Dark History - 33: The TRUTH behind Central Park, Lake Lanier and Dodger Stadium
Episode Date: February 23, 2022America, she’s always been stealing land. Grabbing what she wants. And stealing land has never stopped in America, except now it’s done “legally” thanks to a little thing called eminent domain.... Today we will dive into just three of the MANY stories of communities being erased in the name of building landmarks like Central Park, Lake Lanier, and Dodger Stadium. And all of it was done legally because of eminent domain. Oh yeah, today’s stories are shady Episode Advertisers Include: Stitch Fix US, Thred Up, Apostrophe, and Squarespace. Learn more during the podcast about special offers!
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi friends, I hope you're having a wonderful day today.
My name is Bailey Sarian and I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Dark History.
Now this is a safe space for all the curious cats out there who would think to themselves
hey, is history really as boring as it seemed in school?
Oh, nay nay.
This is what we can learn together about the dark, mysterious, dramatic stories our teachers
never told us about.
So I hope you're having a great day because this story's dark.
I mean, all the stories are dark, but like this one's...
They're all dark.
Okay, great.
Hi.
So how many times have we sat here on this very day and talked about how colonizers swept
across the United States in erased
native communities. I mean, it's a lot. It's a very common theme here, but what if I told you it
wasn't just the native communities and that it didn't stop after the 1800s? Well, hopefully that's
not surprising to you because I've actually talked about that too. So remember when we talked about
Rosewood, it was like the very second episode, where an entire
town drove out all of the black residents after a white woman lied about being assaulted. And over
on my murder mystery makeup, maybe you watched the video I did about the Tulsa race massacre. It was
about essentially angry white folks who decided to take revenge on a black community and burn it
to the ground. And it was like a black wall street.
I mean, super successful.
Money was being made.
And people in Tulsa, Oklahoma burned it to the ground.
Because they didn't really want to see any black Americans
making more money than them.
Or just being successful, having their own thing.
There are stories like this in communities
all across the country that have literally been erased.
And not only have they been completely erased, but they've also been replaced. So today we're going to talk about three of these
communities, Oscarville, Sennaka Village, and Chavez-Rivine. But today you know them as local lake,
a public park, and a baseball stadium.
The ground goes wild. Just kidding.
Not funny.
Okay, so now I'm going to open up my book to chapter what?
What chapter is this?
Oh, what is that?
Okay, found it.
So our first story begins in New York City in the early 1800s, the Big Apple.
But back then, farms dominated a ton of the landscape. And then soon, huge churches and universities were popping up,
and new ideas were being shared.
It was starting to fill with hustle and bustle,
and more importantly, it was starting to fill with people,
and lots of them.
At the time, New York actually had one of the biggest populations
of formerly enslaved people in the nation.
And some of this freed population started buying property and land in an area of the city
That was known as five points because five points was a primarily black neighborhood
It was neglected by the city entire families lived in run-down houses
Old-horse stables and abandoned industrial buildings
Sometimes they would convert these buildings into really uncomfortable one-room apartments, and multiple families would share and live in them.
And five points started getting a really bad reputation as a place full of poverty,
crime, and disease. Charles Dickens even wrote a book about how rough it was living in this
neighborhood. Now, you might say that it was so bad why didn't they just move? And
I mean, come on, it wasn't that easy. Because you see, although they had bought the land in five
points, a lot of people living in these converted buildings were living there illegally. That is
because most black people were not allowed to buy or rent property in the state of New York.
But then, in 1825, a pair of white landowners decided to start selling some farm land they
owned near five points to anybody who wanted it, regardless of the color of their skin. Now,
one of the men who jumped at this opportunity was a man named Andrew Williams. Andrew leaped
at the chance and bought himself a few plots of land for the low, low price of $125, which today is still only $3,200.
Now Andrew was a formerly enslaved man who had become a shoe-shiner, and he saw all this
land as a way to make his place in the world.
And he wasn't the only one, because as soon as words spread around five points, that there
was like a ton of land nearby being sold for dirt cheap, people were scooping it up.
