Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between by Eric Nusbaum (review)

It is one of the enduring urban myths of Los Angeles that the poor, Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine was destroyed to build Dodger Stadium.

It is a testament to Eric Nusbaum’s research that he recognizes that there was no community known as Chavez Ravine, but rather three smaller ones—Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. There is no doubt they were destroyed. And there is no doubt Dodger Stadium rises where the 1,300 households of those communities once stood. But, as Nusbaum’s Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers and the Lives Caught in Between shows, those two undoubted events are connected by forces that were beneficial to the Dodgers and inimical to the communities, but driven by goals that have little to do with either.

Nusbaum’s story is one that builds on the earlier work of Neil Sullivan’s The Dodgers Move West; Gerald Podair’s City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles and my own Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers and Baseball’s Westward Expansion. But, he comes at the story from a different, and much more human, angle than the earlier works.

Stealing Home weaves together three stories: The Arechiga family, Frank Wilkinson, and the fragmented Los Angeles establishment’s campaign for a greater Los Angeles.

The Arechiga family was a multi-generational family living in several houses they owned in the Palo Verde neighborhood. The matriarch, Abrana Arechiga, had migrated from Monte Escobedo, Zacatecas to New Mexico, and then to Los Angeles, settling at 1171 Malvina Avenue in the early 1920s. She and her husband built the house, raised their children, and then helped the children build houses on Malvina and neighboring streets. She had numerous male relatives in World War II and lost a son-in-law at the Battle of the Bulge.

Then came Frank Wilkinson. Wilkinson is portrayed as a naïve and some-what hapless villain—an idealist who winds up as a tool of the larger, establishment forces driving the growth of Los Angeles. Wilkinson was the son of upper-middle-class privilege. His father was a deeply religious doctor who believed in helping people and passed that belief to his son. As Wilkinson ventured out into the world in the Depression years, widespread poverty drove him to reject his conservative father’s religion while committing himself to the social gospel. He joined the Communist Party.

Like many other committed leftists of the time, he saw public housing as a solution to the problems of slums, as poor neighborhoods were termed in those years. As large federal funds became available to build public housing in the late 1940s, Frank was working for the Los Angeles Housing Authority. A true believer, he and his family lived in the projects. As the 1950s dawned, new federal funds made it possible for the authority to expand its program of public housing.

The Housing Authority identified Palo Verde and its sister communities as an ideal site. The authority began buying up the land from willing sellers or using eminent domain on the unwilling. The Arechigas were willing sellers. But when a judge ruled the authority’s original offer had to be cut from $17,000 to $10,000, the Arechigas dug in their heels.

By late 1953, the Arechigas and a handful of other families were all that was left of the 1,300 households. They were holding out for their money and for the last shreds of the community they had built.

But by then, the real estate interests in Los Angeles had revolted. Through pressure on the city council, initiatives put before the voters, and relentless criticism from the Los Angeles Times, they had brought about a voters’ rejection of public housing. They had elected an anti-public housing mayor and smeared Frank Wilkinson with his Communist associations.

For the real estate interests, the...