Proposed Dome Stadium For Dodgers Discussed in Collier's, September 27, 1952

A feature article in Collier’s magazine “Baseball’s Answer to TV” by Tom Meany presents the possibility of a dome stadium to be built in Brooklyn by the Dodgers to replace aging Ebbets Field. The article includes the brain trust behind the possible multi-purpose dome stadium as Dodger President Walter O’Malley, engineer Capt. Emil Praeger and designer and architect Norman Bel Geddes. Plans called for a 600-foot span for the dome (whether solid, transparent, or slides aside). Seating capacity was to be 55,000, which could be expanded to 90,000 for boxing matches and conventions. Wider seats angled towards home plate, column-free, a large parking garage, a shopping center, automatic ticket takers and synthetic turf were all on the drawing boards for the first new stadium to be privately built since 1923. In his book “Forever Blue” about Walter O’Malley, author Michael D’Antonio writes about the Collier’s article, “The field, which could be made of artificial turf, would be lowered below ground level, and parking arranged so customers could walk from their cars to their comfortably cushioned seats without much of a climb. Plans for traffic would allow thirty thousand people to leave the park within fifteen minutes, but if they chose to linger they could shop in an arcade of stores or have their oil changed by attendants in the parking garage. (These services, along with office space and the garage, would be available for neighborhood use every day of the year.) Everywhere machines would replace workers by taking tickets, opening gates, and dispensing food.

“Pressed for his most realistic view, O’Malley told Collier’s he believed that a stadium very much like the domed wonderland he described would be built eventually. Where and when were a different matter, he said, adding, “We’ve already had too much of that wait-’til-next-year stuff in Brooklyn.” It was an honest answer from an owner who couldn’t be sure that Brooklyn and the Dodgers would merit such an enormous investment. Still, a new park seemed essential if the club were to remain in the borough and thrive.”

In Collier’s, Tom Meany wrote, “Brooklyn President O’Malley, himself a man of foresight and imagination, finds himself startled from time to time by Geddes’ enthusiasm for the new project. Each time O’Malley cries out, ‘No, no, Norman!’ he gets the same answer from Geddes, and Praeger, too. ‘Let’s not take the strikingly novel features out until we know they are wrong.’ And, so far, they have been able to stand him off, a feat of no mean proportions, as O’Malley’s baseball competitors will tell you.” Tom Meany, "Baseball's Answer to TV," Collier's magazine, September 27, 1952

In a September 15, 1952 letter to Frank D. Schroth, Publisher, The Brooklyn Eagle, Walter O’Malley writes, “You will be interested in a story by Tom Meany which will appear in the September 26th issue of Collier’s. They have a two page color spread of a drawing of the type of stadium that Norman Bel Geddes and Emil H. Praeger might recommend. This stadium would be the largest covered convention hall in the world. I can think of nothing that would bring more business to Brooklyn than this proposed six million dollar improvement.”