Monday, March 31, 2008
Brooklyn Dodgers
I read about Robert Moses in one my books for Black Music. I find the destruction of the New York area when he was around one of the most interesting parts of American history. He was greedy developer that gave people incentives to stop using public transportation and drive, then they would drive out of the city, and eventually destroyed the communities brewing the city. The loss of community in New York forced the Brooklyn Dodgers out to LA and left Harlem in shambles. Now it wasn't all Robert Moses fault, but the people were pretty ignorant about the whole thing. It was the saddest story I had ever heard when I watched a special about it on HBO and then read it about recently. Does anyone know any more about the story? As I said it really interests me as much as the story of bowling. Catch my drift. Probably not, but that's okay.
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I don't know anything about this story, but I'm sure I would be very interested by it.
I can say that although the loss of the Dodgers to LA was devastating, it is part of an overall trend of exodus to the south/west that started around the time the Interstate highways were built and continues to the present.
I think the loss of baseball teams is a key symbol of the larger processes that were going on. The NY Giants moved to San Francisco, the Philadelphia A's moved to Oakland, the Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta, and the Washington DC Senators moved to Texas.
In their new cities, instead of having a downtown stadium, the new stadiums (Dodger Stadium was the first) were built at strategic highway interchanges, to go along with this new culture of suburbia. There wasn't much opposition to any of this either, people just let it happen, across the entire country--I think the mentality of the country was too occupied with Communism and foreign policy to notice the negative impacts--and of course cheap gas and racism played a role as well.
But as for the specific story you mention, I don't know too much about it.
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