L.A., Here They Came
The Dodgers move to California, and the world follows
Long before the dawn of superdomes and luxury boxes, Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, set out to build a modern stadium to replace the small and aging Ebbets Field, treasured by Brooklyn fans but with only 23,000 seats and little parking. New York City's planning bureaucrats thwarted him at every turn. By 1957, O'Malley was desperate for a land deal, and Los Angeles was a city in transition with wide-open spaces and big-league dreams.
So, after 68 seasons, and a 1955 World Series win over the Yankees, O'Malley moved the Dodgers to L.A., where he could get what he couldn't get at home: a site to build what would become the finest stadium of its time. The deal not only broke Brooklyn's heart, (the old joke was if you were in the room with Hitler, Stalin, and O'Malley and had only two bullets, you'd shoot O'Malley twice) but forever changed baseball, pushing its boundaries 1,800 miles beyond St. Louis to the West Coast.
It also changed forever the way the rest of the country saw California. With the arrival of the Dodgers (as well as the San Francisco Giants, who also defected from New York as part of the Dodger deal), the land of new beginnings and Hollywood fantasy hadn't just become part of the national pastime; it had become part of the nation. "The Dodgers' move to L.A. was hugely symbolic. It was representative of the whole shift west that was happening in the country," says Kevin Nelson, author of The Golden Game, the Story of California Baseball. "It also finally made easterners aware that California existed."
Dreamers. Of course, California more than existed by the time O'Malley showed up, even if the East Coast had yet to take the state seriously. Lured by great weather and high employment, job hunters and dream seekers were migrating to the state in record numbers. By 1957, California's population had grown to 14.2 million, second only to New York. Los Angeles County, already the nation's third-largest manufacturing city, was closing in on Chicago as the nation's second-largest metropolitan area. It wouldn't be long before L.A. was growing faster than any state in the country, except California itself. In the end, the shift west would become the biggest migration in history. "The new West was the most dynamic area in the nation. We wanted to start over fresh, and this was the place to do it because there was less here to erase," says Neil Morgan, author of the book Westward Tilt. "There had been lots of migrations, the Dust Bowl and all the others. They were casual. But this was a boiling-over kind of thing."
With its population booming, California had also begun in earnest to lay down the infrastructure of a megastate. Thousands of miles of freeways were being constructed, supercharging the growth of the suburbs and fueling the state's love affair with the car. (By 1960, approximately two thirds of the land in metropolitan Southern California would be devoted to drivers in one way or another.) Hundreds of new schools were being built, and the master plan for California's university system, which would become the envy of the nation, was falling into place. Three years later, California would authorize the largest water project in U.S. history.
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