![Chavez-ravine-arboretum-view](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Chavez-ravine-arboretum-view.jpg)
Chavez Ravine is a shallow L-shaped canyon in
Los Angeles,
California. It sits in a large promontory of hills north of
downtown Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) contains the central business district of Los Angeles. In addition, it contains a diverse residential area of some 85,000 people, and covers . A 2013 study found that the district is home to over 500,000 jobs. It is ...
, next to
Major League Baseball's
Dodger Stadium. Chavez Ravine was named for
Julian Chavez, a Los Angeles councilman in the 19th century who originally purchased the land in the
Elysian Park area.
History
1800s
![Julian A](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Julian_A._Chavez%2C_unknown_date.jpg)
Chavez Ravine was named for Julian Chavez, the first recorded land owner in the ravine.
He was born in
New Mexico and moved to Los Angeles in the early 1830s. He quickly became a local leader. In 1844, Chavez purchased of the long, narrow valley northwest of the city. There are no records of what Chavez did on his land, but during the 1850s and 1880s there were
smallpox epidemics; Chavez Canyon was the location of a "pest house" which cared for
Chinese-Americans and
Mexican-Americans suffering from the disease.
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 First Jewish site in Los Angeles was a Jewish cemetery located in Chavez Ravine, which opened in 1855 and was owned by the
Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles, a Jewish charity which was also the first charity in Los Angeles. The Hebrew Benevolent Society purchased a 3-acre plot of barren land for the cemetery for $1 from the
city
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...
. The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles was founded in 1854 for the purpose of "…procuring a piece of ground suitable for the purpose of a burying ground for the deceased of their own faith, and also to appropriate a portion of their time and means to the holy cause of benevolence…,". The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles received the deed to land from the
Los Angeles City Council on April 9, 1855. With this land they established the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles at Lilac Terrace and Lookout Drive in Chavez Ravine. The site now includes
Dodger Stadium and the
Los Angeles Fire Department's
Frank Hotchkin Memorialized Training Center
Frank or Franks may refer to:
People
* Frank (given name)
* Frank (surname)
* Franks (surname)
* Franks, a medieval Germanic people
* Frank, a term in the Muslim world for all western Europeans, particularly during the Crusades - see Farang
Cur ...
.
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.
1900s
![Marker for the First Jewish Site in Los Angeles County](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Marker_for_the_First_Jewish_Site_in_Los_Angeles_County.JPG)
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
East Los Angeles ( es, Este de Los Ángeles), or East L.A., is an unincorporated area in Los Angeles County, California. As of the 2020 census it had a population of 118,786, a drop of 6.1% from 2010, when it was 126,496. For statistical pur ...
, 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
East Los Angeles ( es, Este de Los Ángeles), or East L.A., is an unincorporated area in Los Angeles County, California. As of the 2020 census it had a population of 118,786, a drop of 6.1% from 2010, when it was 126,496. For statistical purpo ...
.
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.
1940s
Chavez Ravine was made up of the three mostly Mexican-American communities of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop.
In the 1940s, the area was a poor, though cohesive,
Mexican-American
Mexican Americans ( es, mexicano-estadounidenses, , or ) are Americans of full or partial Mexican heritage. In 2019, Mexican Americans comprised 11.3% of the US population and 61.5% of all Hispanic and Latino Americans. In 2019, 71% of Mexica ...
community. Many families lived there because of
housing discrimination in other parts of Los Angeles. With the population of Los Angeles expanding, Chavez Ravine was viewed as a prime, underutilized location. The city began to label the area as
"blighted" and thus ripe for
redevelopment. Through a vote, the
Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, with the assistance of federal funds from the
Housing Act of 1949, was designated the task to construct public housing, in large part to address the severe post-
World War II housing shortage. Prominent architects
Richard Neutra
Richard Joseph Neutra ( ; April 8, 1892 – April 16, 1970) was an Austrian-American architect. Living and building for the majority of his career in Southern California, he came to be considered a prominent and important modernist architect.
He ...
and Robert Alexander developed a plan for "
Elysian Park Heights." The city had already relocated many of the residents of Chavez Ravine when the entire project came to a halt.
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
''City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles'' is a 1990 book by Mike Davis examining how contemporary Los Angeles has been shaped by different powerful forces in its history. The book opens with Davis visiting the ruins of the socialis ...
