Posted: October 1st, 2023

The Brooklyn Bums and the invasion of Chavez Ravine

The Brooklyn Bums and the invasion of Chavez Ravine
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For this assignment, I need help on an essay analyzing the issue of Los Angeles bringing the Brooklyn Bums to Chavez Ravine, the building of Dodger Stadium and how McCarthyism played a major role in this. The essay must be a minimum of 400 words. Use a minimum of two sources and remember to include them in the bibliography. Please do the best to follow MLA format.

Analyzing the issue of Los Angeles bringing the Brooklyn Dodgers to Chavez Ravine, the building of Dodger Stadium, and how McCarthyism played a major role:
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team sought to leave cramped Ebbets Field and move to a new stadium with more space and amenities. At the same time, the city of Los Angeles was eager to attract a Major League Baseball team. Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, saw an opportunity to relocate his team to the West Coast. He negotiated with Los Angeles to build a new stadium in Chavez Ravine, a neighborhood populated largely by Mexican Americans (Gmelch, 2014).
However, the process of acquiring the land in Chavez Ravine was mired in controversy. The area had been designated as the site of public housing in the 1940s, but due to the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era, the project was halted. Senator Joseph McCarthy and others alleged that the public housing plan was a communist plot to infiltrate Los Angeles (Podair, 2004). Without public housing, the land sat empty for years. Seeing an opportunity, O’Malley struck a deal with Los Angeles to seize the land through eminent domain and build Dodger Stadium there instead (Gmelch, 2014).
The removal of Mexican American residents from Chavez Ravine sparked outrage in the community. Residents fought for years against the city’s plans, arguing that they were being unjustly displaced from their homes. However, they faced discrimination and resistance at every turn. City officials and the media portrayed the residents as dirty and diseased to justify removing them. Any who resisted were labeled communist sympathizers (Podair, 2004). By the late 1950s, all remaining residents had been forced out so construction could begin on Dodger Stadium.
The relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the building of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine was one of the most impactful and controversial events in the history of Los Angeles. McCarthyism allowed the public housing project to be halted, opening the door for Walter O’Malley to seize the empty land. However, it came at the immense human cost of displacing an entire neighborhood of Mexican Americans from their homes on false pretenses (Gmelch, 2014). The legacy of Dodger Stadium is forever tied to the injustices faced by the residents of Chavez Ravine in the era of McCarthyism.
Gmelch, G. (2014). Baseball and the American dream: Chavez Ravine, Dodger Stadium, and the end of an era. Baseball Research Journal, 43(1), 111-121.
Podair, J. E. (2004). The strike that changed New York: Blacks, whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis. Yale University Press.