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RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: The noise you hear around me is the sound of nostalgia--
nostalgia being created in concrete, and at the cost of millions of
dollars. San Francisco, like other American cities, is building a baseball
park to resemble the ones we tore down a generation ago, a park of intimate
scale.
SPORTSCASTER: A side-arm pitch to Charlie Neil. Eddie Mathews grabs
the hopper
and really wizens up to first...
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: You would be fooled, however, if you expect truly
to find an earlier America within the state-of-the-art nostalgia of
Baltimore's Camden Yards, or Denver's Coors Field, or San Francisco's
Pac Bell Park. No, if you want to consider a more intimate America,
I would recommend, instead, this wonderful book: Chavez ravine, 1949,
"A Los Angeles Story."
Just over 50 years ago, around this time of year, a skinny 18- year-old
named Don Normark trudged up the side of a hill, intending to take a
photograph of downtown Los Angeles. What Normark found, to his astonishment,
just over the hillside, was a Mexican village-- grazing goats, Indian
grandmothers, roses falling from tin roofs-- all within earshot of the
Pasadena Freeway. The kid hung around for a year, taking these pictures.
Normark had come to California from a Scandinavian immigrant town in
Washington state. He recognized immediately his own Swedish family in
these Mexican elders.
The three neighborhoods that comprised Chavez ravine in the 1930's
and 1940's were populated mainly by Mexicans. But there were some African-
American families. And on one hillside, in shanties, lived single white
men. "Los Viejitos," the Mexicans would call them affectionately,
"little old men." "We had only one streetlight,"
a resident remembers now, five decades later. One streetlight on her
block. "That was where everybody would party Friday and Saturday.
We used to connect the wire to a big jukebox," she says. "We
had Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw..."
When the war came, the young men of Chavez Ravine went off. Most joined
the Marines. The village's life continued-- children and grandparents,
summer and winter, and shrines in front of each house marked Catholic
feast days, the alternating seasons of joy and grief. By the late 1940's,
city housing officials were describing these neighborhoods as "blighted."
On July 24, 1950, a letter went out, informing residents that their
houses would be torn down for low-income housing. Urban planners in
those years were very much influenced by Northern European modernism,
especially the Bauhaus Movement. Perhaps their hope was that if you
put poor people in clean, rectangular spaces, draw straight lines around
them, you can alter their messy lives. Richard Neutra, the gifted Austrian
modernist, drew up plans for Chavez Ravine, 24 thirteen-story towers
and 163 two- story buildings. Happily none of them got built. Neutra's
very beautiful glass and concrete houses belonged on the other side
of L.A.
Growing up in the 50's in California, I grew accustomed to hearing
New York sportscasters go on and on about the day the Dodgers left Brooklyn.
On this other side of the country, there was another story to tell.
Call it the story of when the Dodgers came to L.A. By the mid-1950s,
Los Angeles wanted to entice Walter O'Malley and his Dodgers out West.
And Chavez Ravine was dust or mud, depending on the season. So Los Angeles
turned what had been a rose garden or someone else's front porch or
a hillside's wooden steps into this: Dodger Stadium, with acres of parking.
Don Normark's photographs are too gentle to shout in protest these many
years later. What these photos remind us is that there was once, right
in the center of our great American cities, not a brand-new, old-looking
ballpark with a corporate logo, but neighborhoods where each door was
a proper name and every face carried a nickname: Chuy, Hoyo, La Pocha,
Neta, Punky, Topo, Vucho. I'm Richard Rodriguez.
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