Chavez Ravine

Based on Wikipedia: Chavez Ravine

The house where Atticus Finch defended Tom Robinson—that modest Southern home with its wide porch, where Scout learned hard truths about justice and prejudice—was a real house. It had been someone's actual home. And before Hollywood bought it for a dollar to use in To Kill a Mockingbird, it stood in a Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles called Chavez Ravine. The family who lived there had been forced out so the city could build a baseball stadium.

This is one of those stories where the irony cuts so deep it almost feels invented. A house from a displaced community became the set for a film about racial injustice. The movie won three Academy Awards.

A Valley Named for a Man from New Mexico

Chavez Ravine is a shallow canyon tucked into the hills just north of downtown Los Angeles. If you know the city, you know where Dodger Stadium sits—that's Chavez Ravine. The name comes from Julian Chavez, who was born in New Mexico and arrived in Los Angeles sometime in the early 1830s, when California was still Mexican territory and Los Angeles was a small pueblo of perhaps two thousand people.

Chavez became a community leader quickly. In 1844, he bought eighty-three acres of this long, narrow valley northwest of the settlement. We don't know what he did with the land. Records are sparse. What we do know is that during the smallpox epidemics of the 1850s and 1880s, the canyon housed a "pest house"—a quarantine facility where Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans suffering from the disease were isolated and cared for. It was the kind of place a city put things it wanted to forget about.

The land was rugged, which actually protected it from development for decades. Los Angeles was growing in every direction, but Chavez Ravine remained largely untouched, too difficult to build on profitably. The hills did serve one purpose: they collected water. The Los Angeles Water Company built a canal to bring water from what's now Griffith Park to a reservoir they constructed in a side ravine. That reservoir still exists, called Buena Vista Reservoir today.

In 1886, two things happened. Part of the canyon and surrounding hills became Elysian Park, one of the city's first public parks. And two brick manufacturers moved in and began blasting the hillsides for clay. Industry and preservation, side by side—a very Los Angeles combination.

The First Jewish Cemetery in Los Angeles

There's another piece of this story that often gets overlooked. In 1855, the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles—which was not only the first Jewish charity in Los Angeles but the first charity of any kind in the city—purchased three acres of barren land in Chavez Ravine for one dollar. This became the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles.

The Hebrew Benevolent Society had been founded just a year earlier, in 1854, for a purpose its members stated simply: to procure land suitable for burying their dead and to devote their time and means to the cause of benevolence. The Los Angeles City Council formally deeded them the land on April 9, 1855.

The cemetery stood at Lilac Terrace and Lookout Drive. Today, that location sits within the footprint of Dodger Stadium and the Los Angeles Fire Department's Frank Hotchkin Memorial Training Center. The remains were eventually moved. In 1902, due to environmental degradation from the expanding oil industry in the area, Congregation B'nai B'rith arranged to relocate the buried to a new site in East Los Angeles—what became the Home of Peace Cemetery.

So before there were Mexican-American families, before there was a baseball stadium, there was a Jewish cemetery. Chavez Ravine has always been a place where the city put what it didn't quite know how to accommodate.

Three Villages on the Ridges

By the early 1900s, a community was taking shape in the hills above and around the ravine. It grew slowly, semi-rurally, mostly on the ridges between neighboring canyons. Eventually, three distinct neighborhoods emerged: Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop.

In 1913, a progressive lawyer named Marshall Stimson helped relocate about 250 Mexican-Americans to these communities from the floodplain of the nearby Los Angeles River. The river flooded regularly, and Stimson saw an opportunity to move vulnerable families to higher, safer ground.

The neighborhoods developed their own institutions. There was a local grocery store. A church. Palo Verde Elementary School served the children. It was a modest community, but it was cohesive. Families knew each other. Children walked to school together.

There was also a brick factory, and it caused problems. The smoke and dust drifted into people's homes, coated their gardens, made their children cough. In 1926, the residents organized against it. On August 20 of that year, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance prohibiting the blasting and zoned the entire area around Chavez Ravine for residential use.

This was a community that could advocate for itself. That could win.

The Label That Changed Everything

By the 1940s, Chavez Ravine was home to roughly a thousand families. The community was poor by most measures, but poverty isn't the same as dysfunction. Many families had lived there for decades. They owned their homes. They had vegetable gardens. The streets weren't paved, but children played in them safely.

Many residents had ended up there because of housing discrimination—redlining, restrictive covenants, landlords who simply wouldn't rent to Mexican families. Chavez Ravine was one of the few places in Los Angeles where they could own property and raise families without interference.

But Los Angeles was expanding after World War II, and city planners began looking at maps differently. Chavez Ravine sat just north of downtown, close to the civic center, with views of the hills. Officials started calling it "underutilized." Then they started calling it "blighted."

