Rare blueprints of Ebbets Field, the former home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, were uncovered by a researcher in the Brooklyn Buildings Department and will be displayed at the city’s Municipal Archives Visitors Center.
The blueprints have gone through quite the odyssey after being filed with the city in 1912 or so. They were basically forgotten, but 20 years ago researcher Rod Kennedy found them in the buildings department archives. Since then he says he’s worked to find them a good home — though, to be blunt, it shoudn’t take 20 years to find a home for them when places like the New-York Historical Society or the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum exist — and ended up working out a plan to display them at Brooklyn College.
No, said the city, those plans are still are property and we want to see them displayed with the rest of the city archives. Now, you can argue whether it’s appropriate for the Brooklyn treasures to be displayed in lower Manhattan; the New York Daily News is doing its best to make this a controversy. But you can also argue whether it was appropriate for a researcher to sit on the plans for 20 years — and doing little to preserve or restore them — when there were clearly better venues for display than Brooklyn College.
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