'', 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
The Battle of Chavez Ravine refers to controversy surrounding government acquisition of land largely owned by Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles' Chavez Ravine. The efforts to repossess the land, which lasted approximately ten years (1951–1961), e ...
, 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.
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 of land at Chavez Ravine to the
Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League Baseball team founded in 1884 as a member of the American Association (19th century), American Association before joining the National League in 1890. They remained in Brooklyn until 1957, after which the ...
and team's owner
Walter O'Malley in exchange for land around the minor league park,
Wrigley Field, with the aim of providing incentives for migration to Los Angeles. From their arrival in Los Angeles in 1958 until 1961, the Dodgers played their home games at the
Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (also known as the L.A. Coliseum) is a multi-purpose stadium in the Exposition Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Conceived as a hallmark of civic pride, the Coliseum was commissioned in 1921 as a mem ...
; Dodger Stadium officially opened in 1962.
Later years
During the years when the expansion
Los Angeles Angels were tenants of the Dodgers (1962 through 1965), the Angels referred to the stadium as "Chavez Ravine Stadium" or simply "Chavez Ravine".
Los Angeles City Council designated the property as "Dodgertown" in October 2008. The
United States Postal Service assigned
postal code "
Dodgertown, CA 90090" in April 2009.
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
Atticus Finch is a fictional character in Harper Lee's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of 1960, ''To Kill a Mockingbird''. A preliminary version of the character also appears in the novel '' Go Set a Watchman'', written in the mid-1950s but not pub ...
, for example, was an erstwhile Chavez Ravine home. 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.
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. Further south in the ravine is
Barlow Respiratory Hospital which was founded in 1902 and continues to treat patients today. 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.
References in the arts
Chavez Ravine is mentioned in
The Mescaleros' song "All in a Day" in their 2003 album ''
Streetcore
''Streetcore'' is the third and final studio album by Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros. The album was completed after the death of frontman Joe Strummer, primarily by Martin Slattery and Scott Shields, and released on October 21, 2003. The album ...
''.
''Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story'' (1999) collects interviews and photos by
Don Normark
Don, don or DON and variants may refer to:
Places
*County Donegal, Ireland, Chapman code DON
*Don (river), a river in European Russia
*Don River (disambiguation), several other rivers with the name
*Don, Benin, a town in Benin
*Don, Dang, a vill ...
documenting the Ravine's culture at the time.
''
Chávez Ravine
Chavez Ravine is a shallow L-shaped canyon in Los Angeles, California. It sits in a large promontory of hills north of downtown Los Angeles, next to Major League Baseball's Dodger Stadium. Chavez Ravine was named for Julian Chavez, a Los Angel ...
'' is an album recorded by
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder (born March 15, 1947) is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, an ...
in 2005, as a soundtrack to a
PBS documentary directed by
Jordan Mechner
Jordan Mechner (born June 4, 1964) is an American video game designer, author, screenwriter, and filmmaker. He is best known for designing and programming the Broderbund Apple II games ''Karateka'' and '' Prince of Persia'' in the 1980s, the la ...
. 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.
[Woo, Elaine (11 June 2014]
"Don Normark, who photographed Chavez Ravine residents, dies at 86"
'' Los Angeles Times''
''The Provisional City'' (2000) recounts the postwar history of housing in Los Angeles by
Dana Cuff
Dana Cuff is an American architecture theorist, professor of architecture and urban design, and founding director of cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
She received her Ph.D. in architecture from University of California ...
, 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.
"
Chávez Ravine: A Record by Ry Cooder" is the twelfth studio album by Ry Cooder. It is the first concept album and historical album by Ry Cooder which tells the story of Chávez Ravine. Sung in Spanish and English, Cooder sought out musicians from the era and the place, including the late Pachuco boogie boss Don Tosti,
Lalo Guerrero, Ersi Arvizu, and Little Willie G., all of whom appear with Joachim Cooder, Juliette & Carla Commagere, Jim Keltner, Flaco Jimenez, Mike Elizondo,
Gil Bernal
Gil Bernal (1931–2011) was a singer and a session musician. His saxophone can be heard on recordings such as " Searchin'" by The Coasters. In the 1950s he played on Duane Eddy's 1958 album ''Have 'Twangy' Guitar Will Travel''. In later years, ...
