Chavez Ravine is a shallow canyon in Los Angeles, California. It sits in a large promontory of hills north of downtown Los Angeles, next to Major League Baseball's Dodger Stadium. [1] [2] Chavez Ravine was named for a 19th-century Los Angeles councilman who had originally purchased the land in the Elysian Park area. [3] [4] [5]
Chavez Ravine was named for Julian Chavez ( né Julián A. Chávez), the first recorded owner of the ravine. [6] He was born in New Mexico and moved to Los Angeles in the early 1830s. He quickly became a local leader. In 1844, Chavez purchased 83 acres (34 ha) of the long, narrow valley northwest of the city. There are no records of what Chavez did on his land, but during the 1850s and 1880s there were smallpox epidemics; Chavez Canyon was the location of a "pest house" which cared for Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans suffering from the disease.[ citation needed ]
In addition to the notable Mexican-American presence, there was also a notable early Jewish-American presence in the neighborhood beginning in the 1850s. The First Jewish site in Los Angeles was a Jewish cemetery located in Chavez Ravine, which opened in 1855 and was owned by the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles, a Jewish charity which was also the first charity in Los Angeles. The Hebrew Benevolent Society purchased a 3-acre plot of barren land for the cemetery for $1 from the city. The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles was founded in 1854 for the purpose of "…procuring a piece of ground suitable for the purpose of a burying ground for the deceased of their own faith, and also to appropriate a portion of their time and means to the holy cause of benevolence…". The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles received the deed to land from the Los Angeles City Council on April 9, 1855. With this land they established the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles at Lilac Terrace and Lookout Drive in Chavez Ravine. The site now includes Dodger Stadium and the Los Angeles Fire Department's Frank Hotchkin Memorialized Training Center. [7]
The land was very rugged which prevented further development of the area at the time. However the area did provide an important watershed and part was used by the Los Angeles Water Company for a canal bringing water from what is now Griffith Park and storing it in a reservoir (today called Buena Vista Reservoir) in Reservoir Ravine. Some of Chavez Canyon and the surrounding hills became Elysian Park in 1886. That same year, two brick manufacturers moved into Chavez Ravine and began blasting operations in the hillsides. [ citation needed ]
In 1902, because of poor environmental conditions due to the unchecked expansion of the oil industry in the Chavez Ravine area, it was proposed by Congregation B'nai B'rith to secure a new plot of land in what is now East LA, and to move the buried remains to the new site, with a continued provision for burial of indigent people, this became the Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles. [8] [7] [9]
By the early 1900s, in the hills above and around the ravine, a semi-rural Mexican-American community had grown up. Eventually, three distinct neighborhoods formed: Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop mostly on the ridges between the neighboring ravines. In 1913 a progressive lawyer named Marshall Stimson subsidized the movement of around 250 Mexican-Americans to these communities from the floodplain of the nearby Los Angeles River. There was a local grocery store, a local church, and Palo Verde Elementary. There was a nearby brick factory which caused local problems from the smoke and dust released. In 1926 the residents of Chavez Ravine organized to shut the company down. On August 20, 1926, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance prohibiting the blasting and zoned the area around Chavez Ravine for residential use. [10]
Chavez Ravine was made up of the three mostly Mexican-American communities of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop. [11]
In the 1940s, the area was a poor, though cohesive, Mexican-American community. Many families lived there because of housing discrimination in other parts of Los Angeles. With the population of Los Angeles expanding, Chavez Ravine was viewed as a prime, underutilized location. The city began to label the area as "blighted" and thus ripe for redevelopment. Through a vote, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, with the assistance of federal funds from the Housing Act of 1949, was designated the task to construct public housing, in large part to address the severe post-World War II housing shortage. Prominent architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander developed a plan for "Elysian Park Heights." The city had already relocated many of the residents of Chavez Ravine when the entire project came to a halt.[ citation needed ]
The land for Dodger Stadium was purchased from some local owners/inhabitants in the early 1950s by the City of Los Angeles, using eminent domain, with funds from the Federal Housing Act of 1949. The city had planned to develop the Elysian Park Heights public housing project, which was to include two dozen 13-story buildings and more than 160 two-story townhouses, in addition to newly rebuilt playgrounds and schools.
