Hoop Dreams
With the Nets at the new Barclays Center,
Brooklyn once again has a team of its own
On Sept. 24, 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers played their last game at legendary Ebbets
Field. After Dodgers owner Walter
O’Malley failed in his plans to build
a stadium near Brooklyn’s busiest
rail hub, he packed his team up and
moved it to Los Angeles, leaving
New York City’s most populous
borough famously bereft of a major
professional sports franchise for
more than half a century.
Brooklyn’s long wait will finally
end this fall, when the NBA’s Nets
play their first home game at the
new Barclays Center, an arena built
just a long home run away from the
site envisioned by O’Malley. After
years of delays due to court fights
and financing troubles, the historic
nature of the occasion isn’t lost on
Bruce Ratner who, as chairman and
CEO of Forest City Ratner Cos., is
the developer and majority owner
of Barclays Center.
“It’s kind of being part of his-
tory,” Ratner says, “bringing a pro-
fessional sports team to Brooklyn,
New York, after the tremendous
sports history that this borough,
and once city, had and continues to
have on every single playground in
the borough. Basketball is the base-
ball of Brooklyn now.”
The Nets’ new home sits atop
one of the largest transportation
hubs in the city—the convergence
of rail lines that made the neigh-
borhood so enticing to O’Malley so
many years ago. With access to 11
subway lines and the Long Island
Rail Road, it’s an easy trip from
New York’s Penn Station.
