NYT: Charles Ebbets, the Brooklyn Dodgers and his ballpark
From Bob McGee at the New York Times on April 6, 2013:
Charles H. Ebbets grew up on Spring Street in Manhattan, but he became inextricably linked with Brooklyn by the time he was a young man.
Ebbets was a charter employee of Brooklyn’s baseball team, as an assistant secretary and handyman, when it played its first game in 1883. Over the years, he gained responsibility for scheduling and other affairs. In the 1890s, he was elected to the State Assembly from Park Slope and later won a race for Brooklyn’s City Council.
On Jan. 1, 1898, the day Brooklyn and the other boroughs were consolidated into the City of New York, the team president, Charles Byrne, was near death. He and his partners put Ebbets, then 37, in charge of the club. One of Ebbets’s first actions was to persuade his partners to move the team back to South Brooklyn from Eastern Park, where it had played home games since 1891.
Known informally as the Trolley Dodgers, the club built a new Washington Park, diagonally across Fourth Avenue and Third Street from the original. With significant investment from Harry Von Der Horst of Baltimore and under the leadership of the former Baltimore manager Ned Hanlon, the team won the National League pennant in 1899 and 1900.
Read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/sports/baseball/charles-ebbets-brooklyns-team-and-their-ballpark.html
Originally published: April 8, 2013. Last Updated: April 8, 2013.