Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

Time to check in on the bunk!  Now, bunk is not a word you hear often—bunk being short for bunkum. Bunkum means foolish claptrap and lemme tellya, our silly world of Los Angeles is all-fire replete with that.

Plus, you know, bunk, Bunker Hill, it all ties together.  Lately I’ve taken to task the bunk-ridden establishment narratives about Bunker Hill-related topics like Cooper Donuts, Chavez Ravine, and Pershing Square, and I thought it would be fun to “check in” on these subjects and see how the ruling class is conducting itself of late.

Why do I care? Some of you might say “well, you’re an old meanie, just trying to tear down the stories of marginalized people!” and of course the opposite is true. I’m all for the stories of marginalized people, but those stories have to be accurate. Inaccuracy makes me angry and offended in general, but particularly when it bleeds into Los Angeles history. Don’t believe me? I once played LA Noire for an hour and the next day wrote five thousand words about its inaccuracies. I saw Ask the Dust and nitpicked the living hell out of it. And those are fictional/fictionalized depictions—stuff like Coopers/Chavez/Pershing is the government and other unethical folk telling us “we now provide you the true version of actual historical events, which you know to be true because…we say so” when they are, knowingly or not (spoiler alert: knowingly) peddling blatant untruths.

So! Without further ado, let’s poke our noses into what’s new around town—

***COOPER DONUTS***

As you are undoubtedly aware, it has been conclusively proven that there was never a Cooper Donuts riot (the only person who ever claimed an unverifiable kerfuffle even happened and/or was a witness to said event, stated it did not happen at a Cooper’s) AND it has been conclusively proven there was never a Cooper Donuts anywhere near the famed gay bars on the 500 block of Main Street (e.g., Harold’s at 555 South Main…and no, before you say “well it happened at Second and Main which is nearby and has to be true because Kevin de León put a plaque there” be advised that is, as well, false, because there was no Cooper Donuts anywhere near that corner in either the spring of 1958 or 1959, when said lone witness claimed the event occurred).

And yet, these simple facts didn’t stop muralist Judy Baca, who depicted the myth on a mural at LACMA. 

In her cynically dishonest artwork, Cooper’s—represented as sited adjacent Harold’s—was the location where trans POC battered LAPD with pink donuts.  Let’s agree it’s a nice picture and is uplifting for the LGBTQ+ community, and isn’t that the point, stories that fill us with pride? In which case it’s no different from, say, a grand salon painting of Napoleon’s triumph at Waterloo.  Let’s pretend for a moment that a monumental nineteenth-century canvas called Napoleon’s Triumph at Waterloo hangs in the Louvre, and that picture is a magnificent source of emotional and spiritual uplift for the citizens of France, I suppose, despite it being based on absolute horseshit.  A French reverence for that painting wouldn’t make the French look strong and proud; it would make them look foolish.

Any mention of Baca’s work will tell you she consulted historians and scholars, but of course I don’t have to tell you, painting a fanciful image of something that didn’t happen is the opposite of history.  It’s ironic that what she is painting is assuredly not history, despite the mural’s official title being The History of California. 

***CHAVEZ RAVINE***

The reparations bill—made up mostly of nonsense, but at least it contains some half-truths—is working its way up the governmental ladder and (having been passed by the Senate Judiciary) is on its way to the Governor’s desk. 

Buried Under the Blue, who triumphantly exclaimed “we did it!” when the bill was announced, have since become really cranky about the bill, and critical of the bill’s author, Councilmember Wendy Carrillo.  Apparently all BUtB really wanted to do is go after the Dodgers (guess they figure it’s better optics to go after the deep pockets of a corporation, than the deep pockets of taxpayers).  But, to Carrillo’s credit, since the Dodgers had nothing to do with the depopulation of Chavez Ravine, Carrillo left them out of the bill.  BUtB’s frothing hatred of the Dodgers being so pronounced, they have since, therefore, branded Carrillo a traitor to La Raza. 