As more and more people started buying up the land, the community grew and started to become known as Seneca Village.
Just 30 years later in 1855, Seneca Village was a full-blown community.
I mean, there was a school, church, cemeteries, and even a community garden.
I mean, it was amazing. It was a 300-person black community,
and they lived almost completely outside of any white influence.
Ceneca Village was also considered the most politically active black community in the country.
The entire country. Now, this was because during the 1800s, in an effort to stop black men from voting,
there was a law that said you had to own at least $250 in property.
But in Seneca Village, half of the people living there owned their own homes and that land valued over the $250 limit.
And this resulted in 90% of black voters in the entire state of New York were residents of Seneca Village.
That's pretty badass.
But while Seneca Village was thriving, the rest of New York were residents of Seneca Village. That's pretty bad ass.
But while Seneca Village was thriving,
the rest of New York was not.
You see, in nearby Manhattan,
the area was becoming extremely overcrowded.
The entire place had become unstandardary,
full of diseases, trash, and even animals
just running down the street.
So instead of putting money towards fixing the actual issues they were facing, there is
like a proposal for a huge park in the upper part of Manhattan.
Everybody loved this idea of a park.
Yes, a park.
Great, we love a park.
But there was one teeny tiny problem.
Now, in order to build this park, houses had to be torn down.
And to make it worse, the houses in question
just so happened to belong to wealthy white land owners.
These homeowners were like, what?
No, no, we are not building a park here
to go build that somewhere else.
So they filed in an injunction with the court
to stop the city from tearing down their houses.
But the city still really wanted their big fancy park,
and they realized they're gonna have to like kick someone out of their home in order to achieve this goal of theirs.
So they start looking around to see who would be the easiest to kick out. And surprise, surprise,
they picked the nearby thriving black community of Sennaka Village to be the new location. But let's
pause for an ad break really quick, hold on. How do you clear out a community of thriving happy people?
The city's plan was just to offer the citizens of Sennaka Village some money to cough over
their land and their homes.
And as if this wasn't insulting enough, the money that they offered was not even like
what the land slash property was worth.
So the people of Sennaeneca Village obviously did not want
to accept the deal.
And Andrew, remember him from earlier,
so he remembers what the rich white people did
when they didn't want to give up their homes.
And he convinces the Seneca residents
to file a court injunction.
Andrew and the Seneca Village community
filed the injunction to save their homes.
It worked for the white people,
so it should work
for them, right? They have the same case. Same exact situation is going on. But unfortunately,
as we know, it just, it didn't work the same for Sennaka village citizens. And I think it's a
safe assumption to make because racism is happening here in this story.
So the judge ignores the people of Senaqa for two full years.
And when the judge finally gets around to their case, he says what the city was doing was
perfectly legal.
In fact, the judge says that the city technically doesn't have to pay the citizens at all, and
that the city can just take their homes, their land, goodbye, see ya.
And if they did so, the city wouldn't be breaking a single law.
And this law, the city used to basically steal this land, was something called eminent domain.
Eminent domain means that the government has the right to just take any land or property
without asking, even if it's private property.
They just had to say that the property they're stealing will be for public use.
In this case, it's going to be a park.
Hi.
The logic behind this law is that a few people will suffer, but in the long run, everyone's
going to benefit.
So, eminent domain may sound boring, but it's also a bit of a loophole for governments
to basically do
whatever they want with someone's home or their land. Or in this case, of Sennaka Village
and entire community. And despite pushback from Sennaka residents in 1857, the city took over
the land using eminent domain. Once they had the land, the city tour everything down and built a big-ass park. That's so lame.
A park? Yeah, a park. Now if you haven't guessed it yet, the park is a super famous park that
you've probably heard of. Maybe it's Central Park. In New York, Central Park? Iconic? Yeah.
The setting of basically every like 90s romcom with its autumn leaves and long twisting paths, a lot of people get murdered there too.
Yeah, Central Park is a United States landmark.