Los Angeles–based author Mike Davis, in his history of the city, City of Quartz , discussed the process of gradually convincing Chavez Ravine homeowners to sell. Davis asserted that with nearly all of the original Spanish-speaking homeowners initially unwilling to do so, "developers", representing the city and its public housing authority, resorted to offering immediate cash payments, distributed through their Spanish-speaking agents. Once the first sales had been completed, it is said that remaining homeowners were offered lesser amounts of money, allegedly to create a sense of community panic that people would not receive fair compensation, or that they would be left as one of the few holdouts. Some residents continued to resist, despite the pressure being placed upon them by the "developers," resulting in the Battle of Chavez Ravine, an unsuccessful ten-year struggle by a small number of remaining residents of Chavez Ravine to maintain control of their property, after the substantial majority of the area had been transferred to public ownership. [12]
Before construction of the Elysian Park Heights project could begin, the local political climate changed greatly when Norris Poulson was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1953. Poulson opposed the provision of public housing, claiming that it was "un-American", and support for projects like Elysian Park Heights faded. Following protracted negotiations, the City of Los Angeles was able to repurchase the Chavez Ravine property from the Federal Housing Authority at a drastically reduced price, with the stipulation that the land be used for a public purpose.
Following the "baseball referendum", promoted by the Taxpayers Committee for Yes on Baseball, which was approved by Los Angeles voters on June 3, 1958, the city made the controversial decision to trade 352 acres (142 ha) of land at Chavez Ravine to the Brooklyn Dodgers and team's owner Walter O'Malley in exchange for land around the minor league park, Wrigley Field, with the aim of providing incentives for migration to Los Angeles. [13] From their arrival in Los Angeles in 1958 until 1961, the Dodgers played their home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum; Dodger Stadium officially opened in 1962.
During the years when the expansion Los Angeles Angels were tenants of the Dodgers (1962 through 1965), the Angels referred to the stadium as "Chavez Ravine Stadium" or simply "Chavez Ravine". Los Angeles City Council designated the property as "Dodgertown" in October 2008. [14] The United States Postal Service assigned postal code "Dodgertown, CA 90090" in April 2009. [15]
A number of structures from Chavez Ravine were spared demolition and sold by the developers of Dodger Stadium to nearby Universal Studios for one dollar apiece. Universal moved the structures to its back lot where they subsequently appeared in various Universal productions, most notably the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird . The house of Atticus Finch, for example, was an erstwhile Chavez Ravine home. [16]
However, according to the film's art director, Henry Bumstead, as cited in an article in Andrew Horton's "Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction", the houses used on the Mockingbird set were actually purchased by the studio after they had been condemned and slated for demolition to make way for new freeway construction.[ citation needed ]
Most of Chavez Ravine remains in Elysian Park, where the Chavez Ravine Arboretum still stands. The arboretum was founded in 1893 by the Los Angeles Horticultural Society where trees were added to through to the 1920s. Most of the Arboretum's original trees are still standing and many are the oldest and largest of their kind in California and even the United States. [17] Further south in the ravine is Barlow Respiratory Hospital which was founded in 1902 and continues to treat patients today. [18] At the open end of the ravine immediately adjacent to Dodger Stadium is the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center which was built in 1937 but is today a training facility, Frank Hotchkin Memorial Training Center, for the Los Angeles City Fire Department. [19]
Chavez Ravine is mentioned in The Mescaleros' song "All in a Day" in their 2003 album Streetcore .
Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story (1999) collects interviews and photos by Don Normark documenting the Ravine's culture at the time.
Chávez Ravine is a concept album recorded by Ry Cooder which tells the story of Chávez Ravine. It was nominated for "Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album" in 2006. [20] It was used as a soundtrack to a 2005 PBS documentary directed by Jordan Mechner. The film makes use of the Normark photos in telling the story of how a Mexican American community was destroyed, thinking their community was going to be replaced with a low-income public housing project, however it was replaced with Dodger Stadium. [21]
The Provisional City (2000) recounts the postwar history of housing in Los Angeles by Dana Cuff, and devotes a section of the book to the politics of transforming Chavez Ravine into a modern housing development designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, and the demise of that utopian plan.[ citation needed ]
A portion of the Great Wall of Los Angeles , a mural by Judith F. Baca in the Tujunga Wash Drainage Canal in San Fernando Valley, California, is titled "The Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine." It depicts families separated by freeways and the Dodger Stadium in the air like a spaceship.[ citation needed ]
In 2003, the Urban Performance Troupe Culture Clash, comprising three writers and performers Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza, premiered a stage show titled Chávez Ravine at the Mark Taper Forum.
