic Yards is a huge, neighborhood-raping megadevelopment, pinned between two of its developer’s own malls, that violates every design principle of the borough’s small-scale, organic history. Construction is scheduled to take ten years. It is pure real estate, with sports as a footnote. The Nets haven’t grown, like the Dodgers did, directly out of the Brooklyn soil—they’ll be transplants, a squad of mercenaries paid to sell the neighborhood’s new regime. It’s hard to envision the natives finally bonding with the gentrifying hordes over $50 seats at a Nets game. (Bruce Ratner has skillfully scrambled the racial politics of the project, enlisting—some say buying—widespread black support and casting opponents as selfish gentrifiers.) Atlantic Yards is Dodgers nostalgia run amok: New Brooklyn getting rich on the dying myth of Old Brooklyn—a supposed tribute to the borough that may well end up defacing the Brooklyn it’s pretending to honor. The Nets are less a karmic reversal of the Dodgers tragedy than its logical conclusion. O’Malley ruined the borough by leaving; Ratner will ruin it by moving in.
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn comments:
There's really nothing we can add to that passage; in fact, we can't recall having ever seen a better summary of what "Atlantic Yards" is all about.
We can tell you, though, that the entire article is a must-read, if you have any interest in understanding how the collective memory of the Dodgers has been twisted and exploited for the purpose of selling a giant real estate boondoggle.
The NY Mag article continues:
Ironically, in terms of community building, Atlantic Yards has already been a rousing, unintentional success, even in its infancy—it’s become Brooklyn’s best excuse for daily conversation in decades. It’s the anti-Dodgers, bringing people together in anger. And it looks like it will provide the borough with a basis for outraged chitchat for at least as long as the Dodgers dominated the National League.
NoLandGrab: Honestly, we don't know whether to laugh or cry.
It looks like Ratner might score one old-timer in his new fan base:
I asked [Rabbi] Kushner, after his lament about the soullessness of corporate sports, what he thought about the idea of the Brooklyn Nets—surely one of the more brazenly corporate exploitations of a fan base in the history of corporate exploitation, a second dose of O’Malleyism on his home soil. But very suddenly, I found that I was the only cynic at the table: Kushner’s nationalism trumped his reason.
“It all depends on one thing,” he answered, “and one thing only. If they call themselves the New York Nets, I couldn’t care less. If they call themselves the Brooklyn Nets, I’ll go to their games. Then they’re my team. For the first time in my life, I’ll become a basketball fan.”
Posted by lumi at September 18, 2007 10:43 AM