Happy 100th Birthday, Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson rookie card, 1947

100 years ago today Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia. On April 15, 1947, he broke baseball's color line went he was sent out start at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a Dodger, he lived at 5224 Tilden Ave in East Flatbush (now a national historic landmark), and later at 112-40 177th St in Queens.

The Dodgers were founded in Brooklyn in 1883 as the Brooklyn Grays, but by 1895 had acquired the nickname "Trolley Dodgers" after the increasing need for residents of Brooklyn to speed across streets to avoid oncoming trolleys. Not everyone was successful, and news reports of the era are filled with trolley accidents.

For years the team went by many names, including the Brooklyn Bridgegrooms and Hanlon's Superbas and did not officially adopt the Dodgers moniker until 1933.

To get some sense of what trolley dodging was like, watch this film from the early 1900s taken from the front of a trolley making its way around Manhattan.

Robinson spent his entire Major League career with the Dodgers, retiring in January 1957. That year, he took a job as vice president for personnel at Chock Full O' Nuts coffee, becoming the first black person to serve as vice president of a major American corporation.

Robinson died in 1972. His funeral was held at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights. That year, the Dodgers retired his number, 42, and in 1997, all other Major League Baseball teams followed suit, making his number the first to be retired by every team.

* * *

Read more about the evolution of Brooklyn in
Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

 

and don't forget our first book

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City
NOW OUT AS AN AUDIOBOOK!

Postcard Thursday: Dodging Trolleys

While some New Yorkers may have tuned out after the Yankees were eliminated from contention, there's a World Series going on between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles (née Brooklyn) Dodgers. Tied at one game apiece, the series now moves to Houston.

The Dodgers were founded in Brooklyn in 1883 as the Brooklyn Grays, but by 1895 had acquired the nickname "Trolley Dodgers" after the increasing need for residents of Brooklyn to speed across streets to avoid oncoming trolleys. Not everyone was successful, and news reports of the era are filled with trolley accidents, such as the one in Newark (above) that killed ten children. 

For years the team went by many names, including the Brooklyn Bridgegrooms and Hanlon's Superbas and did not officially adopt the Dodgers moniker until 1933.

To get some sense of what trolley dodging was like, watch this film from the early 1900s taken from the front of a trolley making its way around Manhattan.

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Area Code Blues

Norman Mailer called it "Probably the worst news to hit Brooklyn since the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles." No, he wasn't back from the dead to pronounce judgment on the new Nets arena -- he was talking about the 718 area code, which was introduced 25 years ago.

When area codes were first established in 1947, all of New York was given 212. Due to its large population, the city was assigned the area code that was considered easiest to dial on a rotary telephone. However, by the early 1980s, it was becoming clear to Public Service Commission that New York's continued growth would soon create the need for a new area code. (Not only was the population rising, fax machines were becoming affordable for the first time and the country's first 1G cell phone network had just been established.)

The commission decided to allow Manhattan and the Bronx to retain the 212 area code, assigning 718 to Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Public reaction was swift and furious. Businesses complained about the costs of reprinting stationery and letterhead; residents kvetched about being pushed further into the realm of the "outer boroughs." As Brooklyn College's president, Robert Hess, remarked to the New York Times: "It's a giant step backwards. For 80-odd years we've been striving to make New York a single city out of the five boroughs. To solve a problem in New York where there are not enough lines by essentially evicting the outer boroughs is really an affront."

Today, of course, 718 seems old fashioned. In 1992, the Bronx (and the Marble Hill section of Manhattan) joined the other boroughs by switching to 718; that was the same year that the 917 area code was added to Manhattan. (Fun fact: originally, 917 was used more for beepers and pagers than for cell phones.) Area codes 646 and 347 were added in 1999 to further lighten to load, but there still aren’t enough numbers -- area code 929 will be introduced in early 2011 to provide more service in the outer boroughs.

* * *

Read more about New York's role in the creation of the telephone
in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

To get RSS feeds from this blog, point your reader to this link.
Or, to subscribe via email, follow this link.
Also, you can now follow us on Twitter.

New York's Lost Ballparks

With the end of the season for both the New York Yankees and the Mets, both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium are coming down.

This is, of course, not the first time New York has lost classic stadiums. On tours of Harlem and Brooklyn Heights, baseball fans often ask us about the fate of Ebbets Field--home of the Brooklyn Dodgers--and the Polo Grounds, once home to the baseball's Giants and Yankees as well as football's Giants and Jets.

As the name suggest, the Polo Grounds were originally built for polo matches, though other sports were played there too. The original stadium was on 110th Street, just north of Central Park and it was the first home of the New York Gothams, who soon changed their name to the Giants. In the 1890s, the Giants moved to a new stadium on Coogan's Bluff at the terminus of the 9th Avenue Elevated Railroad and a year later into the stadium next door that had once belonged to the short-lived rival Players' League. Expanded after a fire in 1911, it was this stadium that remained the Polo Grounds until 1964.

The Polo Grounds was home to one of baseball's most famous games; on October 3, 1951, the Giants won the National League pennant with Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World," a home run off the Brooklyn Dodgers' Ralph Branca, launching them into the World Series (which they subsequently lost to the Yankees).

The Yankees played at the Polo Grounds from 1913 to 1922 and it was home to the NFL Giants from 1925 to 1955. The New York Jets and the New York Mets were the stadium's last occupants. Both played there until Shea Stadium opened in 1964. The Polo Grounds were demolished that year and a public housing project built in there place. A sign hangs on the wall of one of the buildings in the housing project where home plate once stood.

Ebbets Field suffered as similar fate. The stadium was built in the Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1913 to be home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, then owned by Charles Ebbets. It was here Jackie Robinson broke the color line when he joined the team in 1947.

However, in the 1950s the team's owner, Walter O'Malley, began putting intense pressure on the city to build the ball club a new, improved stadium. When New York balked at O'Malley's demands, the Dodgers followed through on what many had considered an empty threat and moved the team to Los Angeles in 1957. That same year, the Giants left the Polo Grounds for San Francisco, suddenly taking New York from being a city of three world-class baseball teams to a city with just the Yankees. Many in Brooklyn have never forgiven O'Malley--or the team--for their desertion.

In 1960, Ebbets Field was demolished and, like the Polo Grounds, was replaced by public housing. The housing project, originally called the Ebbets Field Houses, was renamed the Jackie Robinson Apartments in 1970s.