About a year ago, on June 21st, I was able to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the San Francisco Giants at my first live baseball game. I’m not going to lie, I’m not a huge baseball fan; however, I don’t dislike it either, so I didn’t wanna turn down tickets from a friend who “bleeds blue.” Although it was a fun game to watch as my first (the Dodgers won 10-2), inspired by Ryan’s blog post on the inferior Anaheim Angels Stadium, I plan to talk more about the more relevant history of the place this game was played: Dodger Stadium.
According to Wikipedia (great site on the internet where I usually get a lot of background information for these blogs), the Dodgers, originally from Brooklyn, New York, wanted a stadium with a dome in the middle of the 1950s. However, they weren’t able to get the land (go figure considering a cramped and mostly-developed city like Brooklyn at the time), so they looked to the developing lands in Los Angeles. Using eminent domain (the ability of the government to make private property public), they were able to get a property known as the Chavez Ravine. However, the actual process of building the stadium itself was more complicated. To illustrate, the previous homeowners needed to be convinced to sell their houses, which was a relatively slow process. As you could guess, the Chavez Ravine was home to many Spanish-Speaking residents who weren’t interested in moving. As a result, the stadium developers tried to bribe them with money. This worked for some, but not for others, leading to the ten-year Battle of Chavez Ravine. In the end, as we all know today, the residents weren’t able to secure their property. Once again, white Americans were able to get their way by getting rid of “inferior” races, which is a common idea we’ve seen before (white people taking over the U.S. as their own via overpowering the Native Americans and Spanish people who were already there). Furthermore, all of this was just for a simple stadium, and now that I know, it really makes me feel bad for the people who were practically kicked out of their homes for a sporting/entertainment business. Over the years it has undergone multiple renovations, which just augments the irony that they tried to make this an imagined space to bring people in Los Angeles together (having been built by many freeways downtown), but in building it, it actually did the opposite by tearing homes of “lesser” people apart. In other words, despite the many events it has (baseball games, concerts, filming locations, and many others), was it really fair/necessary/worth the cost? I personally don’t think so…
Moreover, as a quick aside, I only called the Angels inferior because…well it’s a fact, according to the friends who I bleed blue with on our bandwagon. Honestly though, I only prefer the Dodgers because most of my friends do, and they’re authentically Los Angeles instead of Anaheim; I don’t technically prefer one over the other because baseball still isn’t really my thing. Basketball on the other hand…#LAKERS4LIFE #SORRYNOTSORRY #OKDONE