Battle of Chavez Ravine

The majority of the Chavez Ravine land was initially acquired by eminent domain by the City of Los Angeles to make way for proposed public housing.

The new plans were advanced to construct Dodger Stadium on the site, and in 1959, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department forcefully removed the last residents occupying Chavez Ravine.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Chavez Ravine was a largely independent, semi-rural Mexican-American community in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Housing Authority began acquiring the land of Chavez Ravine in 1951 through both voluntary purchases and the exercise of eminent domain.

In furtherance of the public housing proposal, the city acquired almost all of the land of Chavez Ravine and razed nearly the entire community over the period from 1952 to 1953.

The planned public housing development was entitled "Elysian Park Heights" and was designed by Austrian architect Richard J. Neutra.

Residents were encouraged to sell property through a tiered buy-out scheme that offered increasingly lower amounts to sellers who stalled, exploiting their fear of losing out on the maximum payment.

In 1953 Norris Poulson, a political conservative, was elected mayor of Los Angeles on a platform that included opposition to construction of all new public housing projects.

Eventually, in the late 1950s, the city proposed to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley that an entirely separate plot of land (a plot not part of or close to Chavez Ravine) be used as the site of a baseball stadium for the Dodgers team, which was exploring a move from Brooklyn's Ebbets Field to Los Angeles.

After nearly 10 years, by 1959 Manuel and Abrana Arechiga (often cited as "Avrana"), with their daughter Aurora Vargas (a war widow, later surnamed Fernandez), were among the last of the tiny number of residents to hold out against the government land acquisition effort undertaken for the original public housing project.