The 1952 crime drama film Without Warning! has several scenes that take place in Chavez Ravine.
During Dave Dameshek's "Number One Sports" segment on The Adam Carolla Show , Dodger Stadium was often humorously referred to as Chavez Ravine.
At the end of the Twilight Zone episode "The Whole Truth" (1961) Rod Serling says "be particularly careful in explaining to the boss about your grandmother's funeral when you are actually at Chavez Ravine watching the Dodgers."[ citation needed ]
"Chavez Ravine" is mentioned in episode "Community" of the TV police drama Southland when a fraud victim describes how he was "born on home plate" and lived in his family home in Chavez Ravine until May 9, 1959, when the city came in and bulldozed his home to make way for Dodger Stadium.
In the Amazon TV series Bosch , Police Commissioner Bradley Walker, played by John Getz, states that "My father bulldozed Bunker Hill so that lawyers could have an ocean view, *his* father destroyed Chavez Ravine for low cost housing he knew would never happen." [22]
Dick Valentine, lead singer of Electric Six, has the song named "The Ghost of Chavez Ravine"
Wayne and Shuster mention Chavez Ravine in their sketch "A Shakespearean Baseball Game": "I thought I saw the ghost of Dizzy Dean/Calling a game in the Chavez Ravine."
The 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice , and its 2014 film adaptation both make mention of a "Long, sad history of L.A. land use... Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium".[ citation needed ]
Dodger Stadium is a baseball stadium in the Elysian Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It is the ballpark for Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers. Opened in 1962, it was constructed in less than three years at a cost of US$23 million. It is the oldest ballpark in MLB west of the Mississippi River, and third-oldest overall, after Fenway Park in Boston (1912) and Wrigley Field in Chicago (1914), and is the largest baseball stadium in the world by seat capacity. Often referred to as a "pitcher's ballpark", the stadium has seen 13 no-hitters, 2 of which were perfect games.
The Home of Peace Memorial Park and Mortuary, also called the Home of Peace Cemetery, is a Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles, California. It is located at 4334 Whittier Boulevard west of Interstate 710 in East Los Angeles.
Charles Norris Poulson was an American politician who represented Southern California in public office at the local, state, and federal levels. He served as the 36th Mayor of Los Angeles from 1953 to 1961, after having been a California State Assemblyman and then a member of the United States Congress. He was a Republican.
The Dodger Dog is a hot dog named after the Major League Baseball franchise that sells them, the Los Angeles Dodgers. It is a 10-inch pork wiener wrapped in a steamed bun. The hot dog is sold at Dodger Stadium located in Los Angeles, California. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, the projected number of 2011 season hot dogs sold at Dodger Stadium was 2 million—establishing Dodger Dogs as the leader in hot dog sales of all those sold in Major League Baseball ballparks.
University Hills is a neighborhood on the East Side of Los Angeles, California. It consists of the residential areas surrounding California State University, Los Angeles.
Holman Stadium is a baseball stadium in Vero Beach, Florida, built in 1953 from an abandoned naval base, to accommodate spring training for the Brooklyn Dodgers as part of a complex now called Historic Dodgertown. In addition to the Dodgers' spring games, it was the home of the Vero Beach Devil Rays, previously the Vero Beach Dodgers, of the Florida State League, through the 2008 season. The official seating capacity is 6,500.
Elysian Park is a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, California, United States. The city park, Elysian Park, and Dodger Stadium are within the neighborhood, as are an all-boys Catholic high school and an elementary school.
Rosalind Wiener Wyman was an American politician, Los Angeles City Councilmember, and California Democratic political figure who, at 22 years old, was the youngest person ever elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and only the second woman to serve there. Her City Council tenure ran 12 years, representing the city's Fifth District. Wyman was highly influential in bringing the Brooklyn Dodgers from New York to Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles. She helped lead the successful campaigns of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and in 2019, was reported to be California's oldest DNC delegate.
Edward Ross Roybal was a Mexican-American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first Latino American to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council, serving from 1949 to 1962. He later served 15 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1963 to 1993, representing portions of Downtown and East Los Angeles.
