Former manager Tommy Lasorda once called Dodger Stadium “blue heaven on Earth.” Another metonym for the hallowed home of baseball’s most dominant current franchise is Chavez Ravine, after the narrow canyon in which it sits. But Chavez Ravine was also the name of a neighborhood once situated on the current grounds of the stadium, whose residents were displaced to ultimately make room for Dodger Heaven.
Dodger Stadium boasts the largest seating capacity of any baseball stadium in the United States, parking for 16,000 cars, multiple food trucks and restaurants, and 113,349 square feet of field. The last five years have been triumphant for the Dodgers, with two World Series wins in 2020 and 2024 and record-breaking regular season win totals. The Dodgers are the big-money titans of the sport—the recent off-season acquisitions of Blake Snell and Rōki Sasaki, along with Shohei Ohtani’s historic 10-year, $700 million contract, signal that the Dodgers could be set for a decade of dominance. However, sitting (literally) beneath the Dodgers’ success is a violent history—one that still affects a major population of Los Angeles. As the Dodgers become perhaps the most globally famous and popular franchise in baseball history, many fans remain unaware of Dodger Stadium’s impact on its local environment.
Beginning in the 1920s, Chavez Ravine, a three-hundred-acre shallow ravine in the heart of LA, became a a majority Mexican-American and blue-collar neighborhood. Photos of the Ravine show children playing in the streets, vibrant weddings, and the neighborhood school, painting a lively picture of the community. In the early 1950s, much of Chavez Ravine was seized by the Housing Authority of Los Angeles, which planned to build a new, public housing development there. Claiming eminent domain, the Housing Authority started to relocate residents of Chavez Ravine, pressuring residents to sell. But support for the new housing development began to falter, leading to uncertainty regarding the future use of the land, even as its former occupants were already being displaced. In 1958, the management of the Brooklyn Dodgers, looking for a new home for their storied franchise, purchased the 352-acre plot of land, leading to the forceful and physical removal of the remaining Chavez Ravine residents. 1,800 working-class families, many of whom were originally in Chavez Ravine because of discriminatory housing processes, saw their homes bulldozed to make room for a new baseball stadium.
The Brooklyn Dodgers’ relocation to Los Angeles, while pitched as a way to boost the revenue for the franchise, was also supposed to benefit the city of Los Angeles and its local communities. Some surely did benefit, as Dodger Stadium became a major service employer, offering jobs for nearly 1,500 food servers, bartenders, suite attendants, cooks, and dishwashers, not to mention ushers, security personnel, parking attendants, and maintenance workers (none of whom, however, are on $700 million contracts). In many ways, the Dodgers have fostered community in the notoriously impersonal and sprawling megalopolis that is Los Angeles: the city has embraced the Dodgers, who, like other sports teams, are active in community service. Classy players like Shohei Ohtani and Clayton Kershaw have served as role models for young children, and the team has contributed to its city’s reputation for great entertainment, giving families and friends special Saturday night experiences and bringing strangers together around a common interest for over sixty years. But this all came at a cost to Chavez Ravine.
What kind of recourse is available for descendants of those displaced from Chavez Ravine? Several nonprofits and community organizations in Los Angeles believe that reparations and recognition of harm can at least partially repair the damage done to Chavez Ravine. One such nonprofit, Buried Under the Blue, advocates for reparations and the erection of monuments and community centers to honor the displaced residents of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop, the three neighborhoods that comprised Chavez Ravine. Others believe that the Dodgers owe nothing, or at least very little, to those affected. If Chavez Ravine was not initially cleared out for the Dodgers (the Brooklyn Dodgers merely took advantage of real estate already made available by the Housing Authority), do they still have a responsibility to a community that was bulldozed to make room for their success? Buried Under the Blue certainly thinks so, but none of the Dodgers’ community service initiatives seem to aid the Mexican-American community in any specific way. While their community outreach has made a significant impact on underserved youth in LA and members of the military, their lack of attention towards those affected by the Battle of Chavez Ravine continues to fuel anger towards the Dodgers franchise. If the Dodgers hold no accountability for Chavez Ravine, land they did not clear, the most logical culprit would be the Los Angeles Housing Authority and government. Despite this, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill 1950 in September of 2024, a bill that would have begun to rectify the injustice, on the basis that it should be addressed at a local level—which it has not been. This shows a reluctance to acknowledge any culpability in the fate of Chavez Ravine. It seems as though nobody wants to take the blame, but everyone wants a slice of the profit.
Since the Battle of Chavez Ravine, there have been many more instances of community upheaval to make way for sports—from Paris to Tokyo—further accelerating the blame game. In LA, the descendants of property owners in Chavez Ravine have lost generational wealth that could have been passed down through land in the Ravine. In Paris, unhoused individuals were bussed out of the city to housing in other cities, only to be evicted from this housing in preparation for the Paris Olympics. In preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil created the Police Pacification Unit, which forcibly removed favela residents from their homes. South Africa’s 2010 World Cup saw an estimated one thousand taken out of Johannesburg, continuing a trend of displacing the working-class and unhoused. In 2020, as many as three hundred households were displaced for the Tokyo Olympics, which were slated to host more than two hundred countries with some athletes worth millions of dollars in attendance. The contrast between those being displaced and those profiting from them is jarring—franchises already worth absurd amounts of money are only getting richer, while those in the working class are losing everything they have.
Even in cases where relocation and appropriation of land was not their initiative, these sports franchises profit from taking unjust land. These franchises are valued at billions of dollars, more than enough to be able to give back to these wronged communities in some way. The Dodgers may or may not have known all the details of the Battle of Chavez Ravine upon their purchase of the land, but it is certainly no secret to them now. Acknowledgement, while just a start, is the first step, and the Dodgers have paid only lip service to the history of Chavez Ravine. Admitting their part, not in physically bulldozing Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop, but in the erasure of a tight-knit Mexican-American neighborhood would at least provide the descendants of Chavez Ravine with some sense of accountability for the community and property stripped from them. Sports franchises (and Olympic host countries) have a responsibility not just to provide community engagement and support for their fans, but also to recognize when their profit is built on the displacement of entire communities.
To support Buried Under the Blue, visit the link below:
https://www.buriedundertheblue.com/copy-of-home-2.
By Lauren Vandivier
