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plays. Extending the second deck around the entire stadium—which was almost all that could be done to increase capacity—had a catalytic effect on the action within. The dimensions of the playing field shrunk and the slants of the walls, always a physical manifestation of a geometrist’s fiendish mind, multiplied. By one count on Ballparks.com, the right-field wall and post-1930 scoreboard offered nearly 300 different angles.
    Spiritually, the evolution of Ebbets Field fell in step with the evolution of the Brooklyn baseball franchise, which featured characters like Casey Stengel and Babe Herman along with classic heroes like Zack Wheat and ultimately, the Boys of Summer. There could be no greater emblem for the ballpark than Hilda Chester, a Brooklyn fan with a booming voice and head-ringing cowbell, who wanted nothing more than victory. By the end, Ebbets Field was an acquired taste for some, an annoyance for others.
    â€œThere was no escaping the person in the next seat, or the drunk a few rows down,” Brooklyn-born Michael Shapiro wrote in The Last Good Season. “The fans’ close proximity to the field, which made it possible to talk with outfielders during a pitching change and to hear voices from everywhere in the park, felt as confining as life in a brownstone with neighbors who asked too many questions. Ebbets Field was a row house street, a railroad flat, a kitchen window looking out onto a red brick wall. It was not the way people wanted to live anymore.”
    Ebbets Field was built not to last, and you’d have to have blinders not to recognize that some sort of transition needed to be made. Compared to Brooklyn’s fading edifice, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park were modern mansions. Ebbets Field was a ticking clock. On September 24, 1957, the Dodgers played their final game there before 6,702 in attendance. In fewer than three years, the ballpark was demolished. While Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles was being transformed from a former residential area into a ballpark, Brooklyn’s ballpark was reborn as a 1,300-unit apartment complex, Ebbets Field Apartments.
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    Hilda Chester
    She started by bringing a frying pan to the Ebbets Field bleachers and banging it with a ladle, then graduated to shaking a cowbell. She was the loudest, most raucous fan in Dodgers history—even though two heart attacks forced her to abandon her ceaseless razzing of Brooklyn’s rivals. Like no one else, Hilda Chester brought on the noise.
    â€œDuring the games,” wrote Peter Golenbock in Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, “Hilda lived in the bleacher seats with her bell. [Leo] Durocher had given her a lifetime pass to the grandstand, but she preferred sitting in the bleachers with her entourage of fellow rowdies. With her fish peddler voice, she’d say, ‘You know me. Hilda wit da bell. Ain’t it trillin’? Home wuz never like dis, mac.’”

10. The Move
    The real history of the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles is much more nuanced than most people realize, as the following timeline only begins to indicate.
    Back in 1946, with Ebbets Field clearly aging, Dodger vice president Walter O’Malley began soliciting ideas for enlarging or replacing the ballpark. Five years of research and investigation passed before, in 1951—a year after gaining majority ownership of the Dodgers—O’Malley asked to have the city help assemble land for him to purchase in Brooklyn for the building of a privately financed stadium with parking.
    O’Malley directed his request to New York parks commissioner Robert Moses, the biggest hurdle to the Dodgers’ continued residence in Brooklyn. In an August 1955 letter to O’Malley, Moses explained the rationale for his opposition, saying that it was not in the public interest to aid the Dodgers in this quest.
    â€œI can only repeat what we have told you verbally and in writing,