In other news, BUtB has recently posted a couple shots of an anomalous 1950s self-published newsletter that’s online at UCLA.  BUtB again attempts some gaslighty slight-of-hand by putting a screengrab on social media and then claiming “look!  This archival document PROVES all sorts of malicious Dodger forethought and diabolical political activity!” when, of course, a study of the actual material doesn’t bear that out at all.  (BUtB has done this sort of thing before, like when they posted a shot of a letter and said “look!  Here’s PROOF the Dodgers knew about La Loma, Palo Verde and Bishop years before they came to Los Angeles and were working actively to destroy the communities!” when of course should you actually read the letter, it says nothing of the sort.)  

In this case BUtB at last discovered the 14-page newsletter (in my day we’d have called it a ‘zine) online at UCLA, called the Torch Reporter, printed in September 1957.  According to BUtB, it was put out by “residents and supporters.”

True, it was put out by a supporter—a lone woman named Tara Joyce, who lived in Hollywood.  The September ’57 Torch Reporter is full of Chavez Ravine (Joyce subsequently dropped Chavez Ravine and turned her attention, in the next issue, to the question should West Hollywood incorporate as a municipality?) and exists as a minor, but interesting, piece of Chavez curiosa:  Joyce was all worked into a froth, especially, because she worried about oil.  Yes, back in the day, the big question was who was getting the mineral rights?  According to the Torch Reporter, there was never a plan to build public housing; that was all misdirection in the greater scheme to steal Chavez residents’ precious oil—which only residents of Chavez Ravine should be allowed to drill. Drill, baby, drill! 

In any event, BUtB discovered the Torch Reporter online and said “this proves” City Hall and the Dodgers were at work to knowingly and specifically destroy La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop. 

See the Instagram screengrab above, claiming here exists “proof” the mayor was working to “take our homes”? Yeahhhh, so, if you actually read this page of the Torch Reporter, it only discusses how that, during one of Mayor Poulson’s speeches, Poulson didn’t mention Chavez Ravine, and Tara Joyce is irked because she thinks he should have. (A similar conversation— Joe: “Did you know Eisenhower used ray guns to kill all the Portuguese? I have proof!” Bob: “How do you have proof of that?” Joe: “Because Eisenhower gave a speech, and made no mention of it!”)

Besides being largely about retaining mineral rights, Joyce’s Torch Reporter contains all sorts of wild claims:  for example, that 7,500 families were removed (um, nooooo).  It claims the Church of Santo Niño, at 1034 Effie, was “built by the evicted families of Chavez Ravine” (it was built by the Diocese).  And so forth.  The first-person accounts by Glenn Walters and Alice Martin are exceptionally interesting and valuable, though.  Read it all for yourself by clicking here.

***PERSHING SQUARE***

Not a lot going on with the renaming of Pershing Square; it’s still pending in committee (the Neighborhoods and Community Enrichment Committee, to be precise). I submitted a comment to the City Clerk, which you may read here, but it’s annoying that when one submits, their bot converts your message to a single paragraph. I’m not smart enough to figure out attaching PDFs, as Bob Wolfe did in his excellent “Communication from Public.” Therefore, here are my comments with the proper paragraph breaks:

The big news, though, about Biddy Mason Memorial Park, is that the water features have been restored—

—as reported by Esotouric, here.

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Those being the updates on that which falls under the “debunking Bunker” umbrella. One of these days I’ll tuck into some of the other juicy Los Angeles stories that so desperately need to be disproven…until then, then!

In the meantime, remember—

We all love great painters, especially those who depicted Los Angeles, right? And, subset of subset, specifically those who gravitated to Bunker Hill, capturing its picturesque charm.

Some favorites: the enchanting Leo Politi and his watercolors of Bunker Hill (there are libraries and schools and public squares named after the man, not to mention this exhibit). Ben Abril is well-loved for his picturesque California scenes, often focusing on old Los Angeles and Bunker Hill in particular. Emil Kosa Jr. is one of the great California scene painters and remembered for having captured Bunker Hill on his canvases; same with Victor Czerkas. And of course Millard Sheets, titan of Southern California regionalist scene painting, is best known for his masterpiece Angel’s Flight, a noirish tour de force about Bunker Hill, which hangs at LACMA.

And yet one of the greats is almost utterly unknown. Her name is Kay Martin—I love her, and you should too.

