"Brooklyn had been a heterogeneous, dominantly middle class community, with remarkable schools, good libraries and not only Major League Baseball, but extensive concert series, second run movie houses, expansive neighborhoods, and a lovely rolling stretch of acreage called Prospect Park…Then, with postwar prosperity came new highways and the conqueror automobile…Whole families left their blocks for good. They had been overwhelmed by the appeal of a split-level house (nothing down to qualified Vets) on a treeless sixty-by-ninety foot corner of an old Long Island potato farm…" - Roger Kahn, Boys of Summer(1)
The opening of Ebbets Field in 1912 had a very positive effect on the surrounding neighborhood. Local residents loved the Dodgers and the players lived in the neighborhood and they and their families were part of the community. Property values increased as a result. Real estate values in Kings County overall doubled in the 1920s, but in the area surrounding Ebbets Field, they tripled. Improved rapid transit and the demand for property as the Bedford and Flatbush areas expanded toward each other helped to raise real estate values.(2)
After World War II, however, things began to change in Brooklyn. By the 1950s, there was virtually no more available land for development left in Brooklyn. There were few opportunities for families to build new homes under the GI Bill. New commercial development was also impossible without available land. As a result, Brooklyn's wealthier, white residents began to move to Long Island and blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived to take their place.
