Who Owns New York

Oh, Who Owns New York? shouts a rah rah song of my alma mater. The chorus screams the answer: C - o - l - u - m - b - i - a!

That answer isn't too ridiculously far from the truth: King George founded his Kings College on land around Trinity Church. As the school expanded to become a university land now known as Rockefeller Center was donated, and a huge part of Morningside Heights got added, and other packets and parcels all over: not to mention all the Third World land, race courses and so forth controlled by this Ivy League behemoth. Well, if the Church can own land, if the US can own land, if my landlord can own land, why can't my school?

All that just introduces my real subject: sideways, as it were. Consider this: Who owns the New York Yankees? Who owned the Brooklyn Dodgers? Can the residents of Brooklyn be forgiven if they thought that had some rights of ownership? when the team got spirited off to the Pacific coast?

Today there's an article I see as directly related: "After 21 years of tailgating in the same lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium, Ken Johnson plans to take his party across the street starting with the next home game in two weeks.

And with him, Johnson's bringing along his wildly colorful and popular traditions: from the red 1980 Pinto on which he grills meat on the hood to the pizza oven made out of a filing cabinet to a chicken wing-cooking mailbox and, yes, even the long-established ceremony of drinking shots of Polish cherry liqueur out of the thumbhole of a bowling ball." Johnson said, "In my case, I do push the limits, so I can't scream too loudly. But you wonder how many people go to games because of characters like me. I think I add to the experience."

I wasn't much of a baseball fan in the 1940s. At the start I was only two, at the end I was only twelve. I didn't live in a normal, nuclear family: my father was drunk on the couch, or drunk at the RR station, or lying in a gutter somewhere; I never played ball with him. I don't know if he ever played ball with anyone. In a neighborhood stuffed with girls my age I had plenty of partners to play doctor with but no boys for marbles or catch. One blessed day I saw a boy only slightly older than myself. "Hi." I ran up to him. Rudy, just moved from Flatbush, demanded, "Are you a Dodgers fan? or a Yankee fan?" Huh? I hardly knew what baseball was. "Oh, a Yankee fan!" he decided. He jumped on me and beat me up.

So as the 1950s approached and I from my bicycle delivering papers saw the Yankees trash the Dodgers year after year after year, I glowed with satisfaction. Of course I came to know a little bit about those teams. I saw Joe Dimagio. At Rudy's house I became familiar with the oompah band that played at Dodgers home games.

Understand. I am not a lawyer. My father was the lawyer, and my grandfather. (You can see where I get my respect for the law!) I don't know who the court house in Brooklyn (or Manhattan, or Rome) believed owned the legal entity The Brooklyn Dodgers (or whatever its legal entity name was). I understood that there was some individual or group who claimed that the corporation belonged to them. But I also understood that Brooklynites thought they had some claim. I saw that the band was part of the team no matter what the law said. I saw that the players, and the fans, and the TV announcer, and the subway ... were all part of the Brooklyn Dodgers. And I have always understood that the players and the fans and the oompah band and the beer hawker ... were not consulted when the Dodgers moved to LA. Nor were the kids chasing home-run balls in the streets beyond the fences.