People come from all over the world just to see it, but we barely talk about the land
that it was built on, you know, how they snatched the land away from people who already were
thriving and had a whole community and whatnot.
I think it's safe to say most people don't want to talk about what happened to the Black
community of Seneca Village back in 1857.
Lives were uprooted and any hope of generational wealth as a result of property ownership was
destroyed.
Not to mention the erasure of a safe haven for black residents of 1800s in New York.
But the city didn't care about that.
I mean, they wanted a park.
Point blank period. They're like, we want a. I mean, they wanted a park, point blank period.
They're like, we want a park.
We don't have a park, you guys.
We don't have places to have picnics.
Now, don't get me wrong.
M&M domain is super fucked up,
and it is often used to target communities of color,
but it's technically legal within our system.
And this is a good example of what we as a society call
institutional racism.
But when institutional racism doesn't work,
what do the powers that be due to get what they want?
Well, they turn to uglier methods.
And there's no better example of that
than the story of Oscarville, Georgia.
Oh yes, we have another example, bitch.
All right, so now we're in the year 1912,
and we're in a small town of Oscarville, Georgia
with a population that was 90% white and 10% black.
Oscarville was located in Forcith County, where most of the black population had been
free since the end of the Civil War and typically worked in the nearby confields.
Most of them made a decent enough living to be able to build a community for themselves in the area. Like, um, Santa Cove Village, they managed to build some churches
and schools and even a few businesses like hardware stores. And also like Santa Cove Village,
Oscarville also provided a bit of a safe haven for the Black community. But even though Oscarville
was a safe haven, this was still the Jim Crow South. Not to mention, they were like tension in town
because just six years earlier,
a series of riots in nearby Atlanta
ended with white mobs killing dozens of black people.
So there's always this feeling going on in the air
that something bad was about to happen.
And then in September of 1912,
that something bad did indeed happen.
On September 5th, 1912, to be exact,
a white woman named Ellen Greiss wakes up in bed
in her small house just outside of Oscarville.
She yons, stretches her arms and legs,
and when she turns around, she sees a man lying next to her in bed.
It's a black man.
She screams at the top of her lungs and
then she jumps out of the window to escape. Ellen goes into town, she starts telling everyone
that she had been assaulted and then everyone goes into panic trying to find like who was this
man that did this to her. Now Ellen was well known in town because she was the wife of a big wig
farm owner. So this was like a really big deal. And rumors are just flying around town.
But it seemed that most people believe that Ellen Grace was sexually assaulted and that her
attacker had somehow got away. So the police started resting literally every black man they
confined. And then huge mobs around the courthouse where all the men are being held,
demanding justice for what happened to Ellen. One of the people witness seeing what was happening
at the courthouse was Grant Smith.
Grant was a local black preacher and he could tell that tensions were mounting.
So he tried to reason with the crowd, he tried, and Grant was saying that everybody needs to
like just calm down and consider that, I don't know, maybe there's holes in Ellen's story here,
okay? He was basically saying, hey, maybe Ellen wasn't attacked, which
is very brave. There were rumors going around that she was having an affair and she didn't
want to get caught, so she ended up changing her story. Now, as you can imagine, this
didn't go over very well with the already very angry crowd of white people, and immediately
they go after Grant. They beat and they whipped him to a pulp
and then they put a rope around Grant's neck
and they start to pull him up.
At this point, the sheriff's decide
that this is just a step too far.
I mean, the whipping was fine.
But, you know, the rope, not cool.
So the sheriff's decide to cut him down
to take him into the courthouse for protection.
But at this point, it was too late to stop the crowd
and it had turned into just a full-blown angry mob.
It's so annoying.
They're totally, it's like, why are you mad at the wrong person?
This person has nothing to do with anything.
I just, I just, we don't get it.
Why?
Why?
This mob got so intense and violent
that the mayor had to call in the military
and issue a curfew for
black residents.
Not the white ones.
No, they're fine.
Why people can go on raging and like do whatever they want, but black people they needed
to go home.
