The Battle of Chavez Ravine, Short Version

In 1962, the Dodgers played their first game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The bums lost, but it may have been caused by the bad karma at Chavez Ravine.

Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles has been many things: a Tongva Indian village, a cattle ranch, a hospital for smallpox victims, and a residential neighborhood, mostly Hispanic. The land was named after Julian Chavez, the 19th century owner of the property. He served as a judge, a supervisor, and a city councilman in Los Angeles for many years (see the comment below, which corrected my earlier text).

The story of how Chavez Ravine went from being a lovely and colorful collection of barrios to a baseball park is worth retelling, though.

In 1949, Chavez Ravine had about 1100 homes-if you counted tents and shacks as well as more stable structures. Half the buildings in the Ravine did not meet city housing standards; a third lacked indoor plumbing. Goats and chickens wandered the streets, along with rats and other vermin.

On the other hand, all who visited the area were charmed by the communities wedged into the ravine. Yards and empty lots were filled with flowers and rich gardens. Street processions, school and church fundraisers, weddings, fiestas, quinceañeras, music festivals-the colorful and family-oriented street life of Chavez Ravine was something to behold, by all accounts.

In fact, you can behold the Chavez Ravine of the 1940s yourself, in a way. Photographer Don Normack stumbled into the area and fell in love with it. His photos are collected in the book Chavez Ravine, 1949, still in print.

In the later 1940s, the federal government made bundles of money available to cities for public housing. The Los Angeles City Council jumped on their share, and put Chavez Ravine at the top of their list of blighted neighborhoods. They got $110 million dollars to play with!

Not all of it was for Chavez Ravine, of course. But since the area nestled only a stone's throw away from downtown, it's poverty was a bit of an embarrassment to civic boosters.

People were told to move, and an architectural firm was hired to design a big housing project. This was 1949, so it's not hard to imagine what the new "Elysian Park Heights" would look like. High-rise towers, with well-spaced parks. In the 1950s, it looked chic and modern; to us: ugly with a capital Ug.

But back to the part about people being told to move. This was a poor area, remember, and many folks rented. Everyone got a letter from the Housing Authority saying their homes would be assessed and bought. Renters, fearful of eviction, started looking immediately for other homes. Even homeowners assumed they had no choice and moved too. In the 1950s, minority groups were not allowed to go where they chose, so the Latino/a residents of Chavez Ravine ended up in the few areas that were open to them. These departing residents were promised, by the city, that they would have first pick of the new units.

By the time most had moved, and the architectural plans finished, something changed. The mood of the country swung from left to right, from "Let's solve urban blight!" to "Pay for housing? That; sounds like communism to me!" Business leaders formed a Committee Against Socialist Housing. Elected officials, led by a new mayor, canceled the project.

The city was taken to court and the court said, "You accepted millions of dollars in funding; you must build the housing project." Instead of obeying, the city held a special election and voters were clear: they didn't want no stinking housing project. So, the city bought the vacant properties in Chavez Ravine from the federal government--for about $1.3 million. As a compromise, the city promised that the land would be used for "public projects" only.

By this time, word was out that Walter O'Malley and the Brooklyn Dodgers might be looking for a new home. Cool! said the city fathers. OK, I'm paraphrasing. They didn't really say Cool! But they salivated. They cut a deal.

O'Malley and the Dodgers got the land. Los Angeles promised to spend $2 million on roads and improvements. To satisfy the annoying nit-pickers who insisted on bringing up that "public project" clause, O'Malley promised to build a recreation area, then quickly forgot about it.

There were still twenty families living in Chavez Ravine when construction started in 1958. Viewers of that new phenomena, the televised evening news show, got to see the wrenching evictions in black and white. On May 8, 1959, the last resident, Aurora Vargas, was carried out of her home by Los Angeles County Sheriff, and ten minutes later, the bulldozers rumbled through

And that is how the Dodgers came to Los Angeles. Not a pretty story, but those old enough to remember are well-practiced at forgetting the troubling details.

Go Dodger Blue!

For the record, the Los Angeles Times documented this story pretty extensively over the years. None of this is invented or exaggerated-except the Cool! quote. And the court quote. They didn't really say that. It's s simplification.