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On May 26, 1955, O’Malley wrote a letter to noted architect R. Buckminster Fuller stating: “For some time we have been considering a new stadium for our Brooklyn Dodgers...My experience in operating a number of typical but antiquated stadia has convinced me that we lose a great deal of money each year because of inclement weather and for some time I have been talking about building a new stadium that, among other things, would have a dome over it of a translucent material...Baseball companies, unfortunately, do not have the resources of the large industrial companies. Price would become an extremely important issue...I believe this would open up a new horizon in baseball...I am not interested in just building another baseball park.”
This joint effort between Fuller and O’Malley led to the presentation of a domed stadium model. The domed stadium would have been the state-of-the-art baseball home that the Dodger President had always wanted for Brooklyn. The idea was at least 10 years ahead of its time, as the Houston Astrodome was not opened until 1965. Under Fuller’s tutelage, Princeton University School of Architecture graduate students worked on an impressive clear-span, translucent domed stadium design in November 1955.
Graduate student T. William Kleinsasser, Jr. heard the tail end of one of Fuller’s lengthy “guest” lectures. Later, he was prodded by his French class professor to incorporate Fuller’s ideas to help the situation involving the Dodgers and their search for a new stadium by designing a domed model. On November 23, 1955, O’Malley wrote to Long Island Railroad General Manager Thomas Goodfellow stating, “Today’s newspapers had a little story about a visit I made to Princeton over the week end on a matter connected with our proposed new Dodger Stadium. Mr. T. William Kleinsasser Jr., a graduate architectural student at Princeton is making this project a design problem for his Master’s thesis. I was greatly impressed by the model that the students made and which I saw at Princeton. I am particularly pleased with the way Mr. Kleinsasser is approaching the problem. There is nothing official in the Princeton study or in Mr. Kleinsasser’s work on his thesis insofar as the Dodgers are concerned but it is nevertheless of great interest and might ultimately prove of substantial practical value.46
“The Atlantic and Flatbush Avenue site that is the subject of the study is one of the most important subway and railroad intersections in the city and there are detailed maps that I am sure could be made available to Mr. Kleinsasser.”46
Moses, however, strongly condemned this proposal stating in his suggested agenda for the Brooklyn Sports Center Authority on July 25, 1956, “Obviously, the Princeton bubble is simply the idea of an ambitious graduate reporting to a rather wild professor of architecture.” Fuller himself unveiled his concept of a geodesic domed ballpark, which could easily accommodate other year-round events, such as O’Malley envisioned, producing an additional $200,000 in revenue due to the all-weather nature of the structure.
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The downtown landscape of the Brooklyn Civic Center includes a new ballpark to replace an aging Ebbets Field, which was built in 1913. |
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