Abstract
Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American Culture, by Benjamin Lisle, and City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles, by Jerald Podair, share a focus on team owner Walter O’Malley’s process of moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. While they both cover a lot of the same ground, touching on elements of car culture, suburbanization, stadium design, politics, and public planning, City of Dreams gets in the weeds of the political process of pushing Dodger Stadium through a tangle of legal and governmental challenges. Modern Coliseum focuses more on the changing design and function of postwar stadiums as well as their relationship to the communities they exist in. This difference in perspective can be seen in the fact that while futuristic designer Norman Bel Geddes doesn’t even show up in City of Dreams, there are more than forty pages of references to his design schemes for a possible stadium in Brooklyn in Lisle’s book. The similarities and contrasts between them reveal how profoundly different authors’ focus and perspective shape narratives which come down the historical pipeline. Each book is strong, yet the combination of both perspectives was exponentially enlightening in regard to not only Dodgers Stadium but in gaining greater awareness of how historians shape history as much as they excavate it.
As I read City of Dreams, I was consistently struck by a historical sense of déjà vu. Almost twenty years ago, my partners and I fell into a nearly decade-long project chronicling a community fight against what would become the Barclays Arena and Atlantic Yards housing development in Brooklyn. It came to be built at the same crossroads of Atlantic and Flatbush that Walter O’Malley sought to build a stadium for his Brooklyn Dodgers (on the opposite side of Atlantic). Given the ironlike grip that Robert Moses had on all major construction projects in New York, O’Malley’s dream of acquiring land to build a Brooklyn ballpark that he would own would not come to pass. However, in an ironic twist, the private–public partnership that O’Malley structured with the city of Los Angeles would later be something of a template for developer Bruce Ratner as he sought to bring a basketball team to Brooklyn twenty years ago. O’Malley determined that he would need to build and own a stadium in order to take full control of his baseball business. Ratner took this business and real estate perspective one step further. For Ratner, the arena he planned to build was a Trojan horse for a massive real estate development, which would require the government to not only provide access to the land but also to obliterate current zoning laws so that he could build a sixty-story tower in the midst of largely low rise neighborhoods. The basketball team and the arena were the shiny objects Ratner would use to divert attention from how much valuable land he would gain in the process. We documented this fight from the perspective of the community that would lose their homes and business. Like these two books, our film Battle for Brooklyn looked to both The Power Broker by Robert Caro and The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs to gain some perspective on how to orient ourselves to the complex story we were trying to tell.
City of Dreams is focused on the drama of getting Dodger Stadium built in Los Angeles, and while many of my Brooklyn neighbors, as well as Borough President Marty Markowitz (a major proponent of Ratner’s development), still feel pain at the loss of the Dodgers, this book only scratches the surface of the efforts that were made to keep the team in Brooklyn. In fact, in this book, the move reads as a forgone conclusion, and it shifts its focus to Los Angeles before the first chapter is through. O’Malley grew up in New York in a household that was very active in politics. After law school, he established connections to the infamously corrupt Tammany Hall administration where his father worked but was able to adjust when the reformer LaGaurdia came to power. By the time he became an owner of the Dodgers, he had come to have a deep understanding of the realities of political life in New York. Robert Moses, the master builder, held sway over the construction of modern New York for over a half a century. O’Malley fled Brooklyn when Moses refused to help him acquire land for a stadium that O’Malley would then own. City of Dreams zeroes in on O’Malley’s political gamesmanship in Los Angeles, as well as his political stumbles in regard to the differences between East and West Coast political realities, which almost doomed his chances of bringing Dodger Stadium to life. City of Dreams is a political potboiler; it overflows with the kind of facts and details about tax policy, private–public partnerships, and political shrewdness that make it a powerful resource for understanding the impact that the business of sport had, and has, on public planning. While the allure of sports was powerful in the 1950s, it has become wildly more compelling in recent years. At times, these details might be a bit overwhelming, but they create a solid foundation for unravelling the extremely complex process that ultimately brought the Dodgers to Los Angeles, and paved the way for the stadium to be built.
The West Coast political climate differed from the New York that O’Malley was so intimately familiar with. In Los Angeles, where people-powered referendums superseded the power of elected officials, O’Malley was left struggling to find his political footing. In New York, he knew how to work behind the scenes, but in Los Angeles, he was more out of his element than he knew at first. In fact, before he made the move, he didn’t even know that there was a possibility that his project might be subject to a referendum. O’Malley’s arrival in Los Angeles came at a turning point for that city. The book breaks down the various tensions and political alliances between those who wanted to spark development of the city’s downtown and those who fought for more resources to support suburban growth. Podair sets the stage by detailing the fight between those who wanted to build public housing to address the postwar housing crunch and those who wanted the market to solve the crisis by using mortgage tax policy to stimulate demand for single-family homes. O’Malley found unexpected political alliances among both staunchly business-oriented Republicans and progressive activists fighting to stop the bulldozing of their neighborhoods for public housing. It was in this setting that a large chunk of land in Chavez Ravine was seized for a public housing project. Ultimately that project was put on the chopping black as the red scare took hold and public housing was framed as part of the communist menace. This turn of events made the site available for O’Malley to pursue for his stadium. Podair thus communicates a powerful understanding of the various political forces at play in Los Angeles.
