Jackie Robinson Playground occupies the former site of Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until the team moved to Los Angeles and the ballpark closed in 1957. The Dodgers entered the National League in 1890 as the Trolley Dodgers and won the championship in their rookie year. After first playing at Washington Park in Brooklyn, the club moved to a new ballpark in Flatbush built by owner Charles Ebbets; construction began on March 4, 1912, and Ebbets Field was dedicated on April 9, 1913. The city acquired the site when I.S. 320 was built in 1964, and the playground opened to the public on Oct. 16, 1969 as a Jointly Operated Playground serving P.S. 320 and the local community. In 1985 it was renamed for former Dodger Jackie Robinson, whose achievements there linked the site to his baseball career. Born in Cairo, Georgia, and raised in Pasadena, California, Robinson starred at the University of California, Los Angeles, becoming the first student to letter in four sports: baseball, basketball, football, and track. After professional football with the Los Angeles Bulldogs and army service during World War II, he played Negro League baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs, where Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers signed him on Aug. 28, 1945 to join the Montreal Royals. On April 15, 1947, Robinson became the first African American player in a Major League baseball game, helping open the sport to generations of black athletes. A standout second baseman and fierce competitor, he led the Dodgers to six World Series appearances, retired in 1956 with a .311 lifetime batting average, and entered the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. He later worked with Chock-Full-O' Nuts, helped found Freedom National Bank, became active in the NAACP, served as a special advisor to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, and died in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1972.
