Chavez Ravine

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October 15th, 1988, at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, California. Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers limps to the plate, walking on two severely injured legs, Gibson sets in as a pinch hitter in the bottom of the ninth inning in game one of the 1988 World Series. The home team Dodgers trailing 4-3 to the Oakland Athletics, with two outs and Gibson the final hope for the Dodgers. The pitcher for the Athletics, Dennis Eckersley throws Gibson a Slider, Gibson swings and hits the game wining two run home run. The legendary Hall of Fame announcer Vin Scully poetically states, "In a year of the improbable, the impossible has happened." The Dodgers win and the stadium, as well as most of Los Angeles, is raucous and wild with excitement. Some residents of Los Angeles did not celebrate with the city, they do not ever cheer for the Dodgers, nor will they ever go back to Dodger Stadium. To these residents Dodger Stadium will always be Chavez Ravine, and to them the improbable an impossible has already happen decades earlier.
Most Angelinos know that Dodger Stadium was once Chavez Ravine, a quiet and independent hillside neighborhood. Most would also agree that Dodger Stadium is an appropriate progression for an area known and designated as a slum. However, what most citizens do not realize is the designation of Chavez Ravine as a slum served merely as a cover-up for the city's own agenda of modernization through the vehicle of politics. The Community's identity as a quiet hillside neighborhood was ultimately shattered in the wake of the 1949 Housing Act under modern urban planning and the larger realm of politics during an era of intense anti-communist sentiment. This paper will argue that those aforementioned themes as the reason f...

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...n, assistant director of the City of Los Angeles Housing Authority, was put in charge of the redevelopment of Chavez Ravine. He envisioned a public housing space for thousands of low rent housing units. The site of the redeveloped land was to be called Elysian Park Heights Public Housing(Fig. 1), here the fist inhabitants would be from the few hundred people evicted from their homes to make way for the public housing project. Frank Wilkinson states himself in The Documentary film Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles story, He affirms, "We prepared certificates to every family (the certificate said) when the certificate was built you, and your family would be the first priority to get there, you can pick the part of the project you wanted to live in." This would prove to be the start of the lies and broken promises handed to the residents of the Chavez Ravine communities .

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