Before Dodger Stadium was a legendary baseball venue, it was known as Chavez Ravine.
The area was home to generations of families, most of them Mexican American.
After the Dodgers made the deal to ditch Brooklyn, Los Angeles officials used eminent domain and other political machinations to wrest that land away from its owners.
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It was ugly. It was violent. It remains the sort of living history that Los Angeles residents don't like to remember.
The area's origin
Chavez Ravine was named after Julian Chavez, a rancher who served as assistant mayor, city councilman and, eventually, as one of L.A. County's first supervisors. In 1844, he started buying up land in what was known as the Stone Quarry Hills, an area with several separate ravines. Chavez died of a heart attack in 1879, at the age of 69.
By the early 1900s, semi-rural communities had sprung up on the steep terrain, mostly on the ridges between the neighboring Sulfur and Cemetery ravines.
What eventually came to be called Chavez Ravine encompassed about 315 acres and had three main neighborhoods — Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop.
It had a grocery store, a church and an elementary school. Many residents grew their own food and raised animals such as pigs, goats and turkeys.
Many Mexican American families, red-lined and prevented from moving into other neighborhoods, established themselves in Chavez Ravine.
Residents of the tight-knit community often left their doors unlocked.
The battle over the land begins
Outsiders often saw the neighborhood as a slum. City officials decided that Chavez Ravine was ripe for redevelopment, kicking off a decade-long battle over the land.
They labeled it "blighted" and came up with a plan for a massive public housing project, known as Elysian Park Heights.
Designed by architects Robert E. Alexander and Richard Neutra and funded in part by federal money, the project was supposed to include more than 1,000 units — two dozen 13-story buildings and 160 two-story townhouses — as well as several new schools and playgrounds.
Pressure to sell and eminent domain
In the early 1950s, the city began trying to convince Chavez Ravine homeowners to sell. Despite intense pressure, many residents resisted.
Developers offered immediate cash payments to residents for their property. They offered remaining homeowners less money so residents feared that if they held out, they wouldn't get a fair price.
In other cases, officials used the power of eminent domain to acquire plots of land and force residents out of their homes. When they did, they typically lowballed homeowners, offering them far less money than their land was worth.
Chavez Ravine residents were also told that the land would be used for public housing and those who were displaced could return to live in the housing projects.
One way or another, by choice or by force, most residents of the three neighborhoods had left Chavez Ravine by 1953, when the Elysian Park Heights project fell apart.
Opposition to planned public housing
Norris Poulson, the new mayor of Los Angeles, opposed public housing as "un-American," as did many business leaders who wanted the land for private development.
The city bought back the land, at a much lower price, from the Federal Housing Authority — with the agreement that the city would use it for a public purpose.
By 1957, the area had become a ghost town. Only 20 families, holdouts who had fought the city's offers to buy their land, were still living in Chavez Ravine.
The Dodger vote and forcible evictions
In June of 1958, voters approved (by a slim, 3% margin) a referendum to trade 352 acres of land at Chavez Ravine to the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Walter O'Malley.
The following year, the city began clearing the land for the stadium.
On Friday, May 9, 1959, bulldozers and sheriff's deputies showed up to forcibly evict the last few families in Chavez Ravine. Residents of the area called it Black Friday.
Sheriff's deputies kicked down the door of the Arechiga family's home. Movers hauled out the family's furniture. The residents were forcibly escorted out. Aurora Vargas, 36, was carried, kicking and screaming, from her home at 1771 Malvina Ave. by four deputies. Minutes later, her home was bulldozed.
Crews eventually knocked down the ridge separating the Sulfur and Cemetery ravines and filled them in, burying Palo Verde Elementary School in the process.
The Arechiga family, led by 66-year-old matriarch Avrana Arechiga, camped amid the rubble for the next week before finally giving up.