They are dangerous.
Eventually they had to declare martial law where the military takes charge until things
can get back under control.
Okay, so we've got martial law, an angry mob, and a preacher beaten to a pulp and shit
hasn't even hit the fan yet.
Just four days after the incident with Ellen, on September 9th an 18 year old white woman
by the name of May Crow, she's attacked.
Now the last time anyone had talked to May, she was going for a walk in the woods, but
the next day she was found unconscious under a tree.
May then slipped into a coma for two weeks and then eventually died.
Once again, the community worked itself into an outrage, and once again, another innocent
white woman had been attacked, but this time she died.
Now, there was no evidence that May Crow had been raped, but the mob didn't care because they were all starting rumors and saying that she was.
And everybody decided to just go with it. So rumors are starting to swirl around
all over the county that there was a series of black men who were out trying to
rape white women. Again, no evidence of this. Okay, no proof. Nothing. It didn't
matter.
The white people of the community were convinced and they just wanted justice.
They wanted a reason to rage.
So the white members of the community of Forrestth County were out for blood because of this
quote unquote, crime spree of black men attacking white women.
Now again, if you've been paying attention, there's no real
evidence to support this statement. But that didn't matter. And they decided to recruit the help
of a group called the Knight Writers, which sounds like a cool name. But the Knight Writers were
not cool at all. Okay, they were basically a rebrand of the KKK. You see, right after the Civil War,
the clan had gone out of favor and had it been an
official organization since 1871, but just because the organization wasn't a thing, it doesn't mean
that people stopped being racist and like getting together. So that's how the Knight Writers came to be.
Technically a new group, same people, same goals, rebrand. So historians say that the Knight Writers considered themselves a vigilante group who joined forces
to destroy what they called black insurrection, but they also protected the white community
at all cost.
So they go around on horseback, kidnap black men and women, tie them up, then drop them
off at jail houses.
So the nightwriters are patrolling the area, looking for people that they believed killed
May Crow.
One of the people they targeted was a man named Rob Edwards.
Rob had been put in a jail cell for his protection since it was known that the nightwriters were
looking for him.
They were coming for him.
But that didn't stop the night Writers were looking for him. They were coming for him. But that didn't stop the Knight Writers.
They rallied thousands of angry white people
and the mob broke into the cell and murdered Rob.
Oh my God.
Afterwards, they dragged his bodies through the street
and hung him from a telephone wire, Jesus, Lord, dry.
And what was the proof they had on Rob?
Crickets, exactly.
Crickets, nothing.
Okay. The very next day, there was a couple of black teenagers who were arrested on suspicion
of assaulting Ellen Greys, and they were put on trial.
It's almost as if these boys were being offered up to stop the mob from doing a angry mob shit.
They just needed a sacrificial lamb in a way.
And to make matters worse,
the trial finished in just a few hours. It wasn't like a real trial.
Trials usually take weeks, sometimes months, for something like this, and despite having
freaking no evidence, both teens were convicted and sentenced to death by public execution.
But at this time, public execution was, it wasn't even legal in the
state of Georgia. But again, that didn't matter, okay? The mob still wanted blood, and
they needed some kind of performance, and they got it when the boys were executed later
that week. Fucking brutal. This is awful. Unfortunately, this did not satisfy the mob.
At least one historian says that the people of Forceth County
claimed that they were afraid of a black rebellion, which was, it wasn't even a thing, okay?
But the white people of Oscarville, they just didn't care.
And in an attempt to get rid of this fake rebellion that they made up in their minds,
they decided that they should just start burning down
the homes and the churches of the black community,
because that would prevent whatever the fuck
they think is gonna happen.
Buildings that were not burnt down
would be targeted by random gunfire.
Fake notices full of racial slurs were printed,
saying that the black residents of Oscarville
had 24 hours to get out.
These notices actually said that the black residents had to leave by law,
even though this was illegal. This was not true.
