99% Invisible - 342- Beneath the Ballpark

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

In the 1950s, Los Angeles was an up-and-coming city but wasn’t quite there yet. City leaders were looking for a way to boost Los Angeles's profile as a world class city and also give Angelenos something to rally behind. They believed that what L.A. really needed was a baseball team. They picked Chavez Ravine, near downtown LA, as the perfect home for a perfect new stadium, but the land had been home to a vibrant community of Mexican and Mexican American families for decades. Beneath the Ballpark

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1979, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed an unknown picture from Mexico, named Fernando Valenzuela. A couple of years later, in 1981, Valenzuela made his major league debut as a starting picture. That's producer and Angelino, Vivian Lee. Valenzuela went on to have one of the most remarkable seasons in the history of baseball. This obscure player from Sonora, Mexico, became the first player ever to win both the Sia Young Award and Rookie of the Year in the same season. Valenzuela led the Dodgers all the way to the World Series, where they defeated the New York Yankees.

For an Ambo Valenzuela, who threw 149 pitches tonight. This season will always be remembered in Los Angeles as the year of Fernandomania. The whole city fell in love with Valenzuela, and in particular, LA's large Mexican-American community. We actually had someone, a real true Mejicano plane baseball for a major league team. This is Edward Santillon, L.A. native and longtime Dodgers fan. And it was in Los Angeles. And as you know, L.A. is so big and it's full of Latinos. We're all struggling to make it in this world and he actually made it and he made

everybody proud. Edward says there was nothing quite like watching a game at Dodger Stadium when Valenzuela was pitching. We would take younger kids that couldn't forward to go to a Dodger game. We would you know get tickets and take them and and have them experience the the cheering and the you know Fernando Mania and Valenzuela and cheering and cheering and screaming for him. So it was, it was a, it was a good time. It was fun. But not everybody in Edwards family wanted to go see Fernando's famous screwball in action. Some of the older folks, especially, were hesitant to make the trek to Dodger Stadium. It was just the younger generation

that would go with us. I don't know, there was still a little bit of animosity towards the Dodgers for what had happened and what transpired up at Chavez-Reveen. Chavez-Reveen was a neighborhood where Edwards' father, Louis grew up, and it used to sit exactly where Dodger Stadium is today. Back in the 1950s, the community at Chavez-Rivine was displaced in a contentious battle to reshape what the city would look like.

Because back then Los Angeles wasn't known as the sprawling world center it is today. In the years since the turn of the century, Los Angeles has grown from a sleepy Pueblo to a vast, seething metropolitan city. It's an up a sleepy po'ueblo to a vast, seeding metropolitan city. It's an up-and-coming city, but it is not really completely there yet. This is Gerald Poder, author of the book, City of Dreams,

Dodger Stadium, and the birth of modern Los Angeles. In the early 20th century, the population of Los Angeles was exploding. People were moving to California for the climate, the jobs, and the cheap real estate. It was a city on the rise, but still something was missing. When Americans were asked to talk about the major cities of the country in the 1950s, obviously they would say New York. They would say Chicago, they would say Boston. They might even say Detroit, but they might not say Los Angeles, and they might even be

amazed to know how big a city it was. LA didn't have the rows of towering skyscrapers that made New York and Chicago unmistakable, but it was missing something else too, something that was hard to put a finger on. Los Angeles felt more like a collection of neighborhoods than a cohesive city. If you asked in Angelino where they were from, rather than St. Los Angeles, they might say Boyle Heights or Highland Park. If they have any kind of civic identity, it's tied to their neighborhood and not necessarily to their city. So there are very, very few pieces of what I call civic glue in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Very few municipal institutions that everyone in the city can identify with and rally around.

And a few city leaders thought if the people of Los Angeles needed something to rally around, let's give them a baseball team. From its inception, professional baseball in the US was played mostly on the East Coast. By 1953, only a couple of teams had ventured west of the Mississippi River, the Cardinals and the Browns, but they only made it as far as St. Louis, which is actually on the Mississippi's with barely counts. But Los Angeles was a west coast city on the rise, and was looking for a way to boost its reputation. And how do you get the reputation?

Well, you get the reputation with big splashy acquisitions like a Major League Baseball team when there is no Major League Baseball on the West Coast. And so LA City leaders began plotting to lure a baseball team out West. One woman named Roslyn Wyman, even campaigned for City Council on the promise to bring a major league team to Los Angeles. And it worked. She was elected to City Council at just 22 years old.