Dodger Stadium rises
Crews broke ground for Dodger Stadium four months later, on September 17, 1959. While it was being built, the Dodgers played games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The 56,000-seat Dodger Stadium opened on April 10, 1962, on a site that thousands of people had once called home.
It is currently the third oldest major league ballpark still in use, after Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.
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The Los Angeles Housing Authority, funded by the National Housing Act of 1949, voted Chavez Ravine “under-utilized.” They decided to buy-out the homeowners using eminent domain to secure the land for low-income housing. Despite protests, plans to remove the population by 1960 succeeded.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Chavez Ravine was a largely independent, semi-rural Mexican-American community in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The area was split up into three smaller neighborhoods: La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop.
About 1,800 families were forced to leave the land, now known as Chavez Ravine, that eventually became Dodger Stadium. A measure in the State Assembly could provide them with compensation or land.
During the early 1950s, the city of Los Angeles forcibly evicted the 300 families of Chavez Ravine to make way for a low-income public housing project. The land was cleared and the homes, schools, and the church were razed.
Many adults who lived in Chavez Ravine are no longer alive. Most families left under eminent domain by 1951. Between 1951 and 1959, Chavez Ravine was mostly open space. In 1959, the families that remained were evicted from land they no longer owned.
In the early 1950s, the social (“Red Scare” and “creeping socialism”) and political climate are changing and the Elysian Park Heights housing project is eventually stopped – first by a vote of Los Angeles citizens through a referendum on June 3, 1952.
However the area did provide an important watershed and part was used by the Los Angeles Water Company for a canal bringing water from what is now Griffith Park and storing it in a reservoir (today called Buena Vista Reservoir) in Reservoir Ravine.
But there's a dark history to the site. In order for Dodger Stadium to be built, the city of Los Angeles took homes from 1800 Mexican-American families and destroyed three vibrant neighborhoods. The story is shameful and lends a painful footnote to the history of baseball in Los Angeles.
On February 18, 1960, then-Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley finalized the purchase of land that would be used for the construction of Dodger Stadium. O'Malley paid a reported $494,000 for the property at Chavez Ravine, which was believed to be worth $92,000 at the time.
Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1951. They fought the good fight, but all the fight in the world could not change the course of government. So the California Housing Authority buys up most of Chavez Ravine in late 1950, and demolitions begin and continue all through 1951, until it was mostly gone.
The reparations bill estimates as many as 1,800 families owned or rented property in three Chavez Ravine communities known as Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. Most of the families were Mexican American, and many had owned property for decades.
Buried under the blue is the history of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop. These are the three Indigenous communities forgotten and wrongly evicted from their homes and land.
Known today as Chavez Ravine, the 315 acres of land between the San Gabriel Mountains and downtown Los Angeles were once home to three predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods: Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop.
The close-knit Mexican American communities of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop were located on a hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles. The residents were forcefully evicted and the villages destroyed in the 1950s to make way for the Dodger Stadium, as described in the film trailer below.
More Chavez Ravine residents were evicted in 1959 "amid screaming, crying and cursing" as bulldozers cleared the site where their homes used to stand, newspaper clippings from the time show. The Dodgers debuted in their new stadium in April 1962.
Using the power of eminent domain, which permitted the government to purchase property from private individuals in order to construct projects for the public good, the city of Los Angeles bought up the land and leveled many of the existing buildings. By August 1952, Chávez Ravine was essentially a ghost town.
We were very much tied into the majority society, but people didn't know that.” In July 1950, the City of LA Housing Authority mailed letters to each of those families, telling them to leave so that the 300-acre neighborhood could be redeveloped into a massive public housing project called Elysian Park Heights.
Originally commissioned by Center Theatre Group and premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 2003, Chavez Ravine by Culture Clash explored the transformation of a growing city and a small, tightly knit neighborhood and cherished barrio initially slated to be an affordable housing project.
Introduction: My name is Rev. Leonie Wyman, I am a colorful, tasty, splendid, fair, witty, gorgeous, splendid person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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