Whether they believe that these notices were real or not, I mean, they could tell
that this situation was no longer safe for them, and in just two months, almost the
entire black population of Forsyith County had completely left.
This included all of the town of Oscarville.
You happy? You got what you want? You shitheads. Not the white people, the white people.
In 1910, there were over 1,000 black residents in the county. Just 10 years later, there were only 9.
And they all worked for one farmer.
So for a long time, Oscarville was nearly a ghost town, and would stay that way for almost
30 years.
The original citizens of Oscarville never returned.
There were still a couple of people living in the ghost town of Oscarville, but then the
Georgia government used eminent domain to force them out.
And why did the Georgia government force these people out?
You were maybe wondering asking?
Was it so they could rebuild this town and give it back to the original citizens?
Of course not.
You know, no, I wish.
No.
They did so so they could take it and turn it into a lake.
Yay!
So what was once Oscarville is now submerged under the waters of Lake Leneer.
Oh, don't a lot of people get murdered there too? Oh my god! So we got, okay, okay.
Now, if you live in Georgia, you've probably heard of Lake Leneer.
You may have even been there for a swim or on a boat.
But not many people actually know that the lake is actually a flooded town that entire
black community was forced out of. Now for the past few years, Georgia has experienced crazy
weather, and sometimes the drought will be so bad that the lake's water gets incredibly low,
and they say when this happens, old parts of Oscarville will reappear, such as the remains of old burned up homes and shops or even
like old street signs.
Now the taking of Oscarville was incredibly violent, but no one tried to stop it.
And Georgia even sealed the deal legally by enacting eminent domain.
And instead of apologizing and maybe, I don't know, returning the town, they flooded it.
At a site out of mind.
That should be America's slogan.
At a site out of mind, baby.
Eh?
I mean, what happened in Oscarville and what happened in Sennaka Village?
I think we can all agree here was extremely fucked up.
But those places weren't the only places it happened.
I mean, it's happened a shit time.
This is only a small little fraction.
And also, it wasn't just black communities that were affected, but any community of color.
And the reasons they were erasing the communities became grocer and grocer.
Plus, what they started replacing these communities with became more and more stupid.
Because if you think a park and a lake are dumb enough reasons to kick out a whole town,
wait till I tell you about the town that got replaced by a baseball stadium.
Yeah, baseball.
Oh, but I have to pause for an ad break.
BRB.
Now we're going to head over to Los Angeles.
That's where our next story is taking place. Now, way back in the mid-1800s, when Los Angeles was still part of Mexico, there was a huge
canyon. I'm talking no homes, no businesses, just sweet, beautiful nature. It was purchased
by a local politician named Julian Chavez in 1844 and became known as Chavez-Rivine. Just
a couple years later, Los Angeles
becomes occupied by the United States
and also Julian Chavez dies.
The two things are not related,
but they happened around the same time, okay?
So unfortunately, we don't know a lot about Julian Chavez,
but his dream was to create a strong
Mexican-American community in the heart of Los Angeles.
And although Lulian wasn't around to see it, his dream started to become true.
And by the time Los Angeles and the state of California were a fissually part of the United States,
Mexican-American families began to move and build houses.
And soon there were schools, churches, farms, popping up all in the ravine.
And multiple communities started to form.
These communities were known as Palo Verde, LaloMA, and Bishop.
Now these were very tight-knit communities.
I mean, the kind of place where people would just leave their doors unlocked, new everyone's
name, love that.
Now the communities were a little bit more rugged.
The houses were handmade, wooden structures with no indoor plumbing or electricity.
They built a community with whatever materials they could afford, and because of this, it
was really common for the press to paint the communities as an eye sore.
Now, Los Angeles couldn't have this huge eye sore right in the middle of their beautiful
new city.
So the city of Los Angeles weaponized the law to get rid of this community. Only this time they didn't
just use eminent domain, oh, nay, nay. This time they used something called red
lining. Okay, so stick with me on this one because the background on red
lining, it's very long, it's very complex, and I think they do that on purpose.
So we won't understand it.
