In 1926, a company called Brooklyn Edison cleared the land on Third Avenue between
 1st and 3rd streets for a new storage facility, yet intentionally saved a brick
 wall that had been part of Washington Park, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played
 before they built Ebbets Field.

At the time, the company said that the wall -- part of what would've been the
 stadium's left-field facade -- was too significant to tear down.

Yet this year, Con Edison's plans for a new facility on Third Avenue between 1st and
 3rd streets, called for tearing down the very same brick wall.

Somehow, a wall that was seen as too historically valuable to destroy in 1926 has
 become, 76 years later, less historically valuable.

"Was there even a ballpark there?" argued Vibeke Koszeghy, Con Ed's lead architect.
 "No one has said definitively."

Clearly, Koszeghy hasn't spoken to baseball historian Tom Gilbert. The author of
 more than a dozen baseball books, Gilbert is saying -- definitively -- that there
 used to be a ballpark there, built in 1898 to house the Dodgers after a brief stint
 in Brownsville.

Hall of Famer Zach Wheat broke into the majors at Washington Park. The team,
 sometimes called the Superbas, won two National League pennants there. And the
 stadium was still being used in 1912, when a skinny kid named Dutch Stengel -- who
 later picked up a different nickname because he wouldn't stop talking about his
 beloved Kansas City --played his first game. (Before games, the still-young Old
 Professor used to stand in left field and say, "I love the smell of the Gowanus
 Canal in the morning. It smells like…victory.")

"Look, there's nothing left of Ebbets Field at all, so the wall needs to be
 preserved," Gilbert said. "Clearly, Con Ed thought it was important to save it in
 1926. What's changed?"

Almost everything. Where home plate used to be, Con Ed operates a waste dump. Where
 the Dodgers' clubhouse sat, Con Ed now has storage rooms. Where Wheat and Stengel
 roamed, Con Ed parks trucks.

Yet the wall, most likely the oldest piece of a major-league ballpark standing
 anywhere in the country, remains the most popular stop on Gilbert's baseball
 history tours.

"You can show people players' gravesites or pictures of old ballparks," he said,
 "but there is no substitute for touching a wall of an old stadium. People love it."

Con Ed says that it will remove a small portion of the wall and install it in nearby
 J.J. Byrne Park -- but when The Gnome contacted the Parks Department, a spokeswoman
 said no one knew anything about that supposed plan.

Con Ed begins construction next month. The old wall will still be standing when
 Gilbert leads a tour for the Brooklyn Historical Society on Sept. 22. But soon
 after that, black-and-white photos will have to do.

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gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net