And as luck would have it for a Rosy Wyman and other Angelinos desperate for baseball, there was an East Coast team in desperate need of a new stadium. The Brooklyn Daunters. They were a classic baseball team who had been playing at a classic ballpark called Ebott's Field. And these days, New Yorkers loved getting nostalgic about Quaint, little Ebott's Field

right in the heart of Brooklyn. But those who are nostalgic about seeing a game at Ebott's Field probably never actually were there. The Ebott's Field had a lot of problems. There were columns obstructing the view of the field, steep climbs to the upper deck, barely any parking or freeway access, and the building itself was falling apart. The team owner, Walter O'Malley, wanted to build his own modern, well-designed stadium in

Brooklyn. He even went so far as to hire Buckminster Fuller to draft plans for a dome to go over the top of the field that would turn the stadium into an all-weather facility. You don't usually think of baseball team owners as being friends with futurist architects, but in this case, that was what was going on. O'Malley fought for years first to dream of a privately owned stadium, but there was one very powerful bureaucrat standing in the way. New York's infamous master builder, Robert Moses.

It just so happened that Robert Moses not only didn't like spectator sports, he thought that spectator sports were a total waste of time and for what he called the Rooms. And without Moses' support, a new Dodger stadium in Brooklyn was basically impossible. And O'Malley said, well, one, I'm a Brooklynite and I want the park to be in Brooklyn.

If it's in Queens, it might as well be 10,000 miles away. O'Malley figured if he couldn't get his dream stadium in Brooklyn, he might as well move the Dodgers all the way out to California. Ross Wyman and the City Council invited O'Malley out to Los Angeles for a visit. He had, by my estimation, had spent a total of 10 days in his entire life in Los Angeles. He doesn't really know where he wants to build a stadium.

He hasn't made the deal yet to come to Los Angeles, but he's scouting it out. So O'Malley decided to take a helicopter ride across the city to get a feel for the area. And he saw something that caught his eye, what looked like an empty piece of land, just a few miles from downtown. This hilly area was called Chavez-Rivine.

The thing that he sees is all the vacant land around Chavez-Rivine, but it was surrounded by the freeways. This is Mark Langel, the official historian for the LA Dodgers. He says that the freeways made the site appealing because it meant that fans would have easy access to the stadium. The terrain was really hilly, and O'Malley knew he would need to do a huge amount of work to flatten out the land, but it was all worth it because of the highway access. He even estimated the amount of land that would have to be moved.

That didn't bother him because it's easy to move that land, but it's hard to build three or four different freeways. But O'Malley probably didn't realize that the plot of land that he had his eye on wasn't completely empty. There were a few families living in Chavez-Rovine that had been there a long time, and if the Dodgers were going to build a stadium there, they'd have to kick those people out. And it wouldn't be the first time that the people of Chavez-Rovine had been forced to leave their home.

O'Malley thought he saw a vast empty stretch of land from the helicopter, but what he was really seeing were the last legs of a community that had existed there since the early 1900s. And for a long time, it was a neighborhood full of life. It was very colorful because the ladies had colorful birds, canaries were big. I mean, that's what would wake us up, canaries in the morning singing. And it was just a very colorful community. This is Carol Hawkes. Yes, my name is Carol Hawkes, and it's spelled J-A-C-Q-E-S.

Carol is 76 years old now and still lives in Los Angeles. And as a little girl, she grew up in Chavez-Reveen. I know you're pretty young when you left. So as much as you could remember, I'll... Oh, I can remember a lot. Okay. Carol was only 9 or 10 years old when her family left Chavez-Reveen. But her memories are crystal clear.

It was very rural, so we could always see the trees. And at that time, when I was growing up anyway, at this time of year, there'd always be like a fog when you woke up. Chavez-Rivine was like a small town within the city, and it was home to mostly Mexican and Mexican-American families. It was made up of three different neighborhoods called Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. Some roads were paved, but most weren't. A lot of homes had electricity, but some didn't.

In its own way, though, it was still a flourishing, closely knit community. We were like any other neighborhood. We had some people that were doing very well. There were some families that were very poor. There were some families that were not so nice. There were some families that were very poor. There were some families that were not so nice. There were some families that were very religious, but they were all still friends and everybody knew each other. Chavez Reveen was located just a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, but it felt like a world apart.

