THE PLAY OF THE LAND

All of 22 years old and fresh out of USC, Rosalind Wiener was looking for ways to attract voters in her bid for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council.

She had 35,000 cards printed up enumerating the standard election promises: strengthen drug laws, improve the economy, eliminate government waste and provide adequate public transportation.

But she needed one more item. Something different. Something original.

Well, her family had always been huge baseball fans, so why not?

Wiener’s final item: Bring major league baseball to Los Angeles.

The year was 1953.

“I didn’t know about minor league rights,” she said. “I didn’t know you had to get a vote of the owners. I thought, you just said to somebody, ‘Come visit. Come to L.A.’ I didn’t know how complicated it would be to bring a team here.”

Complicated, but not impossible, as Wiener, who married and became Rosalind Wyman, discovered after winning a council seat.

Professional baseball in Los Angeles in those days consisted of two Pacific Coast League teams, the Los Angeles Angels and the Hollywood Stars.

On the other side of the continent, the Dodgers seemed entrenched in Brooklyn, where they had been since their inception in 1890 as the Bridegrooms.

As the Trolley Dodgers and then, simply, the Dodgers, they became the soul of their community and “America’s Team” long before the Dallas Cowboys were tabbed with that distinction.

But by 1953, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley had been exploring alternatives for aging Ebbets Field for seven years. Back in 1946, as a minority owner, O’Malley sent a letter to engineer Emil Prager in which O’Malley said, “Your fertile imagination should have some ideas about enlarging or replacing our present stadium.”

O’Malley’s imagination was running wild by the 1950s. Having taken over majority ownership of the team, he envisioned building a domed stadium, a concept that seemed inconceivable for baseball at the time, more than a decade before the Astrodome was constructed in Houston.

O’Malley had selected a site at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush, a couple of long fly balls from Ebbets Field. The property contained a soon-to-be-abandoned meat market and was located at a hub of the New York transportation system that would bring in the Manhattan crowds via subway and those living in the suburbs via the Long Island Rail Road.

There was no question Ebbets Field, built in 1913, its foundation decaying, its opportunities for expansion nonexistent because of the surrounding neighborhood, had to be replaced.

Also in 1953, a seemingly unrelated event back in L.A. would push Wyman’s dream one step closer to reality.

Three years earlier, a letter had gone out from the Los Angeles Housing Authority to residents living on more than 300 acres of steep rolling hills near downtown known as Chavez Ravine. It informed them a public housing development for low-income families was to be built on their property, which they would be forced to sell at fair market value under eminent domain. The residents would be given the first opportunity to buy into the new project, to be known as Elysian Park Heights, or would be given public assistance in finding other homes.

“The Dodgers had nothing whatsoever to do with the moving of people out of Chavez Ravine,” Wyman said.

With the process underway and families being bought out, the project came to a screeching halt in 1953 with the election of Norris Poulson as Los Angeles mayor. A vehement opponent of public housing, he was the key figure in the killing of the project.

It was too late, however, to resurrect the community in Chavez Ravine. Only scattered families were left on the barren acreage.

What could the city do with the land? Suggestions included a zoo, a convention center, an opera house, even a cemetery.

“The problem was the contour of the land,” Wyman said. “Millions of cubic yards of dirt had to be moved. We couldn’t interest anybody into doing anything with that land. And there were no tax dollars coming off it.”

Vincent X. Flaherty, a Los Angeles Examiner sports columnist, had an idea. Put a baseball stadium there. It isn’t known if he was the first to conceive of that use for the land, but there is no question that, in that pivotal year of 1953, Flaherty wrote O’Malley, informing him that “the clamor has picked up astonishingly here within the past couple of years” for a major league team.

O’Malley showed no interest.

Three years later, Flaherty wrote O’Malley again. The occasion was the 1956 World Series between the Dodgers and the New York Yankees. In attendance was Kenneth Hahn, a member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. The L.A. hunt for a big league team had centered on the Washington Senators.

Flaherty had a note slipped to O’Malley that read, “Supervisor Kenneth Hahn is here from Los Angeles. As things stand, he has the Washington franchise. . . . Hahn is authorized to offer you immediate playing facilities for next April.”

