How Walter O'Malley Got Dodger Stadium (A Blog History Lesson)

Until the decision in Shelly v. Kramer 334 U.S. 1 in 1948, racially restrictive covenants in Los Angeles limited the places where minorities could live.  Chavez Ravine was “a poor man’s Shangri-la” where Latinos and African Americans could live.  It was a close-knit community, near downtown jobs, it had a church and a school, and people grew their own food. 

A 17 year old boy captured the vibrant community in his photographs, which he would not able to get published for fifty years.   (Chavez Ravine 1949: A Los Angeles Story, by Don Normark.  (1999) The film, “Chavez Ravine 1949: A Los Angeles Story” directed by Jordan Mechner, draws on these photographs.   Ry Cooder’s “Chavez Ravine,” by Perro Verde Records, hauntingly revisits Chavez Ravine, partly through the eyes of the Space Vato who orbits above it.) 

In 1949, the Los Angeles Housing Authority condemned the properties in Chavez Ravine for public housing. The feds paid $3 million for the land.  

Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander’s urban design for Elysian Park Heights grew from Ebeneezer Howard’s utopian Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1889) vision.   “The Housers “ who lobbied for government owned housing during the Great Depression dreamed of entire integrated communities with businesses, stores, jobs, churches and schools.

In the early 1950s, the Red Scare enfeebled the Left. There was no one to stand up to the Los Angeles Times or to the other powerful moneyed interests represented by CASH (Citizens Against Socialized Housing). In 1952, Frank Wilkinson, the assistant director of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority and one of the main supporters behind Elysian Park Heights, faced questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He spent a year in prison.  

The City of Los Angeles purchased Chavez Ravine from the Federal Housing Authority for a fraction of the cost taxpayers had paid for it by stipulating the land would be used for a public purpose.  (See, “The Decline of Public Housing and the Politics of the Red Scare,” Don Parson, Journal of Urban History, March 2007, vol., 33, pp 400-417.)

In 1957, the City agreed to exchange 300 acres of land in Chavez Ravine to the Dodgers in return for the Walter O’Malley’s commitment to build a 50,000-seat stadium. The Dodgers also exchanged the deed to Wrigley Field to the city and agreed to pay a property tax estimated at $345,000. The contract also included a commitment from the city to spend $2 million on grading for the area and $2.74 million from the county for the construction of access roads. http://www.walteromalley.com/stad_hist_page2.php.