I. The Early Years

Eva Katherine Whittenberg is born in Springfield, Illinois, July 14 1910, to Eva (née Rice) and Alonzo Lindolf Whittenberg. Eva Katherine is the youngest of six girls born to Eva and Alonzo; Alonzo is a government secretary to the state of Illinois there in Springfield.

Eva Katherine grows up, and she goes by Kay. So it’s 1931, she’s 21 years old, and living in Bloomington, about sixty miles north of her native Springfield, attending Illinois Wesleyan University. There she meets a nice young fellow named Lowell Beckwith Martin—he goes by Beck. Beck is in the insurance game (his father Lester is the president of the Great States Insurance Company). Beck and Kay get married in September of ’31, lovely affair at St. Mathews Episcopal.

Kay has developed as an artist; her artistic training includes the Illinois State Normal School, where she took crafts and design, and the aforementioned Illinois Wesleyan University, where she excelled in her fine arts studies, and dug deep into the history of art and design. Kay and Beck had been married a decade and change when in 1943 they lit out for California, Glendale specifically: Lowell becomes an insurance man for Forest Lawn. Kay becomes a student of the great California landscape artist Ralph Holmes, and a student of famed English transplant California landscapist Dorothy Baugh, and a student of the unbelievably important “King of the Eucalyptus School” Sam Hyde Harris.

But she didn’t go that way, artistically, with all that plein-air painting among the trees of the arroyo, no. Back when Kay was attending Bloomington’s Illinois Wesleyan she began to developer her own style as a staunch urbanist. She depicted day workers, and WPA scenes, but once in Los Angeles her interest in the urban landscape would take her, though, down a different road from the Social Realists. Her aim was to capture the vanishing built environment, and have fun doing it.

II. The Productive Years

Kay’s living with Beck in Glendale, it’s 1955, and something catches her eye: Bunker Hill.

Here’s a shot of Kay at work, March 1956:

Kay’s parked across from the Earlcliff Apartments, at 231 South Bunker Hill Avenue. True to Los Angeles, there’s a Canary Island Date palm, king of palms. There’s her car, the Dreamboat, a 1952 Ford Ranch Wagon. She’s chatting up a bunch of straight-out-of-central-casting 50s teens, with their rolled-up Levis and pomade-slathered ducktail hairdos. She’s working on a painting of the Brousseau mansion which was on the south side of the street at 238, that is, out of frame foreground right.

Let’s take a look at some of Kay’s pictures.

III. Kay Martin: Exhibition, Reception, Awards, Etc.

Now you’ve seen some of her great paintings. You might wonder, were they shown anywhere? Did anyone care? Short answer: they were quite popular. They were exhibited often, won scads of awards, and received dozens of press notices.

Kay Martin’s work was exhibited at the Greek Theater, the Ebell Club, the Tropico Branch Library, and the Casa Verdugo Library. She had shows at Panorama City’s Security First National Bank, and the Bank of America in La Canada, the Glendale Mutual Savings and Loan, and Security Pacific Bank-Prudential Square.

Her most towering achievement was the show in the Tower Gallery atop City Hall. It ran from June 26-July 20 1956 and featured thirty-five oils. To have a one-man show in the Tower Galley was unprecedented; that this “one-man show” was the work of a woman was absolutely groundbreaking. The show was an enormous success, garnering nearly 8,000 visitors.

Kay Martin served as director of the Glendale Art Association, and was a bigwig in the Laguna Beach Art Association, California Art Club, Foothill Artists Group, Foothill Painters, and the group Women Painters of the West. She sat on the board of the Tuesday Afternoon Club. She lectured widely, to every art association in the southland, and spoke to a variety of civic groups and fraternal organizations about old Los Angeles.

Martin won many local and three statewide awards.

Kay had some interesting notices in the newspapers. There’s an especially charming piece about Kay in the January 15, 1958 issue of the Los Angeles Mirror, titled “Artist Discovers Tolerance on L.A.’s ‘Edge of Yesterday'” in which she describes the way visiting Bunker Hill changed her core:

Her fondness for old houses is mirrored in her proclivity toward playing dress-up, and reliving the bygone days:

IV. Later Years

With City Council’s 1959 passage of the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project, the 1960s began with a new under-demolition Bunker Hill, one replete with the sounds of jackhammers and splintering wood, its air full of plaster dust. Kay Martin turned her attention elsewhere.