Again, the parallels between O’Malley’s process of working the system to get public support for a private stadium and Bruce Ratner’s efforts to use the power of the government to seize the most valuable land in Brooklyn for his own project are quite profound. It is interesting to note that the kind of political allegiances and rivalries that O’Malley had faced in Los Angeles cropped up again in Brooklyn sixty years later. Republican activists who were against government interventions partnered with progressive activists who wanted to save people’s homes, and Ratner saw an opportunity, though in general the community groups that supported Ratner’s project were supported by his funding and had not existed until the project was announced. Ratner also knew how to work the media, and reporters were often featured on the news repeating the developer’s promises of “jobs, housing, and hoops.”
Ratner had, like O’Malley, also worked in government before becoming a developer, and he set his sights on Atlantic Yards specifically because it had been previously designated as an urban renewal zone. About a decade before he launched his bid to buy the New Jersey Nets to move them to Brooklyn, Ratner took advantage of that designation to build the much hated Atlantic Terminal mall and office building which sits across from the site (the site that O’Malley coveted). It was this foothold that led him to covet the railyards and adjacent blocks for his Atlantic Yards project (since renamed Pacific Park). The renewal designation made it more tenable to argue that the Atlantic Yards site was also blighted, even though the area was in the throes of rapid gentrification, with three massive condo conversions having recently opened. Both O’Malley and Ratner argued that they needed government support to get their projects off the ground and that their teams and projects would ultimately be of great benefit to the community. While this seems to have been borne out to some degree in Los Angeles, both books also make it clear that these kinds of deals are ultimately disempowering to local communities and the politicians who fight for these communities. The public parts of the process, like public hearings in which locals ostensibly get to have a say, are often used to bring some level of legitimacy to the proceedings but have little concrete effect on policy. This charade was powerfully clear in City of Dreams, and it was astoundingly apparent as we filmed Battle for Brooklyn. In Los Angeles, the evictions from Chavez Ravine were televised live. Podair sites this action and the subsequent discussions around it as a flashpoint in the development of the Chicano rights movement that shortly thereafter began to have a profound impact on Los Angeles.
Reading City of Dreams, one can imagine that Ratner’s PR team did their homework. Nearly sixty years later, Ratner used almost all of O’Malley’s Los Angeles playbook, including partnering with government to get the land he needed by promising increased tax revenue and jobs for local residents. It worked; the Transit Authority accepted Ratner’s wildly low bid for the land above the authority’s railyards. He also used a PR blitz to sell the team to the public in order to increase support for his arena. This enabled Ratner to push through the Barclays Arena project and get control over a much larger footprint on which to build housing and office buildings (since changed to just housing). Dr. Mindy Fullilove, author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, met with the Brooklyn activists who were fighting Ratner’s arena, giving them valuable intelligence that helped them to combat the nearly 10 million dollars that the developer spent on PR. Still, absolute power only gets defeated in the movies. The community was no match for the deeply connected developer. Goliath won that fight. Fifteen years after Ratner’s project was announced, it remains to be seen whether the touted benefits will be delivered. Most of the promised community benefits have simply not materialized. The project was sold as a job creator and a source of middle-income housing. The only jobs were construction jobs as no offices were built, and almost none of those went to people in the community. The office space was replaced by an outdoor plaza which went largely unused in the first decade but has recently been used as a space to launch waves of protests. While some housing has been built, it is mostly luxury housing, and even the subsidized units fall outside the reach of those most in need.
While City of Dreams rapidly moves its attention away from the Brooklyn of the late 1950s, Modern Coliseum spends a good deal of time exploring the sociocultural impacts of the transition from older, more neighborhood-oriented stadiums like Ebbetts Field and the Polo Grounds, to more modern concrete stadiums like the one O’Malley built and Moses’ Shea Stadium. While Shea Stadium had some of the amenities that O’Malley wanted, including copious parking for suburban fans who had fled the city, it was owned by the city. This was not acceptable to O’Malley who wanted full control over operations and profits. Lisle focuses several chapters on the abovementioned futuristic designer Norman Bel Geddes and his machinations and public relations efforts aimed at getting him the commission to design a stadium of the future. While City of Dreams delves into the political scene, Lisle takes a more bird’s-eye view of postwar stadiums and their place in the changing postwar culture, contrasting this with the role that the older stadiums played in the life of cities. He examines how as the stadiums moved to the outskirts they became more “civilized,” but also how they lost some of their soul. His book also takes a longer term look at the ebb and flow of suburban car culture and also charts the reemergence of neighborhood-oriented stadiums. He quotes New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger, who in response to Baltimore’s 1989 plan for a new, downtown ballpark, wrote: “If it is half as good as the models and renderings suggest, it will represent a return to baseball as it should be; a game played on grass, not turf; under the sky, not a dome; in the middle of a city, not out on an interstate highway. This is a building capable of wiping out in a single gesture 50 years of wretched stadium design, and of restoring the joyous possibility that a ball park might actually enhance the experience of watching the game of baseball.” 1
This was the same sentiment that Ratner and his team drew upon as they pitched the Brooklyn Nets as a kind of replacement for the long-lost Dodgers. As if resurrecting Bel Geddes from the ashes, the original unveiling of the project included a wildly futuristic design from master showman Frank Gehry, a barnlike airplane hangar of a building that looked like it was meant to be in the middle of a field. After the crash of 2008, Ratner ditched Gehry and hastily put forth a modern rusted shell that was meant to evoke the industrial past of Brooklyn.
