Chavez Ravine
Chavez Ravine is a shallow canyon in
History
1800s
Chavez Ravine was named for Julian Chavez (
In addition to the notable Mexican-American presence, there was also a notable early Jewish-American presence in the neighborhood beginning in the 1850s.
The land was very rugged which prevented further development of the area at the time. However the area did provide an important watershed and part was used by the Los Angeles Water Company for a canal bringing water from what is now Griffith Park and storing it in a reservoir (today called Buena Vista Reservoir) in Reservoir Ravine. Some of Chavez Canyon and the surrounding hills became Elysian Park in 1886. That same year, two brick manufacturers moved into Chavez Ravine and began blasting operations in the hillsides. [citation needed]
1900s
In 1902, because of poor environmental conditions due to the unchecked expansion of the oil industry in the Chavez Ravine area, it was proposed by Congregation B'nai B'rith to secure a new plot of land in what is now East LA, and to move the buried remains to the new site, with a continued provision for burial of indigent people, this became the Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles.[8][7][9]
By the early 1900s, in the hills above and around the ravine, a semi-rural Mexican-American community had grown up. Eventually, three distinct neighborhoods formed: Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop mostly on the ridges between the neighboring ravines. In 1913 a progressive lawyer named Marshall Stimson subsidized the movement of around 250 Mexican-Americans to these communities from the floodplain of the nearby Los Angeles River. There was a local grocery store, a local church, and Palo Verde Elementary. There was a nearby brick factory which caused local problems from the smoke and dust released. In 1926 the residents of Chavez Ravine organized to shut the company down. On August 20, 1926, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance prohibiting the blasting and zoned the area around Chavez Ravine for residential use.[10]
1940s
Chavez Ravine was made up of the three mostly Mexican-American communities of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop.[11]
In the 1940s, the area was a poor, though cohesive,
1950s
The land for Dodger Stadium was purchased from some local owners/inhabitants in the early 1950s by the City of Los Angeles, using eminent domain, with funds from the Federal Housing Act of 1949. The city had planned to develop the Elysian Park Heights public housing project, which was to include two dozen 13-story buildings and more than 160 two-story townhouses, in addition to newly rebuilt playgrounds and schools.
Los Angeles–based author Mike Davis, in his history of the city, City of Quartz, discussed the process of gradually convincing Chavez Ravine homeowners to sell. Davis asserted that with nearly all of the original Spanish-speaking homeowners initially unwilling to do so, "developers", representing the city and its public housing authority, resorted to offering immediate cash payments, distributed through their Spanish-speaking agents. Once the first sales had been completed, it is said that remaining homeowners were offered lesser amounts of money, allegedly to create a sense of community panic that people would not receive fair compensation, or that they would be left as one of the few holdouts. Some residents continued to resist, despite the pressure being placed upon them by the "developers," resulting in the Battle of Chavez Ravine, an unsuccessful ten-year struggle by a small number of remaining residents of Chavez Ravine to maintain control of their property, after the substantial majority of the area had been transferred to public ownership.[12]
Before construction of the Elysian Park Heights project could begin, the local political climate changed greatly when Norris Poulson was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1953. Poulson opposed the provision of public housing, claiming that it was "un-American", and support for projects like Elysian Park Heights faded. Following protracted negotiations, the City of Los Angeles was able to repurchase the Chavez Ravine property from the Federal Housing Authority at a drastically reduced price, with the stipulation that the land be used for a public purpose.
Following the "baseball referendum", promoted by the Taxpayers Committee for Yes on Baseball, which was approved by Los Angeles voters on June 3, 1958, the city made the controversial decision to trade 352 acres (142 ha) of land at Chavez Ravine to the
Later years
During the years when the expansion
A number of structures from Chavez Ravine were spared demolition and sold by the developers of Dodger Stadium to nearby Universal Studios for one dollar apiece. Universal moved the structures to its back lot where they subsequently appeared in various Universal productions, most notably the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird. The house of Atticus Finch, for example, was an erstwhile Chavez Ravine home.[16]
However, according to the film's art director, Henry Bumstead, as cited in an article in Andrew Horton's "Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction", the houses used on the Mockingbird set were actually purchased by the studio after they had been condemned and slated for demolition to make way for new freeway construction.[citation needed]
Today
Most of Chavez Ravine remains in Elysian Park, where the Chavez Ravine Arboretum still stands. The arboretum was founded in 1893 by the Los Angeles Horticultural Society where trees were added to through to the 1920s. Most of the Arboretum's original trees are still standing and many are the oldest and largest of their kind in California and even the United States.[17] Further south in the ravine is Barlow Respiratory Hospital which was founded in 1902 and continues to treat patients today.[18] At the open end of the ravine immediately adjacent to Dodger Stadium is the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center which was built in 1937 but is today a training facility, Frank Hotchkin Memorial Training Center, for the Los Angeles City Fire Department.[19]
References in the arts
Chavez Ravine is mentioned in The Mescaleros' song "All in a Day" in their 2003 album Streetcore.
Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story (1999) collects interviews and photos by Don Normark documenting the Ravine's culture at the time.