In early 1961, Martin reinvented stained glass:

In the autumn of 1962, Kay and her pal Helen Wilkes made a sketching tour through Europe; Kay sold her works at the Independent Gallery, 112 South Maryland Avenue.

Kay also turned her eye to Glendale. Here she is—

—painting 221 North Belmont, the little white wooden home where Edith Nourse invited ten friends over for an 1898 birthday tea honoring Mittie Parker; so began the Tuesday Afternoon Club (which disbanded in 1998).

After the early 1960s, there’s little about Kay and Beck. We do know that about 1964, they lost their home to Eminent Domain, ironic, since Kay’s beloved Bunker Hill went that way, too. Their house at 2084 Montecito Drive, in the Montecito Park section of Glendale, about halfway between Oakmont Country Club on the west and Descanso Gardens on the east, was lost when the 2 freeway cut through. Kay and Beck moved into a brand-new apartment complex down in the flats, at 420 North Louise, Apt# 25.

They were both in their mid-50s at this point, and presumably retired. Kay dies January 17 1978, and Beck follows the following August. While we’d expect them to be interred at Forest Lawn in their beloved Glendale, they both go back to Illinois.

And that, my friends, is the tale of Kay Martin.

V: But What Happened to Her Pictures?

At this point, fellow Bunker wonk, you are suitably frustrated by these subpar reproductions of her paintings I have shared, and wish to immediately go view the originals wherever they hang, be it in a museum or private collection, and I would say yes you must, adding I will meet you there and docent the living hell out of your experience. But, that’s not going to happen. Not today, probably not for a very long time. There’s a story here:

Kay Martin exhibited her pictures and they received great accolades, but unlike 99% of artists, she didn’t sell them. She kept the entire collection intact, because she had a very special plan for it, a vision. It was her stated intention that the entire collection be returned to Bunker Hill, to be hung in one of the “grand new hotels” destined to be built atop the new, modernized, post-redevelopment world there. Her paintings could act as a teaching aid, instructing and reminding people as to what the old, Victorian, lost world of Bunker Hill looked like.

Kay passes in 1978 and her estate is willed to sister Marjorie Reed, who lives back in Illinois. Marjorie lives another 14 years and dies in 1992, so all the paintings go to her son William E. Reed. At which point Kay’s nephew William, and wife Angela Reed, say dang, our house is now totally filled with these paintings, we need to deal with this, and more importantly we need to fulfill Kay’s wishes.

In 1994 Mickey Gustin, the Arts Planner for the Community Redevelopment Agency, starts getting letters. Like this one, saying, we want to donate this huge art collection to the CRA. The CRA, the Reeds figured, were the ones who could fulfill Kay’s wishes and place the pictures all together in one of “the new super hotels.”

The CRA says, ok, we’ll take ’em, and they’re packed up and sent back to Los Angeles whence they came. The CRA, now in possession of the pictures, requires eleven years to figure out where to display them. Apparently someone was walking through Angelus Plaza—America’s largest federally subsidized retirement community, on Bunker Hill at Third & Olive—and says wow, this place has got a lotta empty walls. And this place chock full of, you know, old people who actually like things like paintings, and who might actually remember Bunker Hill. So in 2005 Kay Martin’s pictures finally go on display up on the walls of Bunker Hill, at long last, in accordance with Kay’s wishes.

At this point, everything is copacetic: Kay’s pictures have been returned to Bunker Hill, and the old folks get to look at them wistfully, and those of us with a passion for old Bunker Hill get to visit and tour them:

Until…one day in 2014. Story goes, someone at Angelus Plaza says let’s paint the walls. AP workers take down all the pictures, paint the walls, and then realize they have to rehang the pictues…which is just more work, so you can see the problem right there. Angelus Plaza figures it’s easier just to get rid of the damn things. They call up William Estrada, in the California History Department at the Natural History Museum and say you want em? and Dr. Estrada says hey, free stuff, why not. That’s the way I heard it, anyway; I’m sure the reality is much more nuanced, certainly more complicated, or perhaps completely different.