, Ledward Kaapana, Joe Rotunde, Rosella Arvizu, and others. Chávez Ravine was nominated for "Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album" in 2006.
A portion of the ''
Great Wall of Los Angeles'', a mural by
Judith F. Baca in the
Tujunga Wash Drainage Canal in
San Fernando Valley
The San Fernando Valley, known locally as the Valley, is an urbanized valley in Los Angeles County, California. Located to the north of the Los Angeles Basin, it contains a large portion of the City of Los Angeles, as well as unincorporated ar ...
, California, is titled "The Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine." It depicts families separated by freeways and the Dodger Stadium in the air like a spaceship.
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 Mark Taper Forum is a 739-seat thrust stage at the Los Angeles Music Center designed by Welton Becket and Associates on the Bunker Hill section of Downtown Los Angeles. Named for real estate developer Mark Taper, the Forum, the neighboring ...
.
The 1952 crime drama film ''
Without Warning!'' has several scenes that take place in Chavez Ravine.
During
Dave Dameshek's "Number One Sports" segment on ''
The Adam Carolla Show'', Dodger Stadium was often humorously referred to as Chavez Ravine.
At the end of the ''
Twilight Zone'' episode "
The Whole Truth" (1961)
Rod Serling
Rodman Edward Serling (December 25, 1924 – June 28, 1975) was an American screenwriter, playwright, television producer, and narrator/on-screen host, best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his anthology television series ' ...
says "be particularly careful in explaining to the boss about your grandmother's funeral when you are actually at Chavez Ravine watching the Dodgers."
"Chavez Ravine" was mentioned as a suspect during a "minute mysteries" segment of the 1960s TV show ''Fractured Flickers''.
A group of American Indians gathered overnight to drink, dance and sing on a Chavez Ravine hilltop in the 1961 movie "The Exiles".
The urban renewal conflict is the subject of the folk song "Preserven el Parque Elysian" by
M. Kelian
( ; ; plural, pl. ; ; 1512, from Middle French , literally "my lord") is an honorific title that was used to refer to or address the eldest living brother of the king in the Ancien Régime in France, French royal court. It has now become the ...
, recorded by
Pete Seeger on the 1966 album ''
God Bless the Grass
''God Bless The Grass'' is the sixth studio album by Pete Seeger, released on January 17, 1966 by Columbia Records as CL 2432 (mono) and CS 9232 (stereo). The album cover was designed by R. O. Blechman.
''God Bless The Grass'' focuses on environm ...
''.
"Chavez Ravine" is mentioned in episode "
Community" of the TV police drama ''
Southland'' when a fraud victim describes how he was "born on home plate" and lived in his family home in Chavez Ravine until May 9, 1959, when the city came in and bulldozed his home to make way for Dodger Stadium.
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."
[Bosch, season 4, episode 2]
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."
See also
*
Don A. Allen
Don A. Allen, also known as Don A. Allen, Sr. (May 13, 1900 - August 1, 1983), was a member of the California State Assembly in the 1940s and 1950s and of the Los Angeles City Council between 1947 and 1956.
Biography
Allen was born on May 13, 1 ...
, 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
Harold A. Henry (October 20, 1895 – May 1, 1966) was a community newspaper publisher who was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1945 and was its president for four terms from 1947 to 1962.
Biography
Henry was born October 20, 1895, in ...
, opposed the contract with the Dodgers
*
John C. Holland
John C. Holland (July 6, 1893 – March 10, 1970) was one of the longest-serving Los Angeles City Council members, for 24 years from 1943 to 1967, and was known for his losing fight against bringing the Los Angeles Dodgers to Chavez Ravine and for ...
, Los Angeles City Council member, 1943–67, also opposed the pact
*
Patrick D. McGee
Patrick D'Arcy McGee (March 5, 1916 – May 30, 1970) was a Republican member of the California State Assembly for the 64th district from 1950 to 1957 and from 1966 until his death in 1970. He was a Los Angeles City Council member from 1957 to ...
(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
Rosalind Wiener Wyman (October 4, 1930 – October 26, 2022) was an American politician, Los Angeles City Councilmember, and California Democratic political figure who, at 22 years old, was the youngest person ever elected to the Los Angeles Ci ...
, leader of fight to bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chavez Ravine
Elysian Park, Los Angeles
History of Los Angeles
Mexican-American culture in Los Angeles
Santa Monica Mountains