When did the Brooklyn Dodgers mover to California?

Real estate businessman Walter O’Malley had acquired majority ownership of the Dodgers in 1950, when he bought the shares of his co-owners, the estate of Branch Rickey and the late John L. Smith. Before long he was working to buy new land in Brooklyn to build a more accessible and better arrayed ballpark than Ebbets Field. Beloved as it was, Ebbets Field had grown old and was not well served by infrastructure, to the point where the Dodgers could not sell the park out even in the heat of a pennant race (despite largely dominating the league from 1946 to 1957).

O’Malley wanted to build a new, state of the art stadium in Brooklyn. But City Planner Robert Moses and other New York politicians refused to let him build the Brooklyn stadium he wanted. During the 1955 season he announced that the team would play seven regular season games and one exhibition game at Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium in 1956. He expected that this move would put pressure on the city’s politicians to build the Dodgers the park he wanted in Brooklyn.[6] Yet Moses and the others considered this an empty threat, and did not believe O’Malley would go through with moving the team from New York City. That is when Los Angeles came into the picture.

When Los Angeles officials attended the 1956 World Series looking to entice a team to move to the City of Angels, they were not even considering the Dodgers. Their original target had been the Washington Senators (who would in fact move to Bloomington, suburban Minneapolis, to become the Minnesota Twins in 1961). When O’Malley heard that LA was looking for a club, he sent word to the Los Angeles officials that he was interested in talking. Los Angeles offered him what New York would not: a chance to buy land suitable for building a ballpark, and own that ballpark, giving him complete control over all its revenue streams. When the news came out, Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. and Moses made a feeble effort to save the Dodgers, offering to build a ballpark on the World’s Fair Grounds in Queens. Wagner was already on shaky ground, as the Giants were getting ready to move out of the crumbling Polo Grounds. However, O’Malley was interested in his park only under his conditions, and the plans for a new stadium in Brooklyn seemed like a pipe dream. Walter O’Malley was left with the difficult decision to move the Dodgers to California, convincing Giants owner Horace Stoneham to move to San Francisco instead of Minneapolis to keep the Giants-Dodgers rivalry alive on the West Coast. There was no turning back: the Dodgers were heading for Hollywood