It was this isolated pocket within the city. It had its own schools, churches, stores, a barbershop. The residents had everything they needed without ever having to leave the neighborhood. But a lot of the reason why they were so independent was because they had to be. 60% of the people, the Mexican, Mexican-American people that were living in Chavez-Ravine area owned their own home. And the reason is because that was the only place in the city we could live because of the covenants. Covenants were racial restrictions that limited where people of color could actually purchase property. From the 1910s through the 1940s, Chavez-Ravine was one of the few

places in Los Angeles that non-white people could actually own a home. The first threat to this community was not actually the baseball stadium. It came years before in the form of a new housing project. In 1949, the federal government passed the National Housing Act, which allocated funds to cities all over the country in order to build new low-income housing for people in need. Los Angeles itself was going to be home to 10,000 of these new public housing units. This was part of an effort to providing affordable, sanitary living conditions

for people who were not able to provide that for themselves. This is Eric Abila, professor of history in Chicano Studies at UCLA. He says that the city selected Chavez-Rivin to be the site for 3600 new units because the city housing authority, or CHA, had determined it was a slum. The CHA claimed that it was infested with rats, homes lacked electricity and toilets, and it was actually in their best interests that the community be replaced with new modern housing.

From an urban planning perspective, or from the perspective of city hall, a poor community like the Chavez-Rivine fit their idea of what Aslam was at the time. But if you talk to the people who remembered what it was like to live in the Chavez-Rivine, they didn't think of their neighborhood as Aslam. We had fleshing toilets everywhere that I went. And I went into a lot of houses and when I had to go to the bathroom, we had fleshing toilets everywhere that I went. And I went into a lot of houses and when I had to go to the bathroom, we had fleshing toilets. We had some lights, not a lot, because we could still see all the stars at night without any problem whatsoever.

We had a lot of things that would not mark us as slums. But because Chavez-Rivine was officially designated a slum, the city housing authority was able to use eminent domain to clear the land for the housing project. Property owning residents were offered payment for their homes, which was far below market value. And it's actually debatable whether you could even call it an offer. Carol remembers when a man named Frank Wilkinson, who was in charge of the housing project, came to the house.

I remember when that actual knock on the door came and he wasn't that congingue, you know, he wasn't really that nice, but... What was he there to tell you when he knocked on the door? He was there to tell us that we had no no choice. That was made very clear that there was no choice that we all had to move. Almost everyone in Chavez-Rovine ended up selling their homes and then moving to different parts of the city. By 1948, the restrictive covenants that prevented families of color from moving into other areas were ruled unconstitutional, and a lot of these former residents became the first Mexican and Mexican-American families in these new neighborhoods.

We moved into what was a completely white community at the time, but what was going on for me when I moved there, there was a lot of white flag going on. I mean, people like me, they were leaving, we're leaving because of people like me coming in. Some residents were told that they would be first in line to move into the new public housing community at Chavez-Rovine, but those hopes were short-lived. In 1953, a new Los Angeles mayor named Norris Polson took office with an ideological objection to the project. He branded public housing as a communist plot or a socialist conspiracy. Pulson thought that subsidized housing

for the poor sounded like communist sense and he made sure that the housing project was dead in the water. The people of Chavez-Ravine have been displaced for no reason. Except for a small number of people who refused to leave their homes, the community of Chavez-Rivine was basically gone. We would go there, you know, it's like, oh, look, there's the house or this or that,

oh, they took all the flowers out of this yard and we would just go back and visit, but it was a ghost town, except for a handful of people. All the stores were gone, the church was gone, they knocked down the school. The city ended up buying the land from the Federal Housing Authority and left it undeveloped for years while it figured out how to put the property to public use. And that's where the Dodgers come back into the picture. Walter O'Malley was convinced that Chavez-Rovine was the perfect place to build his perfect stadium.

And at first it looked like it might be smooth sailing. The City Council approved the deal to give the land to the Dodgers. But as it turned out, a lot of people were opposed to the Dodger deal for reasons that had nothing to do with Chava's ravine. They didn't want the city subsidizing a private business, even if that business was baseball. In fact, the opposition was so intense that the city decided to put the deal up for a referendum. This meant that the following year, the contract would be placed on a ballot, and the citizens of LA would get the chance to vote on the new stadium.

And in the end, voters did come out in the Dodgers favor, but just barely. But there was still the issue of the handful of remaining holdouts living in Chavez-Rovine. Even though the Federal Housing Authority had tried to clear the land, there were a small number of families refused to give up their homes. Those who remained did so in protest. There were only about 20 families left after the Federal Housing Authority tried to clear the land, and they needed to be evicted in order to start construction.