Modern Coliseum compiles powerful quotes from writers of the day like Robert Lipsyte, Roger Angell, and Jimmy Breslin that remind us of just how important cultural writers were in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; even when they focused on covering sports. In general, these writers lamented the loss of the homey, yet problematic, home bases of yesteryear. Lisle uses these authors to illuminate important aspects of the cultural and economic forces at play. For example, he highlights their discussion of how The Polo grounds was much more human scale than the stadium that would replace it; it was a gathering place for people from all walks of life. Ebbet’s Field is described as a melting pot; cramped and foul smelling with poor sight lines, but rooted in the community. Here is where the contrast between the two books is most profound. Where Podair’s book focuses on the story of O’Malley and his pratfalls and foibles, Lisle zeroes in on prose that paints an intimate sense of place and community. He writes of postwar stadiums, “Plastic, loud, unrelenting, undemocratic, and standardized: these were the qualities that disgusted traditionalists who valued sports as something more than a mere diversion. As old ballparks were torn down and new modern ones built to replace them in the name of progress, many thought that the stadium had been corrupted, removed from its traditional status as urban landmark, as an anchor of community identity, and a site where great athletes did great things.” 2
Lisle use the contemporaneous words of Lipsyte to nail these points home. “Writing for the New York Times he called Dodgers Stadium “Lollipop Park,” noting its Hollywood atmosphere: “Only in Lollipop could Doris Day throw licorice bits into [player] Frank Thomas’ mouth during batting practice and leave in the seventh inning of a no-hitter.”
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Further he quotes Roger Angell from the New Yorker as the Mets prepared to leave the Polo Grounds for Shea stadium, The Dirt, the noise, the chatter, the bursting life of the Met grandstands are as rich and deplorable and heartwarming as Rivington Street. The Polo Grounds which is in the last few months of its disreputable life, is a vast assemblage of front stoops and fire escapes. On a hot summer evening, everyone here is touching someone else; there are no strangers, no one is private. The air is alive with shouts, gossip, flying rubbish. Old-Timers know and love every corner of the crazy, proud, old neighborhood: the last-row walk up flats in the outermost lower grandstands…the outfield bullpens, each with its slanting shanty roofs…the good box seats just on the curve of the upper deck in short right and short left-front windows on the street, where one can watch the arching fall of a weak fly ball and know in advance, like one who sees a street accident in the making, that it will collide with that ridiculous, dangerous upper tier for another home run.
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Again, while the books cover a good deal of the same territory, they are both valuable in their own ways. Different perspectives create more complex realities. In some sense, City of Dreams is like Caro’s The Power Broker in its examination of how money and power often drive policy. Modern Coliseums is a bit more akin to Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities in its focus on the import of human behavior and interaction. Each tale brings an important perspective to our understanding of the time, and while they cover similar ground, they do so in ways that are different enough to make them a worthwhile pair.
The tension between street-level living and administrative decision-making from on high is threaded through both books. This was also the source of much of the conflict in our film Battle for Brooklyn. As Yogi Berra used to say, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Both opponents and proponents of Ratner’s project could quote Caro and Jacobs; they understood what had been written, but the foibles of the past are often lost in the fulcrum of the present. In the space of conflict, there is very little room for listening or reason, especially when those with money yield so much more leverage and have more power. It was disheartening to see behind the curtain in this process. Watching the sausage get made makes it much less appetizing. Still, cities grow and change, and that change has a great deal to do with who is in power and how that power is used. It was our hope as we made Battle for Brooklyn that it might help to recast the narrative that was built with the tools of power and money. There was another story that needed to be told, and it wasn’t one that the current media system was capable of handling. There were no writers like Angell, Lipsyte, or Breslin to adequately follow or document the fight. There were writers like Norman Oder who covered it religiously on his blog The Atlantic Yards Report, but without the platform or the literary flair. I hope that future historians will give the Brooklyn saga the thoughtful attention given to the story of Dodgers Stadium in City of Dreams and Modern Coliseum. If we forget the past, we are doomed to recast it in the future. Cities change and grow, but they don’t have to lose as much of their soul as they often do in the process.
