Chavez Ravine Stadium Case

On November 15th, 1957, an article was written in Washington DC’s the Evening Star Newspaper about the petitions against the construction of the Chavez Ravine Stadium. This would be the stadium that would host the new Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team that once resided in Brooklyn. 85,000 signatures were brought into the city hall demanding that the city choose to construct the stadium in a different part of Los Angeles. The city only needed 51,767 in order to delay the transfer of about 300 acres of the Chavez Ravine to the Dodgers organization. Fear of opposition towards the petitions resulted in them requiring to be transported by armored truck with police protecting the area. A photograph attached to the article depicts this scenario as …show more content…
Answering this question would be interesting to me because it would also shed light on who the main supporters of the Dodgers move were. I believe that Major League Baseball’s move to the West was in part to expand the cities that the teams were entering into. Los Angeles was growing exponentially in popularity as well as economically, so bringing a baseball team there had to provide many new opportunities for people in Los Angeles as well as giving people who were considering moving there another reason to do so. Finding out who benefited the most would show if the Dodgers moving to Los Angeles was truly about the fandom baseball can bring and its ability to connect a city, or because they saw the Dodgers as an opportunity to continue growing the city and generating more wealth for only certain groups. Studying this is important in my opinion because the focus of creating and expanding a city should be with the goal of improving the standard of living for the residents, and not creating economic opportunity for a few elite business class members. In order to answer this question, one could look at newspapers and reports that show a history of Los Angeles people advocating for a major league baseball team. Along with this historical records could be searched for the number of attendees that went to Dodger games during their first few seasons in Los Angeles and the new stadium when it was constructed. Another way to help answer this question would be to look at the economic history of Los Angeles businesses surrounding the area and those involved with the construction of the new stadium to see if they prospered during this time period. The city of Los Angeles needed a place for its new stadium to be constructed, but why was the Chavez Ravine chosen and what were the reactions? Finding the reason behind this decision would be

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