But to sum it up as easily and quickly as I can,
it was created in the 1930s to help people buy homes
after the Great Depression.
In order to figure out how big of a home-loan people
could get from banks, neighborhoods were color-coded.
Green, blue, yellow, and red.
Now, green, they would label like a neighborhood green.
Green would be the best neighborhood.
Okay, and then another neighborhood would be red.
Red, you didn't want to be there, it was the worst.
This is why it was called red lining.
So the banks, they didn't want to lend money to people
in the red areas because they assumed the people living there
were poor and wouldn't be able to pay back the loans.
So, if your neighborhood was red, it was considered blighted.
Now, that's the actual term they used.
The word blighted is a farming term, meaning that the neighborhood is completely beyond repair.
That's your word of the day. Try to use it in a sentence.
My big toe is blighted.
Does that work? Great. Okay. I did it successfully,
and I hope you do too. Now because this is dark history, we know something's wrong with the system,
and with redlining the problem is these ratings were not determined in an objective way. They were
filled with racist criteria that labeled white neighborhoods as desirable,
aka green, and communities of color as blighted, which brings us to Chavez-Rivine in the 1940s.
But before we get into that, we got a pause for an ad break.
Now, you probably won't be surprised to learn that Chavez-Rivine was considered to be
blighted in the 1930s, and a few decades later in the 1950s, the city of Los Angeles took
Chavez-Rivine being blighted as a green light to get rid of this eyesore.
I mean, it's red, so nobody cares about it, right?
So this is where we welcome back to the scene, eminent domain.
With this law, Palo Verde, Lalloma, and Bishop, it would become a massive public housing project
known as Elysian Park Heights.
The plan was to create government funding housing consisting of apartment buildings and
two-story town homes.
They would also build new schools and playgrounds, and when the
citizens sold their houses so the new community could be built, they would be allowed to
be first in line to buy these new homes. So it kind of sounds like a great deal, right?
Great. But it turns out that most of the people were offered just a few hundred dollars
around there for their houses. Great. And this was at the time of 1957 when
similar houses would cost a few thousand dollars. Some of the people who lived in
Palo Verde, Lalloma, and Bishop ended up taking the deal. I mean they didn't
really have any other option. But most of them just decide to ignore the city's
request to move out. So the developers were like, well, what if we
could give you, I don't know, less cash? The developers decide to offer the residents
who weren't leaving even less money. They told them that the longer they wait, the
less that they're going to get. Well, this actually worked for the developers. By 1957,
a large number of Shavas ravine residents ended up leaving, but there were still
some people who refused to leave their homes.
They thought that the federal government wanted the land so bad, then maybe they'll
pay up, but sadly they were wrong.
The government decides they're done playing around and basically forced most of the remaining
residents to take even less money than they had been offered in the first place.
The whole place was mostly deserted, except for 20 families who still refused to leave.
And then the housing project the government was using to force everybody out comes to a complete
stop in 1958. Now for the families at the time, this must have seemed like a huge relief. They're
like, oh good, thank God. If the project is over, then we can just go back to our house, right?
But the thing was the federal government now owned most of Cheva's Reveen.
They had bought it all up for this housing project.
But the new mayor that stopped the housing project also wasn't a fan of allowing the Cheva's
Reveen to be left alone.
I know it's messy.
So this mayor, with the approval of the city council
decides to buy what was Chavez ravine
from the federal government.
And then the federal government only has
one stipulation for the land.
And you're probably wondering,
like, well, is it to give back to the families?
No, of course not.
The federal government says
that whatever Los Angeles does with the land,
they have to use it as a public space. So parks and lakes again, right? Great. And there was one guy
who saw this as a golden opportunity. Okay, so this guy, his name was Walter O'Malley. He was born
October 9th in 1903. Now, Mr. Walter, he loves sports. He was like, yay, I love sports. And he
purchased a baseball team in Brooklyn.
And he had this idea of moving it out to Los Angeles.
With his team he bought, they named it a stadium.
