In a column for New York Magazine, Sam Anderson spins the legend of the Brooklyn Dodgers' departure from New York in a skeptical light, a side I have never quite heard before. It seems to be a good evaluation of what things were like in old Brooklyn, as we come up on the 50th anniversary of the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn.Anderson writes:
"The Dodger myth strikes me as one of the more self-indulgent stories a
generation has ever cooked up in a historical homage to itself—an
evergreen excuse for Manhattan’s power elite to wax nostalgic about the
colorful poverty of their Brooklyn childhoods."
"But by far the most irritating part of the Dodgers myth is that—despite its obnoxious ubiquity and subtle historical distortions and inherent racism and all the self-congratulatory backslapping—the core of it actually seems to be true."
Admittedly, I am no expert on the Brooklyn Dodgers, and my knowledge of such comes mostly from the documentaries I have watched on TV. "But by far the most irritating part of the Dodgers myth is that—despite its obnoxious ubiquity and subtle historical distortions and inherent racism and all the self-congratulatory backslapping—the core of it actually seems to be true."
Nevertheless, well put together articles such as this help me to understand what the Dodgers truly meant to the people of Brooklyn during the good ol' days.