In any event, lawyers draw up a deed of gift that irrevocably and unconditionally assigns and transfers all legal title to the paintings from Angelus Plaza to the Natural History Museum. In January 2015 a couple of guys from LA Packing at $135 an hour show up, pack the stuff, haul it off to the Natural History warehouse in Carson.

Four years go by, and I’m working on my Bunker Hill book, so throughout 2019 I would on occasion attempt to contact William Estrada, Chief Curator and Chair of the History Department, about getting an image of one of the Kay Martin pictures. I never hear from him, which is disappointing, since I’d helped Bill when NHM was restoring their 1940 WPA model of downtown, but, whatever. So in January 2020 I turn my attention to collections manager Beth Werling. We discuss getting one of the paintings shot—they hadn’t even been photographed for in-house documentation purposes—for my book. But it doesn’t happen (hence, for the book, I used one of my black-and-white images alongside color pics of Sheets and Politi). NHM’s inability to photograph a painting was due to their losing the lease on their offsite warehouse in Carson, after which the entirety of NHM’s 3D/Material Culture collections was carted off to a new warehouse in Vernon, where all remains unpacked to this day, as the warehouse slogs through the process of upgrades, and the resulting City inspections.

And that’s that: ten years in, and the Natural History Museum has yet to so much as uncrate the paintings for cataloging. In the preparation of this post, curatorial questions regarding their future were again directed to Bill Estrada, who again, remains disinterested in speaking on the subject.

I hope however I have whet your appetite for Kay Martin and her works, and will, with me, look forward to some forthcoming exhibition.

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While I have you here: though there’s scant chance you’ll see Kay Martin’s paintings any time soon, I can at least share with you some of Kay’s sketches from my personal collection. Most of the work in my Kay Martin archive is from her 1962 European trip, but I do have a few nice Los Angeles examples:

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One last thing. April 11, 1958: at the Glendale Art Association’s “April Antics” held in the Tuesday Afternoon Clubhouse, Kay sang a ditty called Bunker Hill Blues. Here’s a shot of her performing it, with Association president James Alden Barber at the piano.

I’ve no idea what the music was. Judging by her garb it had a certain Gay Nineties jauntiness to it. Barber was composer, and I have his typewritten lyrics; the takeaway is neither gay nor jaunty, rather, I find the lyrics quite dark. I’m loath to call them mere lyrics—this is poetry, more to the point, the greatest poem ever written.

And so, I leave you with…the Bunker Hill Blues.

Today we talk about Pershing Square. Perhaps it’s not Bunker Hill proper—bordering the Hill’s southern edge—but I consider it an essential part of the Hill story. It is, after all, where so many of the Hill’s elderly residents spent their days (for example, go to 11:11 in the great 1956 documentary about Bunker Hill to witness a Pershing Square chat between an old fellow and William S. Burroughs’ doppelgänger). We’re also going to talk about Biddy Mason, who has a Bunker Hill connection: she owned the land on which African Methodist Episcopal had its church, at Fourth and Charity (now Grand, site of the Wells Fargo tower). She wouldn’t let the parishioners meet there, because the faithful owed her back taxes!

So, I deal today with Pershing Square and Biddy Mason, because there is a motion before Council to rename Pershing Square to Biddy Mason Park.

Biddy Mason is, unquestionably, a fantastic and important part of LA, but the present narrative raises eyebrows. First of all, it comes from Kevin de León. It was de León’s office that pushed through the counterfactual Cooper Donut embarrassment, so, anything from that office involving “history” should be doubly scrutinized.

Right off the bat, in yesterday’s Council motion de León’s sole mention of Pershing is an absolute and ridiculous falsehood, stating “well, maybe Biddy Mason went to the park, but we know for a fact that Pershing certainly never did, because he never visited Los Angeles even once!”—

For the love of God, Kevin de León, if you’re going to LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING, at least do it WELL. Seriously, attempt some semblance of veracity.

For the record: Pershing spent a LOT of time in Los Angeles: during World War One he commanded the headquarters of the Coast Artillery, AND delivered addresses to the Red Cross, AND Pershing was forever cavorting with his L.A. pal George S. Patton, Jr. while romancing George’s sister Anne at the Patton home in San Marino…which is where Pershing and Anne got engaged. Pershing was also pals with important old Los Angeles families like the Wilsons and the Workmans.

