A Ratnerized O’Malley, Robert Moses And The Simple Fact That No One Really Cares Anymore . . .

The public image of Walter O’Malley (and if you’re asking yourself who that is, that’s good — you’ve moved on) gets a bump from Bruce Ratner:

half a century after Walter O’Malley ripped the heart out of Brooklyn by moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles, quite a few Brooklynites seemed grudgingly willing to congratulate Mr. O’Malley on his posthumous election yesterday to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

“Yeah, he deserves it,” David Avery, 50, said as he stood near what was once center field in Ebbets Field and is now the front courtyard of the Ebbets Field Apartments in Crown Heights. “It’s overdue.”

Yesterday’s vote, by the Hall of Fame’s veterans’ committee, was a bit of a twist of the knife, to be sure. Mr. O’Malley’s great accomplishment, after all, was to take Major League Baseball to the West Coast, allowing it to become a truly national sport. This left a few ruffled feathers back in Brooklyn.

But revisionist history has been relatively kind to Mr. O’Malley, who owned the Dodgers from 1950 to 1970. Many historians maintain that Robert Moses, still at the height of his city-shaping powers in the late 1950s, forced Mr. O’Malley’s hand by refusing to use eminent domain law to acquire land for Mr. O’Malley to build a new domed stadium along Atlantic Avenue to replace the undersize Ebbets Field.

Others say Mr. O’Malley forced Mr. Moses to force his hand by making unreasonable demands for land and snubbing Mr. Moses’s offer of a stadium in Queens. They say he was just looking for an excuse to move to Los Angeles, where he knew he could make a lot more money.

. . .

Sure, the Dodgers’ departure may have hastened white flight and other harbingers of the borough’s economic decline in the 1960s and ’70s. Mark Naison, a Fordham University professor of African-American studies and a Brooklyn native, called the team “one of the few threads that connected the growing black population of Brooklyn with the declining ethnic white population of Brooklyn.”

But those days are gone, too. Brooklyn is hardly down on its heels anymore. It has survived, and thrived, quite well without Mr. O’Malley’s Dodgers.

Just across Atlantic Avenue from where Mr. O’Malley wanted to build his stadium, the developer Bruce Ratner is developing a $4 billion complex, the Atlantic Yards, featuring a basketball arena. It might not be too popular in some parts of Brooklyn, but anyone who rooted for Mr. O’Malley to get his way would be hard pressed to spit in the face of Mr. Ratner’s plan.

The decline of anti-O’Malleyism in Brooklyn can be traced even more directly to simple demographics: There are just not that many people around to hate him anymore. According to census statistics, more than 85 percent of today’s 2.5 million Brooklynites were either not yet born or living outside the United States when the Dodgers packed up after the 1957 season.

“I think in 2007, it’s perhaps time that we get over it,” said Eric McClure, a civic activist in Park Slope who was born in 1963.