This website is about sports and the former City, now Borough of Brooklyn. About team sports such as baseball and the personal bonds between players and fans. About chartered districts that provide an ideal structure for organizing competitve sporting events as well as many other economic activities. About world-famous neighborhoods attached to the identity of each local resident or business. About existing sports facilities that need attention and use. About new technology (i.e. tools) for handling information and energy that are transforming local economic opportunities. And about the 153 separate relationships between the eighteen charter districts that offer opportunities for cooperative trade within Brooklyn and for better trading relationships with other places outside Brooklyn.

Competitive sporting events of wrestling, foot races, and Native American team sports such as Pahsahikan, a form of football, were likely regular occurrences among the Canarsee people who inhabited the southern areas of Long Island before Europeans arrived in 1646. In Pahsahikan both men and women from the surrounding area competed together on two opposing teams to move a deerskin ball through a six-foot wide goal at either end of a large playing area.

European sports arrived with the Dutch people in 1646 and their new settlement of Breuckelen ("broken land") and, just eighteen years later, expanded to local competition between English people within the six original Dutch parishes that were surrended to British forces in 1664: Gravesend, Brooklyn Heights, Flatlands, Flatbush, New Utrecht, and Bushwick.. Thereafter, English and other people engaged in various local sports as Kings County was formed in 1683 and as Kings County was ceded to the United States of America by the British in the Treaty of Paris that ended the American War of Independence in 1783.

THIS WEB SITE

PRE-COLONIAL SPORTS

COLONIAL SPORTS

For virtually all of the nineteenth century, Brooklyn was was a growing city in the State of New York that, by the 1898 was the third largest city in the United States behind New York City and Chicago. The National League Baseball franchise for Brooklyn was created in 1890 whie Brooklyn was an independent city.

SPORTS IN THE CITY OF BROOKLYN

Between 1913 and 1957, the Borough of Brooklyn was home to what is probably the most unique professional sports franchise that has ever existed. The Brooklyn Dodgers (known earlier as the Superbas and Robins) played at a local ballpark, Ebbets Field, at Bedford just north of Empire Boulevard on the east side of Prospect Park. A significant number of the ballpayers on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers actually lived in Brooklyn meaning that both players and spectaators regularly walked to nearby Ebbets Field for games. It is little wonder that, in spite of many losing seasons, the Brooklyn Dodgers, nevertheless, had a strong and loyal base of fans in Brooklyn. It is this dynamic local-fan/local-player/local-field connection that is now being sought with this website.

THE BROOKLYN DODGERS

NEIGHBORHOOD AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN BROOKLYN

As detailed elsewhere on this website, (i) development of individual Brooklyn neighborhoods and general economic development throughout Brooklyn is organized around the eighteen established Brooklyn Community Districts; (ii) general revenues are generated from the internal and external distribution of a full line of Brooklyn district sportwear, (iii) private commercial interests are engaged to create two local interconnected leagues of Brooklyn district ballclubs and eighteen separate district media-nets; and (iv) public and private interests are joined in the maintenance and operation of eighteen local district ballfields.

For many hundreds of years competitive sporting events have been organized and held by different people in the southwestern area of Long Island that is now the Borough of Brooklyn in New York City. These sporting events have moved from completely local competitions, to competitive events of regional, national, continental, and, eventually, international or global significance. This website is about this growth of Brooklyn sports and about the opportunity to begin the cycle of competitive sporting event development all over again at an entirely local or intra-Brooklyn level. This is an opportunity that has far-reaching consequences for neighborhood development throughout Brooklyn and can be a first-rate economic development project for most Brooklyn businesses and residents in sports, in other information enterprise, energy, and trade.

RETHINKING SPORTS IN BROOKLYN

In addition to general information about nine different aspects of Brooklyn Sports accessible through black buttons across the top of the main pages, this website contains (i) specific information on six different action projects now underway that are related to Brooklyn sports and accessible through the maroon buttons at the upper left part of the main pages and (ii) historical or unfolding records of scheduled baseball games involving Brooklyn ballclubs that are accessible through the dark green buttons at the upper right part of the main pages.