And it just so happened that Los Angeles had a bunch of land.
And they had to use this land as a public space.
Oh my god, wow, just like everything fell into place.
And last time, Wallet checked, a baseball stadium like everything fell into place. And last time Walley checked a baseball stadium
was definitely a public space.
So Walley didn't have to put up much of a fight,
and in 1958, 352 acres were his.
Walley quickly announced that his newly acquired property
will be the new home of the Dodger Stadium,
which is kind of interesting because the privately owned Dodger Stadium is
technically considered a public space. So what do we do with that information? We fucking rage.
So now the Dodgers had a new shiny Los Angeles home. I mean all they had to do was kick out the
last remaining families, but these last few families weren't going to give up without a fight.
So in May of 1959, the police have informed the families that this is their final warning.
Okay?
They will soon be removed by force if they don't leave, because the land had been sold
to the stued Walter.
But the residents continue to just ignore their warnings.
This is their home. They never agreed to friggin sell it. Who's Walter? We don't care. But on May 9th,
the police show up and literally pull people out of their homes, breaking down their doors
right in front of them. All sorts of aggressive. Sheriff deputies would kick down the door
of many families homes, and movers would start hauling out their furniture
while the family was forced out.
There was one woman named Avrona,
who was 66 years old,
and was not gonna take this sitting down, okay?
She started throwing rocks at the cops,
and she was screaming in Spanish,
like, why don't the Dodgers go play in the mayor's backyard?
Another woman was dragged out kicking and screaming
by four deputies.
They handcuffed her as she sat on the ground
and watched her house get bulldozed
just minutes later.
Can you imagine?
Getting handcuffed for a what?
Getting removed from your home
and then you have to watch your home
be bulldozed to the ground.
How is this legal?
Oh, eminent domain.
How is that even legal?
Crews arrived and started knocking down the rest of the houses and any trace of the community
that had once existed there.
Within just a few months, construction officially began on Dodger Stadium.
And again, all of this was completely legal.
Now you know.
Now you know.
Now we know. It's all fun and. Now you know. Now you know. Now we know.
It's all fun and games until you know.
So what am I getting out with all this?
Imagine if Seneca Village or Oscar Village or Shava's Reveen remained in the hands of those who rightfully owned it.
Not only were their lives have been undisturbed, but the generations that came after them
would have benefited from the property values increasing over time.
And so when people remove this ability, it doesn't just impact the person who they took it from.
This hurts the entire family lineage and the community that would have benefited from it.
So it's just like a big-ass ripple effect that happens, and it's not fair, it's not right.
I think it's, I mean, hello.
So today, Senaqa is a part that New Yorkers use to escape the city madness.
Oscarville is under a lake people do beer bongs on and Dodger Stadium is a place where
you bond with your kids over violently overpriced hot dogs.
It's, yeah, it's like so crowded there.
But to all the people displaced in order to create those things, it was home.
They say knowledge is power.
But what do we do with this knowledge?
Let me know down below.
Well, thank you everyone for hanging out with me today and learning something new.
Remember, don't be afraid to ask questions or just be like a curious cat because
something always comes from something. The more you know, now I'd love to hear your guys' reactions to this story.
Did you know any of this? I should not.
So make sure to use the hashtag dark history over on social media
so I can follow along and see what you're saying.
Don't forget to join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday
after the podcast airs and you can also catch my murder mystery makeup which drops on Monday's.
I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, you make good choices and I'll be talking
to you next week.
Goodbye.
Sorry to be such a Debbie Downer.
Dark History is an audio boom original.
This podcast is executive produced by Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacob,
Stunia McNeely from Three Arts, Justin Cummins, and Claire Turner from Wilhouse,
DNA, produced by Lexi Kiven, research provided by Ramona Kivitt, writers,
Jed Bookout, Michael Obersch, Joyce Kavuso, and Kim Yageed. A big thank you to our
historical consultant, Vincent Montalvo, and the organization
buried under the blue. And I'm your host. Hi, Bailey Sarian. Goodbye.