The dark legacy of this iconic baseball stadium

October 2020. The Los Angeles Dodgers were on the verge of winning the World Series. "It was the ninth inning, the Dodgers came in there to close it out..." Joseph had been waiting for

this

moment for a long time. But his grandmother was another story. "My mom was at my grandmother's house. We called my mom: The Dodgers are about to win the World Series! It's the first time in my life... And she can be heard screaming in the background: I don't care." . The Dodgers! I don't want to see that!" This is Joseph's grandmother, Dolores: "I said I don't care, I don't like the Dodgers." When Dolores looks at Dodger Stadium, what she sees is the place where she grew up. "It was a beautiful, beautiful community.

Why did they choose that area?" In the 1950s, liberal and conservative visions of the future vied for control of Los Angeles. It was a battle that caught Dolores and her neighbors in the middle, and replaced their homes with a

stadium

baseball

. "It's kind of golden on the outside. But inside, deep down, it is tearing communities apart." Before Dodger Stadium,

this

area of ​​Los Angeles was home to three largely Mexican-American neighborhoods: Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop. Together, they are now commonly known as " Chavez Ravine." It encompassed about 300 acres of land and was home to more than 1,100 families. "I was born there in 1937." "I was born and raised in Chavez Ravine in 1943." "For me, as a child, it was almost a perfect time ". "I think about nature, the hills, a nice neighborhood, everyone knew each other." "The street was full of palm trees.

The area, from my point of view, was like the Garden of Eden." Los Angeles was a deeply segregated city, both because of "redlining," a government policy that prevented non-whites from owning homes in certain areas; and because of racially restrictive “covenants.” Covenants were clauses, like this one, that were added to property titles. They specifically prohibited land from being “sold, devised, used or occupied” by “any person other than the race.” white or Caucasian." "There were very few places for people of color to live in Los Angeles. So Chavez Ravine was a really hot spot for home ownership." In 1940, it was incredibly common for residents of Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma to own their own homes.

Owning a home was a crucial part of of the American dream; it was a way to start generating wealth. And generations of Mexican-American families here were achieving it. "In fact, we could buy property there and prosper there, quietly, in the hills." business and my aunt had a bar across the street." "Most of us owned property." "When I was a kid I had a very comfortable life there." "There was a large part of Chavez Ravine that had what was a true emerging middle class." "Everyone was trying to look to the future to improve. "We were proud of what we had." "That's when we were displaced." In the 1940s, just after the Great Depression and the end of World War II, Los Angeles' population exploded and the city faced serious housing shortage.

Support was growing for the government to expand its role in providing public housing. "Social reformers, activists, architects... different people are starting to think about what it means to build a better world and a better society." In response, Los Angeles began designating certain neighborhoods as "blighted" or "slums," which were to be cleared and replaced with public housing—part of a national wave of what was called "urban renewal." for the remodel was Chavez Ravine. "There were some eyes on this location, which was on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, but it was still fairly accessible and not too far away.

And they saw that this is a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American community, and they did the same thing. We don't necessarily see them as an obstacle to building the vision they wanted." In 1948, Los Angeles designated Chavez Ravine as the first blighted area to be rebuilt. For Chavez Ravine residents, all of this came as a shock. "They tell The entire city of Chávez Ravine was nothing more than shacks. And that is the biggest lie." "We were not slums. "We were a community on an upward trajectory, and we were just Americans like everyone else." The city of Los Angeles had a power called "eminent domain," which allowed them to acquire land from anyone as long as they paid the residents what which the city considered a fair price for it.

In July 1950, residents were notified that they would have to move and sell their homes. The city had a plan to replace Chavez Ravine with a new community: "Elysian Park Heights." 13-story buildings, rows of garden houses and shops. It was presented to residents as a great opportunity. “They always said, well, you can come back to this wonderful town. Why would we want to move into a project, when we already had a garden and a house of our own?" "Why would we want to go live in an apartment complex with 100 other people?" "And that's what seems to have escaped everyone : that we were homeowners and had affordable housing." During the spring and summer of 1951, many families attempted to fight the city.

