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186 | When I opened the door I was slapped in the face by the force of Lips’ alto horn. I had been hearing Lips and Willie and Flattop since I was a boy in Houston. All of them and John and half the people in that crowded room had migrated from Houston after the war, and some before that. California was like heaven for the southern Negro. . . . The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself at the bottom. —Walter Moseley, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) on April 10, 1962, when Johnny Podres uncorked the first Major League pitch in newly built Dodger Stadium, the game marked a new era for baseball fans.1 it also represented the closing chapter in a long struggle betweentwovisionsforLosAngeles.thestadiumlocation—ChavezRavine— had been a 315-acre tract of hilly, wooded land that had managed to escape intense urban development. its Mexican American population had lived in substandard houses and shacks but maintained a lively sense of pride and identity with their community. Plans from the 1940s for a major public housing project collapsed in 1953 in the face of conservative political opposition. the alternative was to use the site as a Major League Baseball stadium for the newly Los Angelized Dodgers. the city “traded” the ravine, which had already been cleared of its residents, for other property owned by the Dodgers, whose owner Walter o’Malley broke ground for Dodger Stadium in 1959. CHAPter eleven Progress and Prejudice ProGress AnD PreJUDiCe | 187 Dodger Stadium was one element in a wide-ranging program to promote the economic development of central Los Angeles. in the 1940s, the Los Angeles Housing Authority had planned to replace the run-down apartments of Bunker Hill, located just northwest of downtown, with public housing. However,thelandwasalsoaprimetargetfordowntownexpansion.opponents of the Housing Authority used the tensions of the Korean War years to turn the issue into one of “communistic housing projects” and “housing pinks,” convincing voters in 1952 to reject public housing by three to one. When Mayor Fletcher Bowron pushed ahead with the Bunker Hill project, to which the city was committed, Los Angeles Times publisher norman Chandler and real estate tycoons looked for a substitute candidate. they ran Congressman norris Poulson against a mayor whom the Times now accused of anarchism. As mayor from 1953 to 1961, Poulson managed to deny nikita Khrushchev the chance to visit Disneyland. He otherwise let members of the establishment write each year’s municipal budget at a special retreat, took his cues from the Times, and made sure that Bunker Hill was saved for a music center, bank towers , and costly high-rise apartments.2 the contest over housing and redevelopment embodies the clash of two competing interests—or the intersection of two different stories—that found expression among many western cities. We can think of the difference as competing versions of the term progressive. organizing, striving, and very occasionally succeeding were “liberal progressives” who worked to meet the needs of minorities and the working poor. their coalitions were a shifting kaleidoscope of Congress of industrial organizations labor unions, political leftists, reform-minded liberals, African Americans, and Latinos. Strongest in the immediate postwar years, they shared some of the same ideology as the national Progressive Party that tried to elect Left-leaning Henry Wallace to the presidency in 1948. As in Los Angeles and in national politics, they were also vulnerable to attacks on Communist Party connections. “neoprogressives” marched under a different flag. these were businesspeople , real estate owners, and professionals who wanted to embrace and build on wartime growth. Many had businesses and careers that stood to benefit directly from a growing population and an expanding market for cars, appliances, houses, and professional services. Some were also newcomers to the West who were impatient with an older generation of property owners who seemed content with a steady-state economy. Like their predecessor Progressives earlier in the century, these neoprogressives tried to claim the high ground by arrogating the rhetoric of progress and public interest. they painted their opponents as vice lords and crooked cops, corrupt political bosses, or, at best, small-timers unfitted to guide their city into the modern age. the immediate goal was often to update antiquated municipal administrations and provide a fuller range of city services at a lower [3.144.187.103] Project MUSE...

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