SEATS OF SUMMER

Iron legs are scabbed with rust and paint peels off the maple slats. The disassembled stadium seats lying about Don Yager’s workshop hardly look special.

Yet they are special.

The seats are from Ebbets Field, the late, mythic stadium that was home to the Brooklyn Dodgers. The field where Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and other fabled figures played is just a baseball memory and many seats from the demolished stadium had been left to fade in the sun and snow.

That has changed now as Yager restores the aged flip-up seats to their former glory. The seats are cleaned, painted with a Dodger blue wash and transformed into high-end pieces of baseball memorabilia. A set of two connected seats sells for $2,250, a sign of the booming sports memorabilia market and the nostalgic appeal of the long-gone Brooklyn Dodgers.

The seats are evocative. Bits of old Ebbets-era paint can be seen on them, and quite a few have barely discernible painted white numbers on their back slats.

“What’s left is just ghost of numbers,” Yager said. “Everything about these is ghosts.”

Which, of course, is the attraction.

Neiman Marcus Direct, which first offered the seats in its Christmas catalog, even showed an apparition of an old-time Dodger standing behind a bench in a field of dreams. The copy read: “Now you can relive the glory days of baseball.”

That’s glory as in Robinson, Reese, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges and any number of legends who called Ebbets home. The ball field built in 1913 made history when Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. But Ebbets and the Brooklyn Dodgers owe much of their latter-day fame to more oddball charms.

Known affectionately as “Da Bums,” the Dodgers became the embodiment of Brooklyn-- brash, hard-playing and somehow always second-best, often behind the more upscale New York Yankees.

An excruciating championship loss to the Yankees in the 11941 World Series inspired a famous Brooklyn Eagle headline: “WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR.” When the Dodgers finally won the World Series, over the Yankees in 1955, the Daily News came up with its own gem: “WHO’S A BUM!”

Ebbets Field was a working-class stadium that fit the team, complete with a motely band of fan-musicians and an outfield sign for a clothing store that enticed batters with the slogan “Hit the sign, win a suit.”

Ebbets Field was demolished in 1960, three years after the Dodgers left for Los Angeles. A wrecking ball was made to look like a baseball for the occasion.

Ebbet’s home plate made it to the Brooklyn Historical Society. The flagpole ended up in a parking lot. As for the seats, they were dispersed widely-- some to high schools in Tennessee and Pittsburgh, said Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame president Marty Adler.

The seats Yager is restoring were bought at the time by a family for $5 apiece. It’s unclear whether the seats ever saw further duty, but they were eventually stored outdoors in the Hudson Valley area.

A sharp-eyed new York City businessman last year saw the potential in the neglected seats, and arranged for their sale through Neiman Marcus. Yager (a Yankee fan!) was chosen to do the meticulous rehabilitation work because of his experience as a professional furniture restorer.

Yager last summer began taking the seats apart, stripping off the flaking paint, wire-brushing the rust, and putting things back together. The seats are painted with blue wash and a few coats of lacquer. For the final touch, oak runners are attached to the iron legs with a plaque reading: “Restored from Ebbets Field. Home of the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

A spokeswoman for Neiman Marcus said the chairs sold well for $2,750 for a set of two, but they stopped taking orders from their Christmas catalog earlier this year. Yager bought 64 seats for himself and now sells them for $500 less a set.

Some seats have a time-capsule quality. A few fans scratched their initials into the maple slats, and some seats still have fossilized gum stuck to their undersides. Yager will often leave the gray wads undisturbed.

“Originally, I would take it off and somebody said, ‘Why are taking it off? It’s part of history!”

Historic seats? It may seem like an overstatement. But Adler, who routinely hooks up buyers and sellers of Ebbets seats, claims they are special in part because of the masses of people who enjoyed Dodger baseball at Ebbets. He lists just a few: Frank Sinatra, Dwight Eisenhower, Barbra Streisand.

“They’re the No. 1 thing to get!” said Chris Arone, a New York city police officer who bought a set from Yager. The rabid Brooklyn Dodgers fan will add the seats to his collection of team balls, caps and autographs.

“I’ll probably just put it in the corner and look at it,” he said.

Sports Collectors Digest editor T.S. O’Connell notes relics from sports parks have become very collectible in the past decade. This can be especially true of Ebbets Field, since the Brooklyn Dodgers are at the top of the collectors market along with the Yankees.

Arone recalled an auction he attend recently where $1,400 was bid for piece of Ebbets Field.

It was a single brick.