After the Dodgers made the deal to ditch Brooklyn, Los Angeles officials used eminent domain and other political machinations to wrest that land away from its owners. It was ugly. It was violent. It remains the sort of living history that Los Angeles residents don't like to remember.
Chavez Ravine was named after Julian Chavez, a rancher who served as assistant mayor, city councilman and, eventually, as one of L. County's first supervisors. In , he started buying up land in what was known as the Stone Quarry Hills, an area with several separate ravines.
Chavez died of a heart attack in , at the age of By the early s, semi-rural communities had sprung up on the steep terrain, mostly on the ridges between the neighboring Sulfur and Cemetery ravines.
What eventually came to be called Chavez Ravine encompassed about acres and had three main neighborhoods — Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop. It had a grocery store, a church and an elementary school.
Many residents grew their own food and raised animals such as pigs, goats and turkeys. Many Mexican American families, red-lined and prevented from moving into other neighborhoods, established themselves in Chavez Ravine. Outsiders often saw the neighborhood as a slum.
City officials decided that Chavez Ravine was ripe for redevelopment, kicking off a decade-long battle over the land. They labeled it "blighted" and came up with a plan for a massive public housing project, known as Elysian Park Heights. Designed by architects Robert E. Alexander and Richard Neutra and funded in part by federal money, the project was supposed to include more than 1, units — two dozen story buildings and two-story townhouses — as well as several new schools and playgrounds.
In the early s, the city began trying to convince Chavez Ravine homeowners to sell. Despite intense pressure, many residents resisted. Developers offered immediate cash payments to residents for their property.
They offered remaining homeowners less money so residents feared that if they held out, they wouldn't get a fair price. In other cases, officials used the power of eminent domain to acquire plots of land and force residents out of their homes.
When they did, they typically lowballed homeowners, offering them far less money than their land was worth.
Chavez Ravine residents were also told that the land would be used for public housing and those who were displaced could return to live in the housing projects. One way or another, by choice or by force, most residents of the three neighborhoods had left Chavez Ravine by , when the Elysian Park Heights project fell apart.
Norris Poulson, the new mayor of Los Angeles, opposed public housing as "un-American," as did many business leaders who wanted the land for private development. The city bought back the land, at a much lower price, from the Federal Housing Authority — with the agreement that the city would use it for a public purpose. By , the area had become a ghost town. Only 20 families, holdouts who had fought the city's offers to buy their land, were still living in Chavez Ravine. On Friday, May 9, , bulldozers and sheriff's deputies showed up to forcibly evict the last few families in Chavez Ravine.
Residents of the area called it Black Friday. Sheriff's deputies kicked down the door of the Arechiga family's home. Movers hauled out the family's furniture. The residents were forcibly escorted out. Using the power of eminent domain, which permitted the government to purchase property from private individuals in order to construct projects for the public good, the city of Los Angeles bought up the land and leveled many of the existing buildings.
The land titles would never be returned to the original owners, and in the following years the houses would be sold, auctioned and even set on fire, used as practice sites by the local fire department. Photos by Don Normark.
Click image collage for album. The plan for Los Angeles public housing soon moved to the forefront of a decade-long civic battle. He was fired from his job and sentenced to one year in jail.
The Los Angeles City Council attempted to cancel the public housing contract with federal authorities, but courts ruled the contract legally binding. After much negotiation, Poulson was able to buy the land taken from Chavez Ravine back from the federal government at a drastically reduced price, with the stipulation that the land be used for a public purpose.
Los Angeles was also a rapidly growing city in the s. Despite its expanding population, the city had yet to host a major-league sports team. County supervisor Kenneth Hahn began to scout out potential teams that might be willing to relocate to Los Angeles, including the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was just a tragedy for the people, and from the city it was the most hypocritical thing that could possibly happen.
On April 10, , the 56,seat Dodger Stadium officially opened. My father lived in Chavez Ravine, he was from La Loma. He often talked about the place he lived and how they were thrown out by force.
He loved looking at the book over and over as he got older. All of my brothers all bought copies of the book as well to share with our friends and family. My father recently passed away but his stories will live on with our children and grandchildren. We will be attending a convention in, Los Angeles, next year. Very dissapointed. Shame on you, Los Angeles. I lived on bunker hill at the time this took place I was 15 yrs.
I use to go into their neighborhood and we would hook up to go to the orpheum movie house on 9th and broadway downtown. It was terrible watching the bulldoizers tear down my friends houses.
Little did I know that just a few yrs. We lost our house because of the clover leaf part of the freeway that came up to Temple St. Late in and the early s, a federal housing project was scheduled to be built in Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles and residents were notified by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles that they would receive three independent fair market appraisals for their properties and subsequently have to move, if they accepted compensation for their land.
Those who stayed did so without paying for services or property taxes for eight years. The land laid dormant for seven years. Norris Poulson, who ran against public housing in , was elected as the new mayor of Los Angeles. He then made arrangements for the land to be purchased by the city from the Housing Authority.
For years, Poulson and the City Council struggled with how to use the largely barren and hilly area.
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