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Don Drysdale pitches to an almost empty Ebbets Field, September 22, 1957
Private collection
By the mid 1950s, the communities around Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds were changing — with the upwardly mobile white immigrant working class moving out, thanks to the GI Bill and postwar prosperity, with dark-skinned newcomers entering from the South and Puerto Rico, and with banks and the federal government disinvesting in the now increasingly minority inner-city neighborhoods. Simultaneously, the teams complained that their existing ballparks were antiquated and lacked the parking that the automobile age required — for example, only 700 cars could park at Ebbets, limiting the number of suburbanites who could return for a game.