Blight is a loaded word. In urban planning, it became a legal designation that unlocked certain powers. Once an area was declared blighted, the city could pursue redevelopment using eminent domain—the government's authority to take private property for public use, provided they compensate the owners. The designation transformed a community from a place where people lived into a problem to be solved.

The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, using federal funds from the Housing Act of 1949, was tasked with addressing the severe post-World War II housing shortage. They had a solution in mind for Chavez Ravine: public housing. Prominent architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander designed an ambitious plan called Elysian Park Heights—two dozen thirteen-story towers, more than 160 two-story townhouses, new playgrounds, new schools. It was going to be a model community.

The city began buying out residents and relocating them. Some left willingly, trusting the government's promises. Others were reluctant but felt they had no choice. The purchases happened gradually through the early 1950s, often under questionable circumstances.

The Spanish-Speaking Agents

Los Angeles-based author Mike Davis, in his book City of Quartz, documented what happened next. Nearly all the original Spanish-speaking homeowners initially refused to sell. The land had been in some families for generations. They didn't want to leave.

So the developers representing the city and its housing authority changed tactics. They sent Spanish-speaking agents with cash. Immediate payment, on the spot. The first families to sell received fair offers. But once those sales were completed, the agents went back to the remaining homeowners with lower offers, creating what Davis called a sense of community panic—a fear that if you waited too long, you'd get nothing, or you'd be the last one standing.

It's a technique that exploits trust and community ties. The very things that made Chavez Ravine strong—the relationships between neighbors, the shared language and culture—became vulnerabilities. When your neighbor sells, you start to wonder if you should too.

Some residents still refused. What followed was a ten-year struggle known as the Battle of Chavez Ravine. A small number of families fought to maintain control of their property even as the substantial majority of the area passed into public ownership. They lost.

Un-American Activities

Here's where the story takes its cruelest turn. Before construction on Elysian Park Heights could begin, the local political climate shifted dramatically. In 1953, Norris Poulson was elected mayor of Los Angeles. Poulson opposed public housing on ideological grounds. He called it "un-American."

This was the McCarthy era. Anything that could be labeled socialist or communist was politically radioactive. Public housing—the idea that the government should provide affordable homes for working families—became suspect. Support for projects like Elysian Park Heights evaporated.

The city had already displaced hundreds of families. The land sat empty. And now the public housing that had justified the displacement wasn't going to be built.

Following protracted negotiations, Los Angeles repurchased the Chavez Ravine property from the Federal Housing Authority at a drastically reduced price. There was one condition: the land had to be used for a public purpose. The families couldn't return. Their homes were gone. But the government couldn't just give the land to private developers either.

For years, the question lingered: what public purpose?

The Dodgers Go West

The Brooklyn Dodgers had been trying to build a new stadium in New York. Robert Moses, the legendary city planner who reshaped New York through highways and parks, had a different vision—he wanted the team in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The Dodgers' owner, Walter O'Malley, wanted to stay in Brooklyn. Neither side would budge.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles was desperate for major league baseball. The city had minor league teams, but in the 1950s, the major leagues stopped at the Mississippi River. Los Angeles was the second-largest city in America and it had no major league franchise in any sport.

City officials saw an opportunity. They promoted a "baseball referendum," asking Los Angeles voters whether the city should trade 352 acres of land at Chavez Ravine to the Dodgers in exchange for O'Malley's land around the minor league Wrigley Field. The Taxpayers Committee for Yes on Baseball campaigned hard. On June 3, 1958, the referendum passed.

The Dodgers moved west. They played their first four seasons at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a football stadium where the left field fence sat only 250 feet from home plate. Dodger Stadium officially opened in 1962.

For a few years in the early 1960s, the expansion Los Angeles Angels shared the stadium with the Dodgers. The Angels, perhaps not wanting to associate themselves too directly with the Dodgers' brand, referred to the facility as "Chavez Ravine Stadium" or simply "Chavez Ravine." The name persisted in casual conversation for decades. It was one of those Los Angeles things—everyone knew what you meant when you said you were going to Chavez Ravine.

The Arechiga Family

Not everyone left before the bulldozers came. The most famous holdouts were the Arechiga family, who refused to abandon their home until sheriff's deputies physically removed them on May 8, 1959. Newspaper photographers captured Aurora Arechiga being carried from her house by deputies. The images ran in papers across the country.

The Arechigas had lived in Chavez Ravine for thirty-six years. They had raised their children there. They had buried family members in the local cemetery. They didn't want money. They wanted to stay.

Their removal became a symbol of what Chavez Ravine represented: a Mexican-American community displaced to make way for entertainment, justified initially by promises of public housing that were never built, then reframed as civic progress and baseball fever.

