The Ugly, Violent Clearing Of Chavez Ravine Before It Was Home To The Dodgers (2024)

FAQs

Why were the residents of Chavez Ravine pushed out of their homes? ›

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.

Dodger Stadium was known as Chavez Ravine when the Angels played there from 1962-1965.

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.

What was the eventual result of the Chavez Ravine issue? ›

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.