These residents had watched their community disappear around them, while the city referred to them as squatters. That was their land, that was their property. I guess you could say that they were squatting, but from their perspective, they had owned that land for several generations. That's not squatting. On May 9, 1959, their time had run out. The city of Los Angeles sent sheriffs deputies to Chavez-Rovín to remove anyone who had

refused to leave. What followed was a horrific scene of a family called the Arachegas being dragged out of their house. Their daughter, a woman named Aurora Vargas, was physically lifted and carried out of the doorway of her own home. This was captured on camera by reporters. We couldn't find any audio recordings, but it was broadcast all over the country. There are these scenes that are indelibly impressed into the living memory of Los Angeles, of a mother and her children being forcefully evicted from their homes. A grandmother carried out in her rocking chair

from their home. Dogs barking, chickens flying everywhere. Children crying, it was a complete melee. When I saw Aurora of Argus on television being forcefully taken out of her house, I saw the house being knocked down. That was really true. That was the point where I hated the Dodgers. Because in my head, that's all I could see is this wonderful kind of nirvana place that I grew up in. I was sad to have left that, of course, but I saw them knocking down and doing what they did live on TV. I was, I don't know, 15, but it was pretty traumatic for me. The evictions dredged up memories not just of a failed housing project years earlier,

but of an entire history of racial discrimination that Latino and Chicano Americans had been experiencing in Los Angeles for decades. And if you know anything about Mexican-American history, it is a history of conquest, it is a history of displacement, and it is a history most of all of land dispossession. So this scene really hit a nerve with a community that had long suffered the indignity, the pain, the inconvenience of displacement

and land dispossession in particular. It just hit a nerve. What happened at Chavez or Vene will always be part of the team's legacy, but it wouldn't be fair to blame all that pain on the Dodgers. The Dodgers got blamed for this, although it wasn't the Dodgers who removed these families, it was the city who removed these families. Here's Gerald Poetaregan. I think it is unfair to say that the Dodgers removed these families. The chain of events is a little different.

This history is complicated. It's hard to sum up all the forces and events that led to the destruction of Chavez-Rovine, but the stadium has become a monument, a physical reminder of the community that was displaced from the land on which it sits. Today, Dodger Stadium is the third oldest ballpark in baseball, and you have to admit, it's a beautiful stadium. It's symmetrical with elegant lines, amazing views of the city, and somehow even a bad seat is still a pretty good seat. In some ways, the ballpark did exactly what those politicians back in the 1950s wanted it to do. The Dodgers are a civic institution, beloved by people throughout the city. The Dodgers are even known for having one of the most diverse fan bases in baseball,

thanks in large part to LA's Latino community. I would have to say that LA's Mexican-American community is of two minds on this issue. I think many Mexican-Americans see the Chavez-Rivine as part of a larger story of discrimination and displacement in Southern California. On the other hand, Mexican-Americans are among the Dodgers biggest fans, and that was especially true in the early 1980s with the arrival of Fernando Valenzuela. And Fernando Mania isn't the only reason why. The Dodgers have tried to appeal to the LA Latino community from the very beginning with broadcasters like Jaime Horene,

who's been calling games for the team in Spanish for almost as long as the Dodgers have been in LA. La protaceba, seba, seba, y despita la comundezón. Se fue de cuadráncula. Edward Santeon's father, Lewis, was one of the many who refused to see games at Dodger Stadium. He didn't blame the team for what happened to his community, but the stadium would always be a reminder of the home he used to have. His claim to fame is that he was born where third base is up and his umbilical cord back then would be buried wherever you know you were born. So he

claims that third base that every time somebody hits a triple or a home run he would get a pain in his stomach because that's where his umbilical cord is buried at. On the third Saturday of July, former residents of Chavez ravine get together for an annual reunion picnic in Elision Park. Edwards' father, Louis, started the tradition years ago and named the group Los Desedados, meaning be uprooted. And they don't get together out of anger.

They're not there to protest the Dodgers. It's just a bunch of friends and family who want to tell stories and celebrate the neighborhood that they shared beneath the ballpark. What the hell is a dodger anyway? Vivian will be back to tell us after this. So I'm back in the studio with Vivian Lee, and we're going to talk a little bit more about the dodgers, and namely, where the name, the Dodgers, comes from. So this is kind of embarrassing. I am from Southern California. I moved here from LA. So the Dodgers