THEN in January 1920, when Pershing personally dedicated the square named in his honor, 50,000 people—1/10th of the entire city—came to see him speak.

Come 1923 Pershing was back in Los Angeles, and two thousand people packed the Ambassador to hear him speak, and he planted a redwood at the War Memorial Building that stands mightily to this day:

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Pershing is of course titanically important, and we’ll end this post with a bit more on him. But now, let’s grapple with de León’s need to have the park renamed.

One might contend that de León is only attempting the Biddy Mason rename because he got caught being a racist. He famously laughed along with casual racism (City Council president calling a Black child a monkey), and denigrated Black children as mere “props” like “handbags” (statements so egregious even Biden himself told de León to resign, a command de León simply ignored), and went on to say that the problem with Blacks is that when 25 of them yell, they sound like 250. No surprise, then, de León proffers some performative activism during his reelection campaign.

It’s important, therefore, to look critically at the claims being made about why we need a Biddy Mason park:

We need a Biddy Mason park!

We already have a Biddy Mason park. Granted, it’s not five acres like Pershing Square, however, it’s still important to point out we’ve had a permanent tribute to Biddy Mason in Los Angeles for the last 35 years.

But the Biddy Mason park we have is terrible!

No, it’s really, really not. I work downtown and know every inch of that part of the world, and Biddy Mason Park is one of the few truly pleasant places in the central city. It’s away from the madness, it’s quiet, the birds chirp in the trees.

In the video above, shot in Pershing Square during the Juneteenth press conference, de León says “I do recall, the day, a few years ago, we were walking there, and I did actually ask you, wha-whe where are we going? And you said (unintelligible) and I said I know, but, we’re going to a parking lot right now. That’s where it is. A parking lot right now. It’s dark over there. You can not see the plaque on the wall, the memorial wall.”

Remember above, where I said if you’re going to just lie, be better at it? Because this is just some dumb-ass lyin’. Here’s a video I shot walking to the “dark, unseeable” Biddy Mason Memorial in “the parking lot” that is Biddy Mason Park:

There are five major entrances to the park, from Fourth, Spring, Third, and Broadway. If we’re going to be extremely charitable, de León, in stating he went to a “dark parking lot” is perhaps attempting to refer to the Spring Street entrance, which goes through a parking structure, via a pedestrian mall.

Ok fine we have a nice park in her honor, but still, Biddy Mason is unknown and unsung!

Let’s examine the claim that Biddy Mason is overlooked, unknown, and unsung.

Really, though? Has her legacy been overlooked?

First of all, LAUSD teaches Biddy Mason as part of its curriculum. LAUSD developed Biddy Mason teaching with Stanford University spinoff Digital Inquiry Group, as part of LAUSD’s K-12 Lessons on African American History in Los Angeles series.

Biddy Mason is part of the National Register. A simple Google search yields 75,000+ results. There’s no lack of books on the subject (including The Power of Place, by the always-thoughtful Dolores Hayden, author of this article in California History). And so forth.

Biddy Mason is an American hero; so is John J. Pershing. So I thought I’d do a quick (admittedly unscientific) comparison as to who’s actually more “unsung.” I went into the newspapers.com newspaper archive, to see how many times our southland newspapers mentioned Biddy Mason or General Pershing, since 1990. Turns out, in the last 34 years you’re more likely to read about Biddy Mason, than General Pershing. I even used multiple variations of ways Pershing might be mentioned, just to make certain I got them all. Still, Biddy beat John, 228 to 207 (I should mention as well, that because I used multiple variations of Pershing to cover all potential bases, the tally also therefore included repeats of single articles that referred to Pershing in multiple ways; the number of unique Pershing-mentioning articles is actually closer 125, revealing that Biddy Mason is mentioned more generally than Pershing by nearly 2-to-1).

So that’s it in a nutshell. Maybe Biddy Mason deserves more recognition, but at the expense of General Pershing? Can we not put a statue of her in Pershing Square?