These residents, often led by women, organized in their homes, demonstrated at City Hall, and became a force at public hearings attended by hundreds. "The people I grew up with were great patriots, as were many people in America after the war. They believed in America. They believed in the American dream." But in the end there were few good options. Many families accepted the offer to leave and received little or no compensation for their land. By 1951, the city had expelled two-thirds of the residents of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop. "They valued the houses as if they were worthless.

They never gave us the correct price. So everyone who sold their property in Chavez Ravine had to go into debt when they moved." "I remember that knock on the door when the man came in and handed some papers to my aunt. My aunt burst into tears, she started crying uncontrollably. "They scare people." Because they put the tractors next to your house. What else can people be scared of if you put a gun to your head?" "It was horrible. It wasn't just that we took his house. There was a great feeling that we were helpless, desperate and that we could do absolutely nothing about it. "After the evictions, they started tearing down everything.

There were no houses. "Everything was like the desert." Some families managed to stay in their homes. But the community had disappeared. But around the same time, a different group in Los Angeles was also fighting the city's public housing plans, for very different reasons. Private real estate groups did not want the government to build housing. They began a public campaign against it, stoking fears of communism and calling public housing un-American and a socialist plot. "They have an organization called Citizens Against Socialist Housing, or. CASH, and they really end up turning public opinion against public housing." The campaign sparked a dramatic backlash against the city's housing plan.

In October 1952, public housing officials were fired and listed A congressman named Norris Poulson was recruited to run for mayor of Los Angeles, on an anti-public housing platform. He won. And just a week after taking office, he canceled the Elysian Park Heights project entirely. Thousands of people had left their homes for seemingly no reason. For the next few years, Chavez Ravine and the handful of residents still there were in limbo. And the next chapter of their story unfolded three thousand miles to the east. The Brooklyn Dodgers played in a

stadium

that had been built in 1913. In the 1950s, team owner Walter O'Malley was frustrated that the stadium's location in a dense area of ​​the city made it difficult to expand.

O'Malley had big plans for a huge new dome-shaped stadium elsewhere in Brooklyn. But he needed financial help and New York would not give him public funds for the land. So O'Malley looked for someone to do it and, within months, he reached an agreement with Los Angeles city officials. He would bring Dodger Stadium to Los Angeles. And Los Angeles offered him excellent land to build it: Chávez Ravine. On May 8, 1959, the remaining residents were ordered to leave their homes. One of the last holdouts, a resident named Abrana Arechiga, tried to hold off the police. His daughter, Aurora Vargas, in images that reached people all over the country, was forcibly taken from her house.

Viewers watched that night as the last families were violently evicted. Then, right in front of the inhabitants, the bulldozers destroyed the last inhabitants of the community. "It is, to this day, an episode that can never go unnoticed and that really sent a message about who the city was for and who it will protect." At the stadium's opening, newspapers photographed children scooping dirt from the site into souvenir boxes, and O'Malley holding a souvenir shovel signed "Chavez Ravine." "As if that ground had never been broken before." In 1962, Dodger Stadium officially opened its doors. "Change is part of the city and part of the landscape.

But again and again, the question we must ask is: who bears the costs of those changes?" In 2020, just a few miles from Dodger Stadium, a new stadium opened. It cost more than five billion dollars to build, making it the most expensive stadium in the world. The residents it displaced were mostly Latino and black. As for Dodger Stadium, its

legacy

is complicated. It has multiple stories. "Chavez Ravine is one of the most egregious examples of racist removal and displacement in American history. But it is also the site of Latino excellence. Over time, different Latino communities have really created a space for themselves in him.

And those things will always have to coexist." "On Bishop Road, that's the road you said you lived on, right?" "It's a strange disconnect. I'll still be a Dodgers fan, I'm raising my son as a Dodger fan. But at the same time, the whole story is rooted in the displacement of families and the displacement of communities. The Dodgers are here to stay. They're Los Angeles' team, they're Southern California's team, but ignoring that part of history wouldn't be fair to the people who lived there before.