In the years of hope and expansion...

In the years of hope and expansion in the 1950s, Los Angeles was a city that seemed to have all the ingredients for greatness, except for one thing--a major league baseball team.

The Music Center was on the drawing boards, the great thoroughfare of Interstate 10 was being built, and the bustling plants of Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas were cranking out the latest aircraft, drawing thousands in search of work to the city.

But for all the signs of growth, when it came to baseball, L.A. was still in the minor leagues--the only baseball in town was played by the triple-A Hollywood Stars and the Los Angeles Angels.

When rumors surfaced that Brooklyn Dodger owner Walter O’Malley might be interested in moving his team to Los Angeles, city fathers leaped at the chance.

O’Malley was disgruntled with the dilapidated shape of his team’s ballpark, Ebbets Field. New York City had offered him a chance to move to Flushing Meadows.

But O’Malley was enticed by the offer from Los Angeles officials, who promised to build him a stadium of grand proportions using county retirement funds. In the meantime, they offered him use of the Coliseum.

O’Malley finally decided to pull up stakes and move west in 1957. Plus, he persuaded New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham to move his team to San Francisco so at least some games could be played on the West Coast without a cross-country trip.

Many New York fans have branded them traitors ever since.

For four seasons, the Dodgers played in the Coliseum while O’Malley dreamed of having his own stadium--built his own way and exactly where he wanted it.

A few years earlier, while visiting L.A., O’Malley had seen a patch of eroded gullies, stunted trees and a few ramshackle dwellings. The site, known as Chavez Ravine, had been turned down by Disney as a possible location for its amusement park.

But O’Malley liked the site. It was only two miles from Downtown and accessible by every major highway in the Los Angeles area. It could not have been more perfect.

But he couldn’t have picked a more controversial location. It had formerly housed a close-knit community of at least 1,000 Mexican Americans who called the rugged hills of Chavez Ravine home. To them, it was called Palo Verde, or Green Tree.

It was a rural area, with unpaved roads, back-yard farms, and goats, sheep and cattle roaming the terrain. Palo Verde was an area where children would take wooden carts, fit them with wheelbarrow wheels and ride fast down the hills.

Ravine resident Chris-Pin Martin, an actor who played a Cisco Kid movie, would come out of his house each morning and jokingly yell out, “My people!” to the delight of neighborhood children.

By the time O’Malley arrived, most residents had been evicted to make way for a federally funded housing project. The city, however, refused to have anything to do with the project and the site had remained vacant for several years.

Finally, the federal government agreed to sell the land to the city for $1.3 million--a $4-million loss--with the condition that it be used “for public purposes only.”

In 1958, the city agreed to trade the land in Chavez Ravine for nine acres that O’Malley owned at Avalon Boulevard and 42nd Place, the site of Wrigley Field.

O’Malley was now set to begin construction of Dodger Stadium. But more problems were still ahead.

About 20 homeowners in the area refused to accept the city’s buyout offer and remained in their cluster of modest homes.

On May 9, 1959, the city moved to evict the group. Television cameras recorded one particularly ugly confrontation, in which sheriff’s deputies tried to evict the Arechiga family from the property where they had lived for 36 years.

Four sheriff’s deputies carried one daughter kicking and screaming out of the house and arrested her for battery; her mother, Abrana, cursed at everyone. Chickens, dogs and a turkey ran wildly as bulldozers pulled down the house. The head of the family, Manuel Arechiga, set up a tent and refused to budge, saying he had no place to go.

Public sympathy was aroused. A trailer company provided to the Arechigas the latest and most expensive model available.

Several days later, the Los Angeles Mirror reported that the Arechiga family as a whole owned 11 dwellings in the city and therefore did have a place to go.

The Arechigas accepted the city’s offer of $10,500.

The families were all eventually removed and O’Malley began building his $20-million stadium on Sept. 17, 1959.

Dodger Stadium officially opened on April 10, 1962. O’Malley, ever the businessman, built the stadium with only two drinking fountains--one in each team’s dugout--to help boost refreshment sales.

The next season, the Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in the World Series. Factory sirens blared, horns honked, strangers clapped each other on the back. Chavez Ravine had now become a gathering place for the new Los Angeles, with the community that once occupied the site becoming a part of the city’s history.