With the Dodgers up for sale, a new use for the undeveloped land at the heart of Los Angeles could revitalize and refocus the city

Is there still a need for downtown Los Angeles?

Many highly respected urbanists believe that L.A. has long since evolved from a traditional downtown-dominated city to a poly-nucleated mega-metropolis. They contend the citizens of Los Angeles (meaning: mega-Los Angeles) have dispersed themselves and privatized their lives with unambiguous clarity. To subsidize or otherwise encourage through public action any form of downtown development--whether convention centers, subsidized stadiums, subway or fixed-rail transportation--is merely to postpone the death rattle and disappearance of the downtown.

The problem with this view, however, is that it readily casts aside 200 years of shared civic identity in favor of the preferences of the last 30 years. The anti-downtown agenda converts a temporary situation into a historical inevitability. In granting to the dispersed suburbs a faux-historical inevitability, the anti-downtown claque misses the point entirely of the need of cities to maintain a shared central space.

For most of its 216 years, certainly since the 1870s, Los Angeles has prized its central spaces in the downtown. The vast majority of its significant public and private buildings--cathedral, city hall, courthouse, music center, museums, clubs, hotels, administrative and financial headquarters--are located in the civic center/downtown. Even as the chorus of dispersionists chant their dirge over downtown, some 40 projects, totaling $3 billion in estimated costs, are being contemplated, in the design phases or under construction in the Civic Center and adjacent downtown. The point of the San Fernando Valley secession movement, moreover, is the notion that Los Angeles continues to remain, despite suburban dispersion, a highly centralized city: too centralized, indeed, from the point of view of the Valley. The major institutions of Los Angeles, in short, have not migrated out of downtown, no matter how extensively the city has spread.

No single institution has underscored this continuing centralism more dramatically than the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dodger Stadium. For 40 years, the Dodgers have reminded Los Angeles that it is a city and that intrinsic to being a city is the sharing of certain public realms, values and identities, no matter how dispersed its population might be.

But the Dodgers, Dodger Stadium--all Chavez Ravine, in fact--are now for sale, and their new owners, unlike the O’Malleys, will probably not feel as connected to the city that hosts them. (Of course, Peter O’Malley may have designs of his own and, if the Coliseum fails to attract an NFL franchise, could end up building a state-of-the-art football stadium--and keeping the Dodgers, too.) Once again, Chavez Ravine will represent unfinished business and the impending future of the City of Angels. Significantly enough, the Dodgers could be the Archimedean point through which downtown can be brought a renewed civic and economic identity.

It was in Chavez Ravine, after all, where a Mexican American neighborhood lived in dynamic continuity with El Pueblo itself, the Spanish city of 1781 and its Mexican successor--until they were displaced, in the 1940s and early ‘50s, to make room for, first, a federally subsidized, ultramodernist mini-city of 3,360 families, which was killed by the anti-communist hysteria of the early ‘50s, then for a major league baseball team, the Dodgers. The entire disestablishment of the Chavez Ravine settlement offered an historical paradigm of the Mexican War that had acquired California through the eminent domain of military conquest. To this day, there are many who still feel the hurt of their removal, despite the passage of time--and despite the success of Dodger Stadium as a civilizing central place.

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote that tragedy frequently arises not from the clash of good versus evil, but from the clash of competing goods. It was good for Mexican Americans to have found their sense of place in Chavez Ravine. It was good to contemplate, in 1950, the creation of a modernist housing development to supplement the ramshackle hillside settlement. It was also a good for Los Angeles to acquire a major league baseball team as an expression of its newly emergent status and to house that team in an appropriate stadium, which would, in turn, promote civic unity.

Yet of these worthy goals--the continuation of a flourishing village life, the creation of modern housing, the coming of a baseball team--only one has thus far been actualized. The new owners of the Dodgers and Chavez Ravine will have an opportunity to reach back and recover forward some of the terminated or suspended ambitions of the past. Should housing be created as part of a new Dodger Stadium scheme, then the settlement of Chavez Ravine shall not entirely have been in vain; nor would the grand housing plans of 1950 be totally forgotten. Dodger Stadium now has an opportunity to be physically re-integrated into the fabric of a once again significantly Mexican American city.

Los Angeles, after all, must constantly be recovering itself. Opportunities missed in one generation, or put aside as unworkable, have a way of reoccurring in a later era. There is no finished business in the city. Los Angeles is a living entity, and everything that happens in it or to it reverberates backward and forward in time and can be recovered as the premise for new action. In times past, Chavez Ravine bridged Los Angeles to an earlier era. In times to come, Dodger Stadium re- linked to the city in retail and housing, re-integrated into the urban context, regains its creative connection with the downtown.

The dispersionists, of course, ask: Why bother? Part of their motivation, it must be admitted, is a legitimate concern over the cost of stabilizing downtown Los Angeles while dispersion was at its most intense. Such a concern represents a legitimate defense of the free-market process. Another source of motivation comes from the growing awareness that the communications revolution has created telecommuting possibilities that are of major consequence to the usage patterns of traditional urban forms.

Even as one grants the possible sincerity of such cautions, however, one might also ask: Why have the present difficulties of the downtown been projected forward into the millennium as a permanent condition? It sometimes seems as if certain prophets of doom cannot wait for the tumbleweeds to blow down through the deserted canyons of downtown. I suspect there are those who do not like downtowns because they express the transcendent grandeur of great cities: cities that discipline us to humility, to seeing ourselves as part of a whole, rather than to that arrogant solipsism fostered by a hyper-privatized life spent at home behind gated doors amid a profusion of consumer goods and the company of strangers in the chat rooms of the World Wide Web.

The downtown will perhaps never repossess its past preeminence but it will not go away, either. We have, after all, the City of Angels in common; and there must be places where that city reveals itself to us as majestic and transcendent and connected to our deepest needs as social beings. Every aspect of Los Angeles, every part and parcel of it, remains precious. No site in the city, furthermore, more fully replicates and recapitulates the past, present and future of the City of Angels as does Chavez Ravine. There is consolidated the reverberations and memories of an Enduring Pueblo that, having been once founded, will always know itself as possessed of a unity that is symbolized in central places.