have essentially been my team my entire life. And I didn't realize until I started working on this story that I had no idea what the hell a Dodger is. Like, you've never wondered or you've never been told or anything. I've never thought about it. I'd never realized that that's an action. And so I just, you know, just, I guess I didn't really think of it either. So what is a Dodger and what exactly are they dodging? So the name actually comes from where the team originally started out, which is Brooklyn, where they were known as the Brooklyn trolley Dodgers. So that makes sense because Brooklyn used to have a lot of trolleys that were on the street and you had a Dodgers. Yes, exactly. The team actually

went by a few nicknames before this. They officially started as the Atlantis. And then they were nicknamed the Brooklyn bridegrooms for a while. And this was so weird. It's because like six or seven of the team members happened to get married around the same time that year. And the nickname just stuck. Wow. A lot of like major league teams in the early days, they went by nicknames instead of their official name. So it kind of, it changed a lot over time. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, but back in the mid 1890s, that's when they first started being referred to as the Charlie Dodgers,

thanks to a man named General Henry Slocum. Okay, so that name sounds vaguely from others, but please remind me. Yeah, so if you've ever heard of the PS General Slocum disaster, that ship was named after this guy. Okay. He was a Civil War general from Atlanta and then moved to New York after the war and served in Congress.

And in 1891, General Slokum kind of made it his mission to modernize transportation and bring electric street cars to Brooklyn. And at first the city denied this request because they thought this sounds dangerous. But in 1892, Brooklyn's trolley ordinance passed, which approved the conversion from horse drawn to electric trawlies. And was it as dangerous as people thought it might be? 100% because, you know, before that horse drawn trawlies were the standards. So trolley rails were laid out all over the place, like in Brooklyn and Manhattan and Brooklyn streets were basically already a maze of these trolley

rails. And at first it seemed like a good idea because you could go faster and you could be, you know, much more efficient and cleaner because there's no horses and no. But, you know, if you compound that with the fact that there's pedestrians all over the streets and you're suddenly changing this technology that people have to adapt to very quickly. It just became a disaster. It's funny, because when I hear the name Charlie Dodgers, it actually sounds kind of cute and quaint, but this is really like,

the streets were deadly for people, all of a sudden, because these giant cars were going very, very fast on these rails. Yes, yeah, yeah. So this is pre-automobile culture. So people just weren't used to looking both ways before or crossing the street. And horse-drawn trawlies were not very dangerous

because you could probably briskly power walk next to one and still go the same speed. Right. So the electric cars are going a lot faster and it was just catching people off guard and so it required trawly dodging. Yes. And these trawlers were going three times faster as, you know, other trawlies.

And it was so dangerous that in 1892, the first year that they're introduced, there's five deaths. The next year, there are 51 deaths. And by 1895, trawlies had already killed 107 people and injured at least 400 other people. So people are literally having to jump out of the way of these, like basically like death machines. Right. And there's these political cartoons

from around that time and they're just kind of horrifying. Okay, so I'm looking at one, you just showed me one here. It's this in the wake of a cable car. And it has just maimed bodies on the street like have run over Yeah, there's like many suits crying. Yeah, it's dark. It really is. Oh my god So what would possess you to name a baseball team after this? Well the weird thing is it was kind of a compliment

So you only found electric trolleys in highly urbanized areas like New York or Chicago So having to actively jump out of the way We only found electric trolleys in highly urbanized areas like New York or Chicago. So having to actively jump out of the way, it made you, it was the mark of like a modern cosmopolitan person. And also a modern cosmopolitan city. So it was good on the city, it was good on the person. I get it, I get it. So at what point did the trolleys be brokler?

So they started disappearing around the 1920s, which is around the time that car culture started popping up. So we're on the next thing, basically. But the name stuck, the Trolley Dodgers stuck. And eventually, they got shortened to the Brooklyn Dodgers. And then eventually became the Los Angeles Dodgers when they moved in 1957. And when they moved in 1957, was the red car still going

on Los Angeles? Were there any trolleys left in Los Angeles? Yes, okay. Yes, there were for about four years Okay, they could have they could have dodged like probably one car one one red car Oh, it's funny. Yeah cool. All right. Thanks. Thank you 99% invisible was produced this week by Vivian Lee, Mix and Tech Production by Shereef Yusuf, Music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstad, is the digital director. The rest of the team is Avery Trouffleman, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald Delaney Hall,

Taren Mazza, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Carol Hawkes and Priscilla Leyva, they've been working on an oral history and preservation project documenting the stories of the former residents of Chavez-Rovine. It's called Chavez-Rovine, an unfinished story. Find out more at chavez-Rovine-la.com. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective

of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want before and after pictures of Chavez ReRovine, look no further than 99pi.org. From PRX.