And did I mention Kevin de León is not only going to rename Pershing Square, but also rename Spring Street? Yes, besides now having two parks named after Biddy Mason, we’ll also have 1.6 miles of Spring Street renamed to Biddy Mason Way. This includes the Spring Street Financial District, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Pretty fitting, since Mason’s major claim to fame after achieving her freedom was becoming rich by being a capitalist landlord. (Hey, I thought we weren’t supposed to like capitalist landlords!)

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I will leave you with someone else’s words—Courtland Jindra, historian of the Great War—who can speak to Pershing’s importance better than I, and did so in a letter recently submitted to the editor of the Times, which said:

POSTSCRIPT

Jindra’s letter to the editor was published today, in an abbreviated form:

There were as well two other letters to the editor.

A woman named Ellen Switkes contends that renaming the park for Mason is not enough—for example, LAUSD should teach the story (except, as I’ve shown above, Mason is already part of the LAUSD curriculum) and there should be a “major biographical film” about Mason (this ignores the fact that biopics are frequently terrible [Blonde, All Eyez on Me, Gotti, Wired, Stardust, Beyond the Sea, ad nauseam] so be careful what you wish for; moreover, just because Mason gets a biopic doesn’t mean anyone will actually see it [the recent Till would have a similar audience, and despite good reviews, was ignored by audiences, failing to recoup most of its budget]).

The other letter, from Bob Wolfe (who, last June, aided me in unraveling and understanding the intricacies of overturning historic “masquerading” ordinances) correctly asserts we should be more thankful for and attentive to our existing Biddy Mason Park, and then posits a fascinating premise: we should rename Pershing Square for Cristóbal Aguilar.

After a couple of solid weeks out in Chavez Ravine, let’s get back to Bunker Hill.

And do you know what was on Bunker Hill? Fire Stations!

There were two engine companies on Bunker Hill, and images of neither made the book Bunker Hill, Los Angeles (though there is a passing mention of the Hope Street station on pp. 16-17). So, in the interest of covering all things Bunker Hill, we’re going to take a look at these stations. (I won’t got into the whole history of the LAFD; to learn more about the noble institution, click here, and don’t forget to go to their museums!)

I. Engine Companies No. 3 & 8, 354 South Hill St. (1896-1900)

We begin our consideration of Bunker Hill fire stations on Hill near Fourth Street, specifically, on the east, even-numbered side of Hill Street. You might ask, is across the street still Bunker Hill? I say yes indeed (or at least I made that assertion when I posted about the Hotel Clark).

Engine Company No. 3 was founded in 1887. They had a couple of locations, on Main Street and West Third, before they moved into this structure, at 352-58 South Hill St.:

Aloise Reithmuller built the Hill Street station in 1896 for the Los Angeles Fire Department; Robert Brown Young, architect. LAFD leased the facility, and kept it as its headquarters, until 1900, when they could move into their own purpose-built fire station. The Young-designed firehouse then became a commercial structure:

II. Engine Company No. 3, 217 South Hill St. (1901-1923)

In late 1901, Engine Company 3 moves across and up the street, to 217 South Hill St.:

Frank Dale Hudson designed Engine No. 3, in 1901, at 217 South Hill St.; it is one of his final solo projects before the October 1901 partnership with William Munsell. Hudson’s relationship to Bunker Hill is probably best known through the Hudson & Munsell Elk’s Lodge.

Here is an incredible shot from the Homestead Museum:

III. Engine Company No. 3 and Dept. HQ, 217 South Hill St. (1924-1980)

The 1901 structure is razed in the spring of 1923, and in its place rose a mighty Fire Department HQ, dedicated July 30, 1924:

The four-story structure is by Rudolph Meier. Meier worked primarily on large commercial and institutional structures, like the Lynwood branch of Farmers & Merchants Bank of Compton (at Long Beach & Mulford, it was a victim of the ’33 quake), and First National in La Habra (described in the papers as “Modern Aztec,” it was once at Euclid & La Habra); the California Preparatory Institute for Boys, Covina; and Mother Cabrini’s orphanage in Burbank (which became the Villa Cabrini Academy in 1937). His best residential project was this home (once sited amid twenty acres of orange groves) for Thomas Clay Mayo.

