The former L.A. City Council member played a significant role in the team’s beginnings here, but her death last week is a reminder that there were many sides to the “battle royal” involving Chavez …
In one of her final public interviews on the subject of the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles,who passed away last Wednesday at age 92
“People don’t sometimes understand when they say, ‘well, people were removed out of Chavez Ravine,’ it was five years after the area was taken for public housing,” Wyman said. “The Dodgers didn’t know anything about what was going on at that point. The land lay dormant. It wasn’t getting taxes. Nothing was happening with it. We looked at it for a zoo. We looked at it for a police academy. We looked at it for everything. We also had no money to develop it.
On Oct. 7, 1957, the L.A. City Council approved a deal with Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley by a vote of 10 to four. The following day, O’Malley formally announced the Dodgers were leaving Brooklyn. Eric Nusbaum wrote in his bookthat there were still a “dozen or so” families living on the Chavez Ravine site at the time.
In defense of the few who did not, where was the public housing? Its fate was apparently decided at the ballot box in 1952. A municipal referendum had defeated plans for the original 10,000-unit development, prompting Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron to fly to Washington D.C. to downsize plans for the 13-story towers, designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander.
For another, at least one land-owning family did, in effect, pay taxes on their land. The Arechiga family was the last to leave Palo Verde, one of the three Chavez Ravine communities that was leveled to create Dodger Stadium. Their dramatic, forcible evictions were captured on television in May 1959, the peak of a long battle between the family and the city that mostly played out in court.
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