It’s kind of a sad-looking flagpole, plastered with stickers and a layer of grime at the chaotic intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.
But it once stood in Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 to 1957. And that makes it a welcome rescued relic from a very different Brooklyn.
The flagpole took a strange journey before ending up here in big box shopping, skyscraper-dominated Downtown Brooklyn.
After Ebbets Field was bulldozed in 1960, “the flagpole was later donated to a VFW post on Utica Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush,” states the website for the Barclays Center.
There it remained, even after the VFW post became the Canarsie Casket Company, which later transitioned into a church.
Real estate and Barclays Center developer Bruce Ratner obtained the flagpole in 2007, raising it in front of the arena in a dedication ceremony when it opened to the public in 2012.
Having the flagpole in front of the home arena for the NBA’s Nets and WNBA’s Liberty celebrates the return of professional sports to the borough.
It also commemorates the legacy of the Dodgers—or the Trolley Dodgers as they were called back in 1896, an ode to the fans who had to dodge electric trolley tracks to get to the ballpark before Ebbets Field came to be.
The plaque on the base of the flagpole tells the story and cites the 2012 dedication. It’s one of those hiding-in-plain-sight monuments, so inconspicuous that I wonder how many passersby even notice it—or know that the former site of Ebbets Field is now the Ebbets Field Apartments.
[Second image: MNCY, X2011.34.2264]