O’Malley returned the note with his written response: “Not interested as our Brooklyn Stadium matter is progressing satisfactorily.”

Not really. Robert Moses, a New York city commissioner in charge of urban renewal, had his own vision of the city and it didn’t include a domed stadium at Atlantic and Flatbush. He didn’t deny Ebbets Field had to be replaced, but Moses wanted to put the new stadium in Queens, near where Shea Stadium now sits.

“This was one Moses,” said Bert Sugar, a New York sportswriter, “who was not going to take the Dodgers to their promised land.”

O’Malley came to accept that.

“He put a lot of time and energy and money into it,” said his son, Peter O’Malley. “He gave it his best shot, but finally, I think he realized it was up. It was over. It wasn’t going to happen in Brooklyn.

“And only then did he say, ‘OK, what are the options?’ ”

One, of course, was his most ardent suitor, L.A.

But smaller steps had to be taken before O’Malley could make such a giant leap across the country.

In January 1957, he bought a 44-seat plane, making the Dodgers the first team with their own air transportation.

That was important considering St. Louis was the farthest west baseball stretched at that point.

In February, O’Malley swapped the Dodgers’ minor league team in Fort Worth for the Los Angeles Angels and their ballpark, L.A.’s Wrigley Field.

In March, O’Malley met with L.A. officials at the team’s spring training headquarters in Vero Beach, Fla.

Also in March, O’Malley met with Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants. Unhappy with his situation in New York, Stoneham had decided to move the Giants to Minneapolis, where he had a minor league team. O’Malley, knowing how difficult it would be to get his fellow owners to accept traveling all the way to the West Coast to play one team, saw a way to double his chances of approval. O’Malley put the idea of San Francisco in Stoneham’s head.

In May, O’Malley inspected Chavez Ravine from a helicopter.

In August, Stoneham announced the Giants were moving to San Francisco.

As the 1957 season ended, negotiations were underway on an agreement that the city of Los Angeles would give O’Malley in excess of 300 acres in Chavez Ravine and the county would finance the building of access roads.

In exchange, the Dodgers would give the city Wrigley Field, estimated value $2.2 million; build and maintain a stadium with at least 50,000 seats (final cost: $23 million); spend $500,000 on a recreation facility in the area; pay $60,000 a year to the city for 20 years and pay property taxes, which totaled $345,000 in the first year.

“The Dodgers were Brooklyn,” Wyman said. “Deep down in my heart, I thought this wasn’t going to happen. Up until the day of the vote.”

That day was 50 years ago today -- Oct. 7, 1957.

There would still be unanticipated hurdles ahead, including a referendum on the move, lawsuits against the Dodgers, the ugly spectacle of the last remaining holdouts on the land being forcibly removed, and delays in stadium construction.

But none of that would matter if the city council didn’t approve the contract with the Dodgers. A yea vote by two-thirds of the 15 members was needed.

“Opponents were still saying, ‘We’ll use that land for something,’ ” recalled Wyman. “They wouldn’t admit it was unusable.

“Norris Poulson was a nervous wreck that day. He said we should call O’Malley.”

Against Wyman’s wishes, that’s what Poulson did in the privacy of his office as the debate droned on in the council chambers.

Then he handed the phone to Wyman, who had never spoken to the Dodgers owner.

Wyman remembers the conversation going as follows:

O’Malley: “Mrs. Wyman, I thank you for everything you’ve done. I think it’s a fair contract, but I don’t know if major league baseball can be a success in Los Angeles.”

Wyman: “Are you coming?”

O’Malley: “I’m a New Yorker. I believe that New York is the right place for me to be in baseball. . . . I always wanted to build my own stadium, but if something should happen where I see I could stay in New York, I would stay.”

Wyman: “Mr. O’Malley, we are going to go to a vote here. If we vote for you to come, would we have to wait a long time to hear from you?”

O’Malley: “No, I will not keep you waiting.”

Says Wyman, “I was devastated. I got a partial yes, but I felt it was almost more like a no.”

After a session that stretched well into the night, the council voted, 10-4, with one member not in attendance, to approve the deal. The Dodgers announced the next day they were coming. Rosalind Wyman had fulfilled her farfetched campaign promise.

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steve.springer@latimes.com