JOVE23
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs=article
I want to get my hands on high res copies of these prints and rebuild the place as a 3D model
Soon on Display in Brooklyn: 'Holy Grails' of Baseball
By SOPHIA HOLLANDER
They were presumed lost, one more casualty from a move that broke a borough's heart.
But this week, a century-long odyssey will come to an end when the original 1912 blueprints for Ebbets Field, the iconic home of the beloved, bedeviling Brooklyn Dodgers, will be displayed in public for the first time in decades.
They will be the centerpiece of an exhibit on the Dodgers at Brooklyn College set to open on Thursday. Three of the 18 plans will be on display, alongside team photographs, cartoons and one of the last home plates used at Ebbets Field—one with a memorable dedication to the owner who moved the team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season: "May Walter O'Mally [sic] roast in hell."
Ebbets Field, the home of the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, the borough's former baseball team, was demolished in the 1960's. Original Ebbets Field blueprints - presumed to be lost for decades - will be displayed to the public for the first time later this month.
The Dodgers played for 45 seasons in Ebbets Field, where baseball's first televised game took place, in 1939, and Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play a Major League game, in 1947. The field was torn down in 1960 and replaced by a public-housing project, but its cozy design remains an enduring standard for elegance and intimacy that modern architects have emulated.
"You might say that these blueprints are one of the holy grails of baseball memorabilia," said Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn's official historian and a rabid Dodgers fan.
On a recent afternoon, the blueprints were laid out on tables in Brooklyn College's conservation lab, the only center for restoring damaged historical items in the City University of New York system.
The prints measure up to five feet long and 20 inches wide. Although the faded blue paper is torn at the edges, with pieces of Scotch tape scarring the back, the intricate white ink designs vividly evoke the lost stadium.
Baseballs are woven throughout the plans, embedded in ironwork along the side of the facade, through terra-cotta balls adorning the top of the stadium, in stitches visible in the tile inlay on the rotunda floor and in its dangling baseball-and-bat chandelier.
The recovery of the blueprints is itself a tangled, quirky tale befitting the team that for many still defines Brooklyn.
They were actually found in 1992 after a dedicated search by Rod Kennedy, a Manhattan writer who has often examined the subject of Brooklyn. They sat in his closet for 20 years after he and Marty Adler, founder of the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, discovered them in a musty room filled with cobwebs in a subbasement of a city Department of Buildings archive.
Mr. Kennedy made it his mission to find the blueprints in the early 1990s after he stepped out of a subway near the Ebbets Field site at Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place in Crown Heights and was astonished to see that there was no plaque marking the location of the iconic stadium.
Hoping to spark discussion about building an Ebbets Field replica, Mr. Kennedy began looking for the blueprints, but without success. Historical societies, colleges and the city's Fire Department and Department of Buildings—none was any help.
"They said this is like finding the plans for the pyramids. They don't exist," said Mr. Kennedy, who had found more than a dozen plans for other fields for his business creating tiny tin replicas of baseball stadiums.
"It became a quest to find the Ebbets Field plans," he said.
Perhaps the mystery was appropriate: The creation of Ebbets Field was also veiled in secrecy.
In 1908, then-owner Charles Ebbets—a former ticket seller for the team—started secretly purchasing land for a new stadium to replace the team's wooden structure near Washington Park. It was to be designed by architect Clarence Van Buskirk, with the intent of creating the most magnificent, state-of-the-art park in baseball.
Ebbets focused on a former pig farm in a neighborhood known then as Crow Hill that had remained undeveloped despite grand plans for a botanical garden and museum nearby. To hide his intentions, he created a shell company with the name, Pylon, plucked at random out of the dictionary, said Bob McGee, author of "The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers."
"His great fear," said Mr. McGee, was that "if word got out the price would skyrocket, and it would be beyond what he could afford."
The company, under the direction of the team attorney, hired real-estate agents to fan out across the area to secure land. None was told the real purpose behind the purchases.
Such was the genesis of a Brooklyn icon. It was built in less than a year at a cost of $750,000.
Historians are hailing the discovery of Van Buskirk's 1912 blueprints in part because the initial design can be glimpsed only in photographic fragments. The stadium was renovated and expanded in the 1930s.
"The original blueprints are important because that's probably the best evidence we have of what Charles Ebbets' vision was for his ballpark," said historian John Zinn, who consulted on a recent Dodgers exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Their discovery, he said, "is a big deal."
Messrs. Kennedy and Adler discovered the prints after convincing the city Department of Buildings to allow them into an archival subbasement. They descended the stairs and found themselves facing a dim vault.
"Bela Lugosi could have lived there as Dracula," Mr. Kennedy said. "It was that ominous looking."
Once inside, they stared in dismay at rows of metal shelves, stacked with thousands of documents, all cloaked in layers of dirt and dust. Then they got their first break: Mr. Kennedy found Ebbets Field blueprints in the first batch of documents.
Blackened fingerprints still smudge the envelope that contained the plans. But the prints inside were remarkably intact.
Mr. Kennedy convinced the buildings department to let him remove the prints, he said, with the promise to find them a suitable home.
But nothing is easy when it comes to the Bums, the borough's mostly affectionate nickname for its team. No place Mr. Kennedy turned would take the plans and promise to exhibit them.
"Some of them felt nervous because they didn't know how to quite preserve them because they're old and delicate," he said. "Others, they were just going to archive them."
He wanted them available to the public eventually, so they sat in his closet as he waited.
The Mets' plan to model Citi Field after Ebbets Field jump-started Mr. Kennedy's plans. He offered Mets officials the prints, and there was an initial plan to display them in the entrance rotunda, Mr. Kennedy said.
But the team ultimately decided against it, he said. A spokesman for the Mets declined to comment.
In January, Mr. Kennedy passed the blueprints to Mr. Schweiger, the Brooklyn historian, who accepted instantly. He was already planning to give a speech on the Dodgers at his alma mater, Brooklyn College, in April.
When he unrolled the plans for acting college archivist Marianne LaBatto, "it was like he was opening up the blueprints to the lost temple of Jerusalem," Ms. LaBatto said. "I could see that he handled these blueprints with a sense of reverence."
She quickly came to share his appreciation.
"They were like works of art," she said. "They also document something in Brooklyn's history that's now lost and that's what we try to do at the archives."
After decades of searching, Mr. Kennedy said he was relieved to have found the right home.
"They needed to be in a place of importance because these things belong to the people of Brooklyn," he said. "It was such a great loss when the Dodgers left. At least they have a little piece of something back."
I want to get my hands on high res copies of these prints and rebuild the place as a 3D model
