Dodger Stadium: Chavez Ravine and the Price of Baseball

The stadium visible on these hills opened in nineteen sixty-two and is now the third-oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball. But the story of how it got here is older and harder than the box scores suggest.

The land it sits on was once called Chavez Ravine, three hundred acres of shallow canyon just north of downtown Los Angeles that had been home to a predominantly Mexican American community since the nineteen twenties. The neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop together housed close to two thousand families, many of them there for generations. In nineteen fifty, under the Federal Housing Act, the Los Angeles Housing Authority seized the land through eminent domain, promising residents they would have first claim on the public housing that would replace their homes. Families accepted and left.

The housing project was never built. In the anti-communist hysteria of the early nineteen fifties, Los Angeles voters rejected public housing as socialist, and the land sat empty. When the Brooklyn Dodgers announced in nineteen fifty-eight they were relocating to Los Angeles, the city offered Chavez Ravine as the stadium site. A referendum passed narrowly after a bitter campaign.

A few families had refused to leave. On May ninth, nineteen fifty-nine, sheriff's deputies arrived to finish the evictions. Aurora Vargas, a war widow who had vowed they would have to carry her out, was carried out, manhandled by four officers and briefly jailed. The scene was filmed and broadcast on local television. The bulldozers followed.

Nearly eighteen hundred families were ultimately displaced for a stadium built with private money on publicly seized land. The Dodgers have won multiple World Series titles while playing here. The California legislature in twenty twenty-four began debating reparations for the families displaced to make room for them.