MLB | The Ballpark Under the Apartment Block (Ebbets Field site, Brooklyn)

On 9 April 1913 Brooklyn lost 1-0 to the Philadelphia Phillies in the first regular-season game at Ebbets Field. The 22-year-old batting leadoff and playing centre field was Casey Stengel. Four days before that, the gates had opened for an exhibition against the Yankees, and Charles Ebbets's youngest daughter Genevieve threw out the first ball.

Ebbets had spent five years assembling the ground. From 1908 he quietly bought individual lots in a corner of Flatbush known as Pigtown, named for the animals that fed on the refuse dumped there, until by 1911 he held about 5.7 acres. Construction started on 4 March 1912. The result was a concrete-and-steel park with a marble rotunda at the entrance, hemmed in by Bedford Avenue and the street grid so tightly that it could never be enlarged properly. Every later expansion pulled the outfield wall closer to home plate.

On 15 April 1947 Jackie Robinson played first base here against the Boston Braves. The phrasing matters: he broke the modern colour line. Moses Fleetwood Walker had played in the American Association in 1884, and the exclusion that followed was an understanding among owners rather than a written rule, which is to say it was a decision men made and kept making for sixty years.

The Dodgers won their only World Series as tenants of this ballpark in 1955. Two years later Walter O'Malley moved them to Los Angeles.

Demolition began on 23 February 1960. Among the roughly two hundred people who turned up were Roy Campanella, who had caught the last game played there, and Otto Miller, who had caught the first one in 1913. Home plate was handed to the Hall of Fame's historian.

The Ebbets Field Apartments opened on the site in 1962 and were renamed the Jackie Robinson Apartments in 1972, the year Robinson died. There is a plaque, and in the parking area off Sullivan Place a marker shaped like home plate. The school across McKeever Place carries Robinson's name too. When the Mets built Citi Field, they copied the rotunda and dedicated it to him.

Nothing of the ballpark itself survives. This memory is pinned to the apartment complex that replaced it, at 1720 Bedford Avenue in Crown Heights. It is private residential property: the plaque and marker are visible from the street and the lot, and residents live here, so treat it as somebody's home rather than an attraction. Coordinates from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: Genevieve Ebbets throwing the first ball at the opening of Ebbets Field, 5 April 1913. Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 2014692697. No known restrictions on publication. Second image: the Ebbets Field Apartments in 2008, photographed by Jim Henderson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.