The government's independent appraiser set the property value at about $17,500. They were given an offer of about $10,000. 'They believed that they were given an offer for one house. 'They had two houses on three lots,' he said. The most famous exception was the Arechiga family, whose forceful eviction was immortalized by local newspaper photographers years later.Īs Nusbaum explained, the Arechiga family did not agree with the terms they were offered, which considered theirs to be a single property rather than three separate lots. Many families did take the money, often relocating them to other parts of the city like 'Lincoln Heights, Whittier or Long Beach,' explained Nusbaum, an LA native. It's not something that is a pleasant experience for anybody.' Nobody wants to be told you have to sell your house. There was a lot of pushback and they were forced to deal with the government telling them what to do. 'They were complex people who had different ideas. 'There was not a single feeling,' he said. And since the Dodgers were MLB's only team west of Kansas City in 1957, there was no need to specify the part of town where the team played - an area that is now referred to as Chavez Ravine.īut as author Eric Nusbaum explains in his new book, Stealing Home, that area was really comprised of three distinct neighborhoods which were inhabited by the real victims of this story: the residents who were cheated, betrayed, and forcibly evicted by the city of Los Angeles.Ī diagram of early city plans regarding Dodger Stadium In Los Angeles, that nickname was rendered meaningless. Then there was the nickname, which referred to the Brooklynites who dodged the borough's innumerable trolleys at the risk of being pulverized. The use of the borough rather than 'New York' was a departure from the city's other two Major League Baseball teams, the Bronx's Yankees and Manhattan's Giants. The team's official name reflected Brooklyn in two ways. Most notably there was Hilda Chester, a staple at Ebbets Field in Flatbush who famously proclaimed her presence with a sign reading 'Hilda is Here!' The crumbling stadium was also home to the Dodger Sym-PHONY band, whose members could favorably be described as 'musicians,' but whose talents were commensurate with a club that dated its struggles back to the 1880s. 'Dem Bums,' as the Dodgers were affectionately known, had built baseball's most colorful fan base despite failing to win a World Series until 1955. In a typical retelling of the Dodgers' 1957 move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, it's New York's most-populous borough that plays the role of the only victim.īy fleeing to the West Coast after failing to secure a new stadium in New York, team owner Walter O'Malley was perceived to be robbing millions of Brooklynites of their identity. Their ordeal has been detailed in a new book, Stealing Home, which was released on Tuesdayīy Alex Raskin Sports News Editor For.The surviving citizens and their relatives hold a reunion at a nearby park every July.A small group who had refused payoffs were forcibly evicted in 1959 and their homes were destroyed.In 1958, O'Malley agreed to swap the land surrounding a local minor league stadium he owned in exchange for roughly 300 acres of Chavez Ravine and the voters approved the referendum to green light the stadium.Amid the Red Scare of the 1950s, public housing was equated with communism and the project was cancelled. ![]() Previously the working-class citizens of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop were being ushered out of their respective neighborhoods through eminent domain as Los Angeles planned a public housing project.At first the team played at a football stadium, the LA Coliseum, while O'Malley sought a permanent home.After years of struggling to get a new stadium in New York, Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley agreed to move the club to Los Angeles in 1957, giving Major League Baseball its first West Coast team.Dodger Stadium's tragic past: How working-class LA citizens were forcibly evicted to build public housing in the 1950s before anti-communist hysteria ended the project and the club got the land for a song
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |