Requiem for the ravine

The drama of Chavez Ravine begins with what photo-essayist Don Normark called “a poor man’s Shangri-La” -- the villages of La Loma, Bishop and Palo Verde, home to some 1,100 mainly poor, mainly Mexican American families. The terrain was rough and steep, the views picturesque, the community tradition-steeped and tightly knit as it lived in sight of City Hall’s tower yet a world apart.

The peaceful landscape Normark stumbled upon and captured in his book, “Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story,” vanished during the early 1950s. Its homes were condemned and its residents forced to leave in the first salvo of a decade-long civic war. The ensuing battles pitted liberals who hoped to wipe out poverty via a massive federal housing project (designed by architecture star Richard Neutra) against a conservative business establishment that was willing to use Red Scare tactics to defend its interests.

In the end, the spoils went to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who acquired Chavez Ravine and built their stadium atop the bulldozed villages.

It’s a pivotal Los Angeles tale, now being retold on the stage of the Mark Taper Forum by the Latino comedy troupe Culture Clash. The trio -- Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza -- sifted through documents, listened to the accounts of those who shaped or witnessed events, then wrote a play called “Chavez Ravine.” It aims to present a humorous but accurate and politically nuanced take on this turbulent and, for some, still unresolved episode in the city’s history. For Culture Clash, it’s the latest in a series of documentary plays since the mid-1990s; others have examined contemporary life in Latino communities in Miami, San Diego, New York and San Francisco.

A vision, then politics

What first undid La Loma, Bishop and Palo Verde was the idealistic vision of urban planners. They appreciated the community feeling and idyllic life in those barrios, but decided that tearing down and building anew was the way to deal with substandard housing and rat infestations. The Los Angeles City Housing Authority, flush with newly appropriated federal money, hired Neutra to turn the 315 acres of Chavez Ravine into Elysian Park Heights, a high-rise housing project of more than 3,300 units. Armed with the power of eminent domain, the housing authority bought up the neighborhood and tore most of it down. But the people who had lived there, housing officials vowed, would get first pick of the new apartments.

Then politics -- heated, nasty and prolonged -- intervened. The city’s business elite organized a Committee Against Socialist Housing. The Los Angeles Times editorial page -- and the paper’s unabashedly slanted news coverage -- warned that the housing authority would grow into an unchecked political behemoth.

During a court hearing, one of the top housing officials, Frank Wilkinson, was asked under oath to list his political affiliations. He refused to answer, and soon the state Senate Committee on Un-American Activities was investigating the housing authority. Wilkinson and two colleagues were fired, a new mayor who opposed the housing project was voted in, and by mid-1953 it was clear there would be no federal homes in Chavez Ravine -- and no civic attempt to honor the right of return that had been promised its residents.

Instead, the battle over the land became entwined with a revolution in big league baseball. The Brooklyn Dodgers of the mid-1950s were covering themselves in glory but not profit in their outmoded and poorly situated little park, Ebbets Field. When owner Walter O’Malley couldn’t persuade New York City to give him a better stadium site, he looked west.

In 1958, the Dodgers began playing at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Meanwhile O’Malley and his supporters at City Hall banked on winning a June referendum on a land swap that would give Chavez Ravine to the Dodgers in exchange for a much smaller minor-league ballpark the team had acquired. Opponents blasted it as a sweetheart deal and a betrayal of the city’s previous commitment to keep Chavez Ravine for public use. The Dodgers won with 52% of the vote.

All that remained was the removal of a few families who had refused to budge. The last stand came on May 8, 1959, when sheriff’s deputies forcibly evicted the extended family of Manuel and Abrana Arechiga. It became the signature moment in the city’s memory of the long saga of Chavez Ravine.

“Aurora Vargas was the last to leave -- making good on her threat that ‘they’ll have to carry me,’ ” The Times reported. “Less than 10 minutes later, two bulldozers lumbered onto the property, pushed their might against the old dwellings, and began reducing them to rubble.”

Four months later, the Dodgers had their ceremonial groundbreaking in Chavez Ravine. The 56,000-seat ballpark opened April 10, 1962.

What’s to be taken from this history? In Culture Clash’s play, says troupe member Montoya, “our admittedly lefty hearts are with the Frank Wilkinson character. The end of his dream of public housing in Los Angeles is clearly the climax and the tragic moment.”

But for Ron Lopez, a professor of history and Mexican American studies at Oakland’s Laney College, who is writing a book on Chavez Ravine called “The Politics of Displacement,” the fundamental lesson is that civic leaders and bureaucrats with big plans need to respect the human face of a city as they find it.

“What has to be gained from this is that healthy, organic communities like Chavez Ravine should be promoted, not destroyed.”

From the vantage point of a new century, here are voices recalling the story of Chavez Ravine.

LOU SANTILLAN

Former Chavez Ravine resident,

age 68

“They made it sound like a bunch of shacks. Not really. They were pretty good houses. They needed renovations, but they weren’t shacks.

“My dad had the ‘can’t fight City Hall’ attitude, and we moved in 1951. I just accepted the fact that we were being moved to the strange land of Lincoln Heights. Lincoln Heights wasn’t so bad, but it was a defeated feeling, being told to move out. My dad even wrote a song about Chavez Ravine, ‘Corrido de Palo Verde.’ It gave the story of what happened and how it happened, and how it would turn out that we would be going back after they build the housing project. At our reunions, a lot of people hold a grudge against the Dodgers. I don’t have too much love for the Dodgers, but it’s not their fault. The city [cheated] us. It’s something we have to instill in our children and grandchildren, never to forget what happened up there.”

FRANK WILKINSON

Former Los Angeles City Housing Authority official, age 88

“It was a wonderful little community, but there were problems in terms of health and safety. A good strong fire would have taken the whole place out, like a tinderbox. The rat infestation was the heaviest in town. If the residents had a choice of having the project built or not, they would have said no, no question about it. But I don’t think I ever had a second thought, I don’t think anyone in the field of health or housing or planning did. It was a place that had to go.

“Every family living in Chavez Ravine got a statement in writing guaranteeing they would be the first occupants when the project was built. So I felt horrible that people’s homes were destroyed and the project was taken over by a ballpark. These people had a piece of paper in their hands, guaranteeing their rights, and then it falls apart. I was the one who made the promises to the people, I discovered the site, recommended the site, knew it was correct from every standpoint, moral and social. I did the right thing, but to this day I have a certain sense of guilt. I hurt people really badly.”

GENE CABRAL

Former Chavez Ravine resident,

age 75

“It was a wonderland to grow up in. Playing on the hill near the Police Academy, making kites out of newspapers, homemade carts that we would go down in. Leaving it hurt, but you get over it. You’ve got to take care of your family, you’ve got to move forward. But the memories are still very vivid, and I still feel the emotional hurt at my age. I wish I had a dollar for every dream I had about that place since I moved.”

DOLORES KLIMENKO

Former Chavez Ravine resident,

age 56

“We lived with our grandmother and grandfather, Abrana and Manuel Arechiga. Somebody came to the bus stop and said, ‘They’re bulldozing your house down,’ and we ran. There was nothing you could do, it was already gone. It looked like a tornado hit it. My kids used to love the Dodgers, and I took them occasionally, but I still feel funny when I go. About eight years ago, I got a TV news clip that showed them knocking on the door, kicking the door open and pulling my mother out. They were taking the baby away from my aunt, and she was crying, my cousins were crying. It was horrible; I couldn’t stand it, it just hit me like a ton of bricks and I couldn’t stop crying. My grandkids were looking at me like, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ They really don’t know what it was.”

ROSALIND WYMAN

Los Angeles City Council member (1953-65), age 72

“I wanted my city to be big league. Chavez Ravine just sat there, nonproductive. Developers knew they could buy it really cheap and said, ‘We wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole, to have to move all that dirt to make housing.’ I wrote Mr. O’Malley a letter in 1955, saying Eddie Roybal and I would like to meet with him. He wrote back that he was a New Yorker and he preferred to stay in New York. But that changed, and it’s proven to be one of the best things that ever happened to Los Angeles. The first year, the Dodgers paid $350,000 in taxes; God knows what it is now. And it unified the city.”

ANITA CANO

Former Chavez Ravine resident,

age 57

“In 1950, the rumblings had begun that if you didn’t move they were going to bulldoze you in the night while you sleep. I was old enough to understand about bulldozers, and the adults were terrified. They were saying, ‘There’s no way it could happen here, it’s America.’ One of my uncles, Ramon Contreras, said, ‘I’m not moving, they’ll have to drag me out by the feet dead.’ He had a rifle and was going to make his last stand. It was kind of a tense situation, but finally they were able to talk him out with an offer of money.

“In 1981, for the first time, I went back to see a Dodgers game, to see Fernando Valenzuela. We stopped at the gate on Elysian Park, I turned, and on the right side, what do I see? The driveway my uncles had built. I started crying. It was still there, part of my childhood hitting me in the face.”

ALFRED ZEPEDA

Former Chavez Ravine resident,

age 64

“My father saw it as a chance to get out and move to a better neighborhood, and we went to Cypress Park. It was nice to move into an area like that, but we missed the relationships we had built in our old neighborhood. My mom suffered the most. All her life she spoke Spanish; she had neighbors she could communicate with, watering the flowers, talking across the fence. All of a sudden, she had no one. That was the worst part of the whole thing.”

PETER O’MALLEY

Dodgers owner (1979-98), age 65

“There’s been misunderstanding that it was our responsibility [that the last residents were forcibly evicted]. They’d been told for six or seven years to leave, and had stayed without paying taxes. I was in college at Penn, but I was there for the groundbreaking. The bulldozers came down the hills and moved a tremendous amount of earth. There were a lot of people, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of optimism about what was to be.”

DICK WALSH

Dodgers executive (1948-66), age 77

“It was October 1956. Don Larsen had just pitched a perfect game against us in the World Series. We had stopped in Los Angeles on our way to play an exhibition tour in Japan. We’ve got two buses ready to go to the airport, and I can’t find Walter [O’Malley]. I go down to the coffee shop, and there’s Walter sitting with Kenny Hahn. That was the first time the words ‘Chavez Ravine’ came up that I heard. Kenny was selling Walter on the idea of coming, and Walter was receptive.

“The stadium referendum was Proposition B. We struggled to get that letter rather than A or C. We wanted B for baseball. The opposition felt that it was a sweetheart deal, a giveaway, but we built the stadium and it was totally privately financed. I had a wooden model of the stadium, it was in a case about waist high, and I would put it in the car and go make speeches to the Lions, the Rotary, explaining what was going to occur. That model ultimately wound up as a centerpiece under a glass tabletop in Walter’s office in Dodger Stadium.

“On opening day, we had no water fountains in the stadium. It was an absolute oversight. People just wouldn’t believe that you would overlook that, but we sure did.”

VIRGINIA PINEDO

Dodger Stadium neighbor, age 57

“I live in Solano Canyon. All my friends from over the hill were uprooted. I grew up with the fear that the bulldozers would come over the hill and I would be next. On the day Dodger Stadium opened, we didn’t waste any time. My friend and I went in and threw rotten tomatoes at the stadium. It looked like blood coming down the wall. I blamed the Dodgers for my grandmother losing her house, all my friends having to move. But my anger was based on a myth. Seven or eight years ago, I told Peter O’Malley, ‘I’m sorry now I threw tomatoes at your stadium when I should have been throwing them at City Hall.’ A lot of people still carry a lot of pain and are unwilling to let it go. I hope people will learn the truth that it wasn’t, ‘Oh, the O’Malleys threw those Mexicans out.’ ”

RICHARD MONTOYA

Culture Clash member, age 42

“We had heard about Chavez Ravine, but we had a lot of misinformation about it. It piqued our interest, because, No. 1, it’s where Dodger Stadium is; No. 2, all the film noir movies you’ve ever seen, there’s always a body up in Chavez Ravine; and No. 3, it’s the place where the poor people got kicked out to make room for Dodger Stadium. We found the story as complicated as we could ever have imagined. You needed a small army of people to gather and suss out information.

“The Taper stage certainly isn’t a classroom, but we feel a great responsibility with this piece to get the facts right, because the collective memory of a community is a precious thing.

“We’re not trying to put halos on anybody. It’s not really a story of heroes and villains. It’s one of those complicated L.A. stories involving land and rights. It’s safe to say it’s the most challenging thing we’ve ever done.”

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‘Chavez Ravine’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Also July 2, 2:30 p.m. Matinee only on July 6.

Ends: July 6

Price: $31-$45

Contact: (213) 628-2772