Why We Stink: How Nepo Babies and Wealthfare Cheats Wrecked New York Sports, Part III.

 Just what did Horace Stoneham and Walter O’Malley want from New York City by way of a new home?

The demands of Stoneham—the original “nepo baby,” and a lifelong alcoholic—were always the more nebulous, mostly because what Horace really wanted was to leave. 

 

The Giants floated ideas for a 150,000-seat stadium in Long Island City, or maybe up in Baychester, where Co-Op City stands today, or near the Whitestone Bridge. Or perhaps a stadium built on stilts over the West Side Highway in Manhattan, one that would seat 110,000 people and provide parking for 20,000 cars. 

It could be used for football, too, and maybe draw the Olympics to New York. Enormous skyscrapers would be built around it, and enough studio space to keep the television industry in the city. In fact, it could be called “TV City”…

 

Sound (all too) familiar?

Walter, on the other hand, had very specific plans ready. He even had pictures and architectural models, provided by certified geniuses such as Buckminster Fuller and Norman Bel Geddes, and featured in magazines like Mechanix Illustrated and Collier’s.

Fuller’s geodesic dome would cost only $1 million, and would increase Dodger attendance by 200,000 a year! 

Bel Geddes’ retractable dome would seat up to 52,000, situated over an enormous parking garage and surrounded by a shopping mall. It had numerous gates designed to let the stadium empty almost instantly, and “a fully automated ticketing system.”  

This design was much more expensive, but O’Malley claimed but the Dodgers would build it all with their own money, just so long as the city condemned the Fort Greene Public Market, where the Atlantic Terminal Mall stands today (very near the Barclays Center), and handed it over to them.

How would the Dodgers manage this? Mostly with money from Skiatron, a revolutionary pay-TV device where—I’m not making this up—a metal box would be attached to your television, and Dodgers fans would pop in 50 cents every time they wanted to see a game.

The only trouble was that Robert Moses wasn’t buying—and what Moses said went, in the New York of the 1950s. 

“The Master Builder” commissioned a study that found what O’Malley was proposing would actually cost anywhere from $21-$50 million, which was an awful lot of Skiatron quarters. 

What’s more, the giant, domed park Walter wanted would created “a China wall” of traffic in downtown Brooklyn. It would be “like building a stadium in Times Square,” as a New York Times critic put it. 

Instead, Moses had an idea of his own—one very close to what Walter O’Malley claimed to so admire out in Milwaukee. The city would build a new park out in Flushing—an all-purpose, publicly owned ballpark much like the Braves’ marvelous new County Stadium.

It, too, could be used for multiple purposes. It could host a football team, say, and other public events, such as concerts by any long-haired groups of English musicians who might happen by. And both the Giants and the Dodgers could rent this new park, each for an entirely reasonable, $500,000 a year.  

This was not all right by Walter O’Malley, who still had one more card to deal off the bottom of the deck.