Generations after its passage, iconic Ebbets Field remains the single-most colorful and enduring image of a baseball park, with a treasured niche in the game’s legacy and the American imagination.

In this lively story about Charley Ebbets, his associates who helped create Ebbets Field, and the talented, hilarious and winsome characters associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers who populated it, Bob McGee chronicles a vibrant history, including the social, political and the historic events that provide context through all its years, capturing the strong connection that remains yet today with a place revered as hallowed ground.

Tracing the origins of Charley Ebbets to his father’s family in the Civil War era, to the outset of ballpark construction and the first pitch thrown in 1913, McGee weaves through all the stories and incidents that shaped life in Brooklyn and New York: the advent of wooden ballparks, the effects of the consolidation of Brooklyn into the City of New York in 1898, the impact on the populous of the Spanish-American War and the two World Wars, telling and threading the baseball stories