By Andrew Keh
NEW YORK — Every now and then, someone will wander into the parking lot of the sprawling apartment complex in Brooklyn where Ezra Askotzky works and start staring inquisitively at the ground.
By now, Askotzky knows what they are looking for: a small plaque that marks the location of home plate at Ebbets Field, the long-ago-dismantled home of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Askotzky, 28, the maintenance manager for the Ebbets Field Apartments, or one of his staff members, will emerge — often wielding one of the wooden bats they keep in their office as props for pictures — and momentarily assume the role of tour guide.
“At this location on April 15, 1947, Jack Roosevelt Robinson Integrated Major League Baseball,” the plaque reads.
“People come all the way out here just to see something that means so much to them,” said Askotzky, who started working at the Crown Heights complex in 2021 after moving from Milwaukee. “It’s not a big deal for us just to go out there and give someone a bat and offer to take their picture. You see the smile, and that makes it worth it.”
The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles before the 1958 season, and two years later Ebbets Field was razed. In 1962, the Ebbets Field Apartments rose up in its place.
Now, with the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers competing in the World Series, the plaque that gets a small handful of visitors most days is now seeing a few groups almost every hour.
And Askotzky and his staff of 40 or so maintenance workers and porters have become unwitting, and generally ungrudging, caretakers of this almost-hidden vestige of the franchise’s lore.
On Monday, hours before Game 3 of the World Series in the Bronx, Phillip Duke, a maintenance staffer who has worked at the complex for more than 20 years, was crouched on the sidewalk, using a cordless drill with a brush bit to burnish the plaque.
At one point, Adam Aguilar and Osvaldo Heredia, two friends visiting the city from San Bernardino, California, wandered hesitantly into the parking lot.
“We’re looking for the home plate marker,” Heredia said.
“Oh, we sold it this morning,” one of the porters said, with a straight face. “For $1.5 million. It’s gone.”
The friends looked at each other, surprised and dejected. A second later, the workers burst out laughing.
“No,” the porter said. “You’re standing on it.”
Indeed, one of the memorial’s defining features is its inconspicuousness. You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking. And even if you were, you might struggle to find it.
Paul Dagliolo, a Dodgers fan, walked to the wrong parking lot on Monday after deciding on a whim to find the plaque. His grandparents were fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he considers himself something of a dying breed: a native New Yorker who roots for the team.
Dagliolo, 37, of Astoria, bent over to touch the plate — “trying to get the old Brooklyn ghosts going” — and left shortly after, feeling at once impressed and a tad underwhelmed.
“There should be more of a shrine to it,” he said. “It’s part of the fabric of Brooklyn. If I had to give feedback, I would say they could do a little more with it.”
But the memorial, of course, is not sequestered inside a museum. It sits on the well-trodden pavement of a sprawling, 1,318-unit apartment complex.
As on any New York City sidewalk, most of the residents on Monday wove wordlessly around the loitering tourists and visitors, hardly breaking stride.
One resident, Alexia Scott, 39, who grew up in the houses and recently moved back, took the time to shepherd over a couple of confused out-of-towners she had encountered down the street.
Scott said she was proud of the building’s past — its associations with Jackie Robinson and Black history — but noted that gentrification and changing immigration patterns in the neighborhood meant that fewer people seemed to revel in its aura.
“New people don’t always understand the gravity of the fact that we’re walking where legends walked,” Scott said. “This is a landmark, and we really need to preserve this space.” She paused, saying she had gotten chills. “It’s a big deal. But it looks like this.”
Askotzky said he often met people who had attended Brooklyn Dodgers games as children. He said he had found the wooden bats in a vacant apartment one day and brought them downstairs, thinking they might be of use.
“Some people really crouch down into a stance,” Askotzky said. (He prefers basketball and football to baseball: “The games are too long. It’s too slow.”)
As the day went on, more visitors arrived, sparking more banter with the staff — about whether the Yankee Stadium crowd could buoy the home team that night, whether certain star players were healthy or not, and who ultimately would take the trophy.
When the chatter died down, Aguilar, the fan from California, seemed suddenly struck by the emotional weight of his surroundings.
“Damn,” he said, straightening his back. “Jackie Robinson used to stand right here.”
This article originally appeared in <a href=”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/nyregion/dodgers-brooklyn-ebbets-field.html”>The New York Times</a>.
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