100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Jon Weisman Read Free Book Online Page A

feature. The area became home to a number of Mexican American families over time, and was also called Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma. Chris-Pin Martin, who appeared as a character actor in numerous films—mostly Westerns including the Cisco Kid series—was its most notable resident. But for the most part, it was not a part of the city that most people even knew existed or how to get to.”
    A child of that area born in those 19 th -century days would still have had all those memories in 1949, when a federal housing act offered money to cities for public housing. Los Angeles approved a 10,000-unit project, a huge chunk of which would encroach upon Chavez Ravine’s 300 acres. Sounds like a plan, except for the not-so-minor issue of the existing 300 households (as counted by the New York Times ). To facilitate the transformation of the area, Los Angeles accompanied its demand for the residents to sell their homes with a promise that they would have the first opportunity to live in the new project designed by architect Richard Neutra and featuring new playgrounds and schools.
    As you can imagine, some agreed to the terms, others held out for better offers, and still others dug in their heels and prepared for a battle. These were their homes, after all, and in many cases more valuable to them than the compensation they were getting. What happened next forms the wound upon which Dodger Stadium rests.
    Of those people in Los Angeles who had the city’s political and economic ear, few fretted over the fate of the Chavez Ravine population. But things changed when the Los Angeles real estate business, hardly thrilled that valuable property was being transacted at rates well below market, exploited a timely political and public relations problem for the housing project and its assistant housing director, Frank Wilkinson.
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    A 1958 brochure from the “Yes on Proposition B” campaign explains what the previously approved contract between the City of Los Angeles and the Dodgers means to the Southland. It also notes that Walter O’Malley pledges to build, privately finance, and maintain a 50,000-seat stadium, and pay property taxes. Photo courtesy of www.walteromalley.com. All rights reserved.
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    â€œWe had tremendous support for the program,” Wilkinson said years later in the PBS documentary, Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story . “We were pretty well finished. And the only people opposing were what is commonly called the real estate lobby, which was headed up by the department of house owners association and other people like that. They called [the public housing project] creeping socialism. They were trying to discredit us every way they could. They had petitions, they had initiatives to try to kill the program. We should have been more suspicious than we were.
    â€œAs I remember, [the piece of property discussed at the hearing] was a very large site. It was vacant land, but the owner of that property was a prominent person in downtown L.A., and he demanded, I think, a hundred thousand dollars, and we were fighting with them over value. He wanted as much as he could get, when out of nowhere this lawyer for the property owner turned to me and said, ‘Now, Mr. Wilkinson, I want to ask you what organizations, political or otherwise, did you belong to since 1931?’”
    When Wilkinson exercised his right not to answer the question, the Chavez Ravine housing project became wrapped up in the Red Scare.
    â€œAfter a City Council hearing, in which Mayor Fletcher Bowron punched a man in the audience who had called him a ‘servant of Stalin,’ Mr. Wilkinson was questioned by the California Anti-Subversive Committee,” wrote Rick Lyman of the New York Times in Wilkinson’s 2006 obituary. Still resisting, Wilkinson was fired.
    â€œI’m out,” Wilkinson recalled. “Destroyed. Really destroyed. ‘Neutralized,’ they, the FBI, listed it.