Chávez Ravine is an album recorded by Ry Cooder in 2005, as a soundtrack to a PBS documentary directed by Jordan Mechner. The film makes use of the Normark photos in telling the story of how a Mexican American community was destroyed to make way for a low-income public housing project.[20]
The Provisional City (2000) recounts the postwar history of housing in Los Angeles by Dana Cuff, and devotes a section of the book to the politics of transforming Chavez Ravine into a modern housing development designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, and the demise of that utopian plan.[citation needed]
"
A portion of the
In 2003, the Urban Performance Troupe Culture Clash, comprising three writers and performers Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza, premiered a stage show titled Chávez Ravine at the Mark Taper Forum.
The 1952 crime drama film Without Warning! has several scenes that take place in Chavez Ravine.
During
At the end of the Twilight Zone episode "The Whole Truth" (1961) Rod Serling says "be particularly careful in explaining to the boss about your grandmother's funeral when you are actually at Chavez Ravine watching the Dodgers."[citation needed]
"Chavez Ravine" is mentioned in episode "
In the Amazon TV series Bosch, Police Commissioner Bradley Walker, played by John Getz, states that "My father bulldozed Bunker Hill so that lawyers could have an ocean view, *his* father destroyed Chavez Ravine for low cost housing he knew would never happen."[22]
Dick Valentine, lead singer of Electric Six, has the song named "The Ghost of Chavez Ravine"
Wayne and Shuster mention Chavez Ravine in their sketch "A Shakespearean Baseball Game": "I thought I saw the ghost of Dizzy Dean/Calling a game in the Chavez Ravine."
The 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, and its 2014 film adaptation both make mention of a "Long, sad history of L.A. land use... Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium".[citation needed]
See also
- Don A. Allen, Los Angeles City Council member, favored building a zoo and a golf course, as well as a baseball stadium, in the Ravine
- City Council member Harold A. Henry, opposed the contract with the Dodgers
- John C. Holland, Los Angeles City Council member, 1943–67, also opposed the pact
- Patrick D. McGee (1916–70), Los Angeles City Council member who opposed the contract
- City Council member L.E. Timberlake, favored the contract
- City Councilwoman Rosalind Wiener Wyman, leader of fight to bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles
References
- New York Times. June 4, 1958.
- ^ The name Chavez Ravine can be used to mean either the actual ravine itself in a narrow sense or sometimes in a broader sense the entire promontory and surrounding ravines, and (by metonymy) is also used to refer to the stadium. Dodger Stadium was constructed by knocking down the ridge which separated the nearby Sulfur and Cemetery Ravines and filling in those two ravines. Palo Verde Elementary School was buried in the process.
- ^ Glen Creason (March 20, 2013). "CityDig: The Utopia of Elysian Park Before Dodger Stadium". Los Angeles magazine. Retrieved 2014-09-09.
- ^ William Moore (1868). "Map of Zanja Madre, Los Angeles". Retrieved 2016-01-04. Cemetery Ravine is marked to the right of the map. Calvary Cemetery is marked "Campo" by an icon of a church, where the ravine ended at modern Broadway; Cathedral High School was later built over the cemetery.
- ^ Nathan Masters (2012-03-07). "Six Notable & Unusual Maps of Southern California". KCET. Retrieved 2016-01-04. The map, "Zanja Madre, 1868" shows Cemetery Ravine on its right side.
- ^ Pollack, Gina (July 22, 2019). "How To Speak LA: Your Guide To The City's Most Debated And Mispronounced Words". LAist. Archived from the original on 2020-11-12. Retrieved 2021-05-22.
- ^ a b Cohen, Thomas (April 1969). "Early Jewish LA". Western States Jewish History. Vol. 1, no. 3. Archived from the original on 2012-03-13. Retrieved 2012-05-08.
- ^ "Home of Peace Memorial Park". 4334 Whittier Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90023: Home of Peace Memorial Park. Retrieved 2012-05-08.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: location (link) 34°01′19″N 118°10′30″W / 34.022°N 118.175°W - ^ "Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles". Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. Retrieved 2012-05-08.
- ^ Masters, Nathan (September 13, 2012). "Chavez Ravine: Community to Controversial Real Estate". LOST LA. KCET. Retrieved 29 May 2016.
- ^ "The History of Chavez Ravine". Independent Lens. PBS. Archived from the original on 2019-01-01.
- ^ "When the Big Leagues Destroyed the Barrio". National Museum of American History. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. Retrieved 13 September 2023.
- ^ "The Dodgers Settle Down at Last in Chavez Ravine". New York Times. April 10, 1962.
- ^ "United States Postal Service to designate unique ZIP code to Dodgertown, CA". dodgers.com: Official Info. 2012-06-19. Retrieved 2012-08-14.
- ^ "Dodger Stadium gets its own ZIP code". MLB.com: News. April 30, 2009. Retrieved 2012-08-14.
- ^ "Elm Street". Thestudiotour.com. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ^ "City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks". Laparks.org. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ^ "Barlow Respiratory Hospital". Barlowhospital.org. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ^ "Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center, Los Angeles Building". Wikimapia.org. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ^ Woo, Elaine (11 June 2014) "Don Normark, who photographed Chavez Ravine residents, dies at 86" Los Angeles Times. Accessed April 12, 2024.
- ^ "Chavez Ravine - Ry Cooder - Songs, Reviews, Credits". AllMusic. Retrieved June 5, 2016.
- ^ Bosch, season 4, episode 2.