Houses for Hollywood

Some of the structures from Chavez Ravine weren't demolished. The developers of Dodger Stadium sold them to nearby Universal Studios for one dollar apiece. Universal moved the houses to their back lot, where they became sets for various productions.

The most famous use was in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird. The house where Gregory Peck, playing Atticus Finch, delivered his closing argument about the injustice of a racist legal system—where Scout watched her father defend a Black man falsely accused—was an actual home from Chavez Ravine.

There's some dispute about this. The film's art director, Henry Bumstead, later said the houses on the Mockingbird set were purchased after being condemned for freeway construction, not from Chavez Ravine. It's possible both accounts are true—that some buildings came from one source and some from another. Hollywood back lots accumulated structures from all over Los Angeles as the city kept tearing itself down and rebuilding.

Either way, the irony resonates. A film about the destruction of a Black man by a racist system, filmed in houses taken from a Mexican-American community by a government that promised public housing and delivered a baseball stadium.

What Remains

Most of Chavez Ravine actually remains outside the stadium footprint. Elysian Park is still there, and within it stands the Chavez Ravine Arboretum, founded in 1893 by the Los Angeles Horticultural Society. Trees were added through the 1920s. Many of the original plantings still stand—they're among the oldest and largest specimens of their species in California, some in the entire United States.

Further south, Barlow Respiratory Hospital continues to treat patients. It was founded in 1902, originally as a tuberculosis sanatorium, and has operated continuously for over a century. At the open end of the ravine, immediately adjacent to Dodger Stadium, is a Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center built in 1937. Today it's a training facility for the Los Angeles City Fire Department—the Frank Hotchkin Memorial Training Center, named after a firefighter who died in the line of duty.

So the ravine holds all of it: a park, an arboretum with century-old trees, a hospital, a fire training center, and a baseball stadium built on land where families once lived, where children once walked to school, where a grocery store served the neighborhood and a church held services.

In Culture and Memory

Chavez Ravine didn't disappear from cultural consciousness after the stadium was built. It became a kind of wound that Los Angeles keeps returning to, probing to understand what happened and what it means.

In 1999, a book called Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story collected interviews and photographs by Don Normark, documenting the community's culture at its height. The photos show families on porches, children playing, gardens in bloom. It's hard to reconcile with the word "blighted."

Ry Cooder, the guitarist and composer known for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack, released a concept album called Chávez Ravine in 2005. The album tells the story through music, mixing traditional Mexican sounds with rock and R&B. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

The same year, PBS aired a documentary directed by Jordan Mechner that used Normark's photographs to tell the story of how a Mexican-American community was destroyed. The families had believed they were making way for a low-income housing project. They got Dodger Stadium instead.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a massive mural by Judith Baca in the Tujunga Wash Drainage Canal, includes a section titled "The Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine." It depicts families separated by freeways while Dodger Stadium floats in the air above them, alien as a spaceship.

In 2003, the Latino theater troupe Culture Clash premiered a stage show called Chávez Ravine at the Mark Taper Forum. Joe Strummer, the former lead singer of The Clash, mentioned the ravine in a song called "All in a Day" on his final album, Streetcore, released after his death. Thomas Pynchon referenced it in his 2009 novel Inherent Vice: "Long, sad history of L.A. land use... Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium."

Even television keeps returning to it. In an episode of Southland, a fraud victim explains that he was "born on home plate" and lived in his family home in Chavez Ravine until May 9, 1959, when the city bulldozed it. In Bosch, a police commissioner notes that his father's father "destroyed Chavez Ravine for low cost housing he knew would never happen."

The story persists because it captures something essential about Los Angeles—and perhaps about America. Progress and displacement. Good intentions and broken promises. The gap between what gets built and who gets to enjoy it.

Dodgertown

In October 2008, the Los Angeles City Council officially designated the stadium property as "Dodgertown." In April 2009, the United States Postal Service assigned it a dedicated postal code: Dodgertown, CA 90090.

The name Chavez Ravine still appears on maps. Sportscasters still use it. But officially, institutionally, the neighborhood that was erased has been renamed after the team that replaced it.

There's no memorial to the families who lived there. No historical marker explaining what was lost. The stadium parking lots cover the land where homes once stood. On game days, fifty thousand fans drive in and park where gardens once grew, where children once played, where Aurora Arechiga was carried from her house by sheriff's deputies while photographers captured the moment.

The Dodgers have won seven World Series championships. The stadium is considered one of the most beautiful in baseball, praised for its views of the San Gabriel Mountains and the downtown skyline. It's an architectural landmark, a beloved institution.

And it sits in Chavez Ravine, named for a man who bought the land in 1844, in a city that wasn't yet American, in a place where the displaced dead of multiple communities—smallpox victims, Jewish pioneers, Mexican-American families—once rested before being moved to make way for what came next.