Squeeze Play That Sent Dodgers West

The Dodgers open at home today amid much uncertainty about who will buy the team and where it will play. But whether they stay in Chavez Ravine or move to a new downtown ballpark, as has been suggested, Los Angeles might consider erecting a statue, an overdue tribute to the man who delivered the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Not Walter O’Malley. Robert Moses.

O’Malley has for too long been the beneficiary of Southern California’s gratitude for having moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958. But he was a reluctant transplant. The thanks should go, instead, to Moses, who was as influential in shaping Los Angeles as he was in the many years he systemically tore down and rebuilt New York.

Moses was for almost 40 years New York’s unelected commissioner of everything that mattered, which gave him all but unchecked leave to decide where the highways would go, where people would live, what great buildings would rise in the places their homes once stood. It was Moses whom O’Malley needed if he was going to realize his dream of replacing aging Ebbets Field with a new stadium for the Dodgers in downtown Brooklyn.

O’Malley started begging Moses for help in 1953 and did not stop until October of 1957, when the Los Angeles City Council was debating whether to extend its very generous offer to lure his Dodgers west.

O’Malley wanted to build his own stadium, but he could not afford both the cost of construction and the market price of the land. For that he needed the condemnation powers that Moses wielded. Moses liked to use this power to build big buildings and broad highways. He did not like row houses and the poor people who lived in them. And, to Los Angeles’ enduring benefit, he did not like Walter O’Malley.

All the winks, nods and vacuous smiles that O’Malley used to great effect with other political people had the opposite impact on Moses, an imperious and often cruel man. To Moses, O’Malley’s manner was, as he wrote to an aide, too soaked with “wolfhounds, shamrocks and harps.” Too Irish. Too much.

Moses said no to O’Malley almost from the beginning. He had briefly considered allowing O’Malley to build near Brooklyn’s civic center. Then, very quickly, he changed his mind. He suggested instead a less-than-appealing site in a distant slum. O’Malley did not so much decline his offer as point again toward the borough’s heart.

In time, he enlisted the great architect R. Buckminster Fuller to design a domed stadium for the Dodgers to rise in the center of Brooklyn’s transportation hub. Moses would not hear of it. O’Malley asked every influential man he knew to write to him, to plead his case. Moses could not seem to make O’Malley go away.

Finally, in January 1956, as he was planning his grandest project -- Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, which would require condemnation far more extensive than what O’Malley sought -- Moses wrote to an aide: “It is necessary to show that our opposition [to O’Malley’s plan] is based on something other than prejudice.” Even Moses felt compelled to cover his tracks.

In the end, Moses left O’Malley too little room to wiggle. He could stay in Ebbets Field, where fewer people were coming. He could leave Brooklyn for Queens and rent the ballpark that Moses had for years envisioned, the future Shea Stadium. Or, he could leave New York.

L.A. first came courting in 1955 and O’Malley sent those emissaries away, believing he could still get what he wanted in New York. But in 1956 he secretly told county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn that he would quit Brooklyn.

Not that he necessarily meant it. Just before the L.A. City Council’s vote, Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman pressed O’Malley to commit to coming if formally invited. He told her that he was a New Yorker and would stay there if he got a good alternative offer. Wyman kept that to herself. The L.A. City Council approved the offer, and New York never countered it.

O’Malley was not, contrary to reputation, a man who had looked to California and seen his future. At least until Moses left him no place else to turn. And for that alone, Los Angeles will always be in Moses’ debt.