Chavez Ravine: The Eviction That Made Dodger Stadium

There were streets here. Schools. A church. Families who had lived in these hills for three generations.

Between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen fifty-nine, the City of Los Angeles displaced approximately eighteen hundred Mexican American families from the three communities that occupied the ridge above downtown: Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. Together they were called Chavez Ravine. The city's stated reason was a public-housing project called Elysian Park Heights, designed by the architects Robert Alexander and Richard Neutra. It would have been excellent housing. A red-baiting campaign, culminating in a nineteen fifty-two public referendum and the nineteen fifty-three election of Mayor Norris Poulson on an anti-public-housing platform, killed the project. The land sat empty.

For most of the families, the legal process was finished years before the bulldozers arrived. They were offered below-market compensation and told to leave. Some left. Some refused. The city condemned properties and let them deteriorate. Children still walked to school through blocks of cleared foundations. A working neighborhood became, block by block, a wasteland.

In nineteen fifty-eight, with the land still vacant, the city offered the entire cleared site to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were negotiating to move from New York. The deal went through. The Dodgers came west.

The final standoff came on May eighth, nineteen fifty-nine. Aurora Vargas and her family were among the last three families still occupying their homes. Los Angeles County sheriffs arrived at the Vargas house that morning. Photographers were there. The scene was documented. Aurora Vargas was carried from her home. Her family was removed. The house came down.

Dodger Stadium opened three years later, in nineteen sixty-two. The scoreboard has never acknowledged what was on this land before the first pitch.

KCET's Lost LA series has produced extensive documentary coverage of Chavez Ravine, and the California History journal has published peer-reviewed scholarship on the eviction and its political mechanics. The story is not disputed in its facts. What is disputed is what to call it. The families who lived here called it home.