“Back in the 1880s,” wrote baseball historian Bob Timmermann, a senior librarian at the Los Angeles Central Library, “a Los Angeles County Supervisor named Julian Chavez owned a hilly tract of land north of downtown, and it eventually took his name and became known as Chavez Ravine after the most prominent geographic feature. The area became home to a number of Mexican American families over time, and was also called Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma. Chris-Pin Martin, who appeared as a character actor in numerous films—mostly Westerns including the Cisco Kid series—was its most notable resident. But for the most part, it was not a part of the city that most people even knew existed or how to get to.”
A child of that area born in those 19th-century days would still have had all those memories in 1949, when a federal housing act offered money to cities for public housing. Los Angeles approved a 10,000-unit project, a huge chunk of which would encroach upon Chavez Ravine’s 300 acres. Sounds like a plan, except for the not-so-minor issue of the existing 300 households (as counted by the New York Times). To facilitate the transformation of the area, Los Angeles accompanied its demand for the residents to sell their homes with a promise that they would have the first opportunity to live in the new project designed by architect Richard Neutra and featuring new playgrounds and schools.
As you can imagine, some agreed to the terms, others held out for better offers, and still others dug in their heels and prepared for a battle. These were their homes, after all, and in many cases more valuable to them than the compensation they were getting. What happened next forms the wound upon which Dodger Stadium rests.
Of those people in Los Angeles who had the city’s political and economic ear, few fretted over the fate of the Chavez Ravine population. But things changed when the Los Angeles real estate business, hardly thrilled that valuable property was being transacted at rates well below market, exploited a timely political and public relations problem for the housing project and its assistant housing director, Frank Wilkinson.
A 1958 brochure from the “Yes on Proposition B” campaign explains what the previously approved contract between the City of Los Angeles and the Dodgers means to the Southland. It also notes that Walter O’Malley pledges to build, privately finance, and maintain a 50,000-seat stadium, and pay property taxes. Photo courtesy of www.walteromalley.com. All rights reserved.
“We had tremendous support for the program,” Wilkinson said years later in the PBS documentary, Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story. “We were pretty well finished. And the only people opposing were what is commonly called the real estate lobby, which was headed up by the department of house owners association and other people like that. They called [the public housing project] creeping socialism. They were trying to discredit us every way they could. They had petitions, they had initiatives to try to kill the program. We should have been more suspicious than we were.
“As I remember, [the piece of property discussed at the hearing] was a very large site. It was vacant land, but the owner of that property was a prominent person in downtown L.A., and he demanded, I think, a hundred thousand dollars, and we were fighting with them over value. He wanted as much as he could get, when out of nowhere this lawyer for the property owner turned to me and said, ‘Now, Mr. Wilkinson, I want to ask you what organizations, political or otherwise, did you belong to since 1931?’”
When Wilkinson exercised his right not to answer the question, the Chavez Ravine housing project became wrapped up in the Red Scare.
“After a City Council hearing, in which Mayor Fletcher Bowron punched a man in the audience who had called him a ‘servant of Stalin,’ Mr. Wilkinson was questioned by the California Anti-Subversive Committee,” wrote Rick Lyman of the New York Times in Wilkinson’s 2006 obituary. Still resisting, Wilkinson was fired.
“I’m out,” Wilkinson recalled. “Destroyed. Really destroyed. ‘Neutralized,’ they, the FBI, listed it. They successfully neutralized me. Crews of television people walked in, arrived to take pictures of the whole scene. Mayor Bowron [who wanted to preserve the project] was removed—he would have been a shoo-in in 1953. After this was reported in the press, the Times and other papers crusaded against the mayor.”
With Norris Poulson defeating Bowron at the polls in 1953, a public vote on the Chavez Ravine situation took place despite a California Supreme Court ruling declaring it unenforceable. Los Angeles canceled its public housing contracts (except for two that had already had construction started on them) and later sealed their end by negotiating to buy back the land from the United States at a discount, on the condition that it still be used for a public purpose, though not limited to housing. Los Angeles ultimately determined that purpose should be a baseball stadium, one that would host the team the city lured west from Brooklyn after the 1957 baseball season.
Though the Dodgers had nothing to do with its controversial history, Chavez Ravine was falling into their lap. But opponents to the new Dodger Stadium (including business interests who had hoped to profit from the property themselves) stalled construction by forcing a public referendum, contested to the final hour but boosted to narrow approval by a live five-hour “Dodgerthon” on KTTV in Los Angeles that took place two days before the June 3, 1958, vote. Even in the ensuing months, it took continued legal wrangling before the Dodgers were almost free to build their stadium.
By this time, Chavez Ravine had almost been emptied of its residents. “The land titles would never be returned to the original owners, and in the following years the houses would be sold, auctioned, and even set on fire to be used as practice sites by the local fire department,” according to PBS. But approximately 20 parcels remained.
Two months after the California Supreme Court unanimously denied a Los Angeles Superior Court injunction that had continued to preclude Dodger Stadium’s construction, eviction notices for those who remained at Chavez Ravine came in March 1959. In the following month, the legal battle ended when the U.S. Supreme Court did not find sufficient merit to further explore the case. But there was one final showdown. “On May 8, 1959,” wrote Neil J. Sullivan in The Dodgers Move West, “as deputies forcibly removed the Arechigas from their dwelling, Mrs. Avrana Arechiga, the 68-year old matriarch, threw rocks at them while her daughter, Mrs. Aurora Vargas, a war widow, was carried kicking and screaming from the premises. Mrs. Victoria Angustain also physically resisted the eviction, while children cried and pets, chickens, and goats added to the chaos. The grim scene was televised by local stations in the city.”
The footage seemed to sum up 10 years of conflict in the area, though sympathy for the Arechigas—who remain a cause célèbre today—dissipated at the time when it was revealed that they were actually owners of numerous properties elsewhere in Los Angeles, had been occupying the land tax-free for years and had been awarded compensation for their lots from the courts but were holding out for more. In subsequent decades, they became a symbol both of the anguish enveloping the area and the misunderstandings—on both sides—of its history.
The specter of looted art hovers over Chavez Ravine, but the Dodgers weren’t complicit. The expulsion of Chavez Ravine’s homeowners lay at the feet of the city, which was going to dictate a new fate for the land, with or without the Dodgers. One could further argue that Dodger Stadium does serve a public purpose, albeit one that profits private ownership; you can decide whether that’s fair or hypocritical, clear-eyed or naive. But the Dodgers shouldn’t be counted among any villains in the story of Chavez Ravine.