Elysian Park is one of the largest parks in Los Angeles, California, United States, at 600 acres. Most of Elysian Park falls in the neighborhood of the same name, but a small portion of the park falls in Echo Park.
John C. Holland was one of the longest-serving Los Angeles City Council members, for 24 years from 1943 to 1967, and was known for his losing fight against bringing the Los Angeles Dodgers to Chavez Ravine and for his reputation as a watchdog over the city treasury.
The Battle of Chavez Ravine refers to resistance to the government acquisition of land largely owned by Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles' Chavez Ravine. The efforts to repossess the land, which lasted approximately ten years (1951–1961), eventually resulted in the removal of the entire population of Chavez Ravine from land on which Dodger Stadium was constructed. The majority of the Chavez Ravine land was initially acquired by eminent domain by the City of Los Angeles to make way for proposed public housing. The public housing plan that had been advanced as politically "progressive" and had resulted in the removal of the Mexican-American landowners of Chavez Ravine was abandoned after the passage of a public referendum prohibiting the original housing proposal and the election of a conservative Los Angeles mayor opposed to public housing. By 1958, the public housing plans were abandoned and the land was conveyed by the city to the Dodgers. The new plans were advanced to construct Dodger Stadium on the site, and in 1959, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department forcefully removed the last residents occupying Chavez Ravine.
Cypress Park is a densely populated neighborhood of 10,000+ residents in Northeast Los Angeles, California. Surrounded by hills on three sides, it sits in the valley created by the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. It is the site of the Rio de Los Angeles State Park, the Los Angeles River Bike Path and other recreational facilities. It hosts one private and four public schools.
Founded in 1915, the Greater Los Angeles Area Council (GLAAC) (#033) served most of the City of Los Angeles as well as several other cities in the greater Los Angeles area. It was one of five Boy Scouts of America councils in Los Angeles County, California. Since its founding in 1915, the Los Angeles Area Council has brought its purpose and values to millions of youth. The Council served 54,567 youth in the Greater Los Angeles Area in 2008 alone.
The Brooklyn Sports Center, in retrospect known as the Dodger Dome, was a proposed domed stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers, designed by Buckminster Fuller to replace Ebbets Field. Meant to keep the Dodgers in New York City, it was first announced in the early 1950s. The envisioned structure would have seated 52,000 people and would have been the first domed stadium in the world, opening roughly a decade before Houston's Astrodome. The Dodgers instead moved to Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles.
Julián Antonio Chávez was a Hispano-Californio ranchero, landowner and public official in 19th-century Los Angeles, California. Chávez served multiple terms on the Los Angeles Common Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. He is the namesake of Chavez Ravine.
Harbor City is a highly diverse neighborhood in the South Bay and Harbor region of Los Angeles, California, with a population upward of 36,000 people. Originally part of the Rancho San Pedro Spanish land grant, the 2.58-square-mile (6.7 km2) Harbor City was brought into Los Angeles as a preliminary step in the larger city's consolidation with the port cities of Wilmington and San Pedro.
Historic Dodgertown is a multi-sport facility in Vero Beach, Florida where athletes of all ages and skill levels have the opportunity to train, play, and stay together. The facility which includes the historic Holman Stadium was originally created as a Navy housing base, and was transformed into the home of spring training for Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, as well as the Vero Beach Dodgers from 1980 to 2006, and the Vero Beach Devil Rays from 2007 to 2008. It has since evolved into a multi-sport destination that includes an option of room and board via their on-site villas.
The First Jewish site in Los Angeles is a first Jewish cemetery in the City of Los Angeles, opened in 1855 by Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles, the first charitable organization in Los Angeles. The First Jewish site in Los Angeles was designated a California Historic Landmark on Jan. 26, 1968. The First Jewish site in Los Angeles is located at Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles in Los Angeles County. In 1902 the cemetery was moved, a California Historic Landmark is at the place of the original cemetery. The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles was founded in 1854 for the purpose of "…procuring a piece of ground suitable for the purpose of a burying ground for the deceased of their own faith, and also to appropriate a portion of their time and means to the holy cause of benevolence…,". The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles received the deed to land from the Los Angeles City Council on April 9, 1855. With this land they established the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles at Lilac Terrace and Lookout Drive in Chavez Ravine. The site is now the current site of Dodger Stadium and the Los Angeles Fire Department's Frank Hotchkin Memorial Training Center.
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