In 1950, the Fire Dept HQ gets an addition to its south:

Hoooo boy, it is hard for me to love a shot more. This is from LAPL’s Mildred Harris collection, captured in November 1958. Wonderful Bunker Hill architectural juxtaposition: at left is the Vendome, 231 South Hill St. (Charles H. Brinkhoff for the Barr Realty Company; 1900, demol. 1963). Next door, the 1950 addition, designed by none other than Albert C. Martin & Assoc., and the 1924 Meier HQ, and the small structure adjacent is the Fred Dorn-designed auto park and office/shops that became a county garage, built 1910 in the front yard of the Hotel Lincoln at 207 South Hill St. (read about the Lincoln on p. 127 of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles).  Then in the distance across West Second St., is everybody’s favorite dirt patch, with the brand-new County Courthouse looming o’er, and the skeleton of the Hall of Administration behind.

Another look at the 1950 fire station annex:

It’s hard to believe, but these lasted all the way into the early 1980s. Here they are in a couple of William Reagh shots from 1979:

In 1973, LAFD HQ had relocated into City Hall East. In September 1980 Fire Station No. 3 had moved to a new facility at 108 North Fremont Ave. The Hill Street structures were demolished by the Community Redevelopment Agency in early 1981.

Today:

The area is now site of a Wells Fargo Parking Garage, developed by Macquire Partners and opened in 1983. Like the Angelus Plaza facility that wraps “L”-like around it, it was designed by Dworsky Associates. This garage is currently managed by megaparker ABM.

IV. Engine Company No. 16, 139 North Hope St. (1904-1960)

Engine Company No. 3 down on Hill Street—Bunker Hill’s eastern edge—is all fine and good, but what about a station actually up on the Hill?

Nineteenth-century folks living atop Bunker Hill were served by various fire stations nearby, but nevertheless felt it necessary to have their own. Judge Julius Brousseau, of 238 South Bunker Hill fame, led the charge:

The Fire Commission agreed, and, after a few years, 1904 saw the opening of Engine Company No. 16, at 139 North Hope St.:

It was originally supposed to be Engine Company No. 13, but the firemen figured they had enough problems without adding a “hoodoo number” to the mix.

This station was designed by none other than John C. Austin. Austin’s best-known Bunker Hill building is of course the Fremont Hotel, and he had his hand in a couple of structures down on the Hill’s eastern Hill Street flank, which I discuss here.

In early 1912, when LAFD added Truck Company No. 6, the station had this 15 x 76′ addition built on to its south side. It was designed by Dennis & Farwell. Obviously, there wasn’t that much for D&F to do, given as their mission was to match the original structure:

Where was this structure, you ask? Well, when you see shots—as you invariably do—taken from atop City Hall’s 27th-floor observation deck, looking west over Bunker Hill:

Let your eye travel up Court Street (near the right in the above image) and then, there, up there near the corner of Court and Hope—

The demolition permit, dated February 7 1961, lists the owner as the Department of Water and Power. As such:

V. More Fire-Themed Snaps of Bunker Hill

The vast majority of the images in this post are from LAFire.com — if you click that link and hit the sidebar, the two Bunker Hill-related stations are “Fire Station 3” and “Fire Station 16.” I would heartily recommend you taking a look, though, at all the fire stations. So many incredible early LA structures (with a majority replaced by quintessential postwar structures, and in both cases, a whole host of interesting architects involved—fun fact: Station No. 9 was designed by Robert Brown Young, with requisite Youngian corner tower, though Young designed No. 11 in Mission Revival!).

There are lots of neat shots of equipment-in-action on the LAFire site, so, let’s look at a handful of other images shot by and of LAFD as they ran about the Hill.

And now you know more than you ever thought you’d know about Engine Companies Three and Sixteen, and their once-upon-a-time locations on Bunker Hill. You’re welcome!

The story so far: we introduced our subject in Part I by detailing how Chavez Ravine’s Master Narrative, from which came the Reparations Bill, is equal parts unsupportable claims and outlandish disinformation. Part II made sure you knew Chavez Ravine’s history. Part III provided a snapshot of life in Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop during the 1940s, before it was forever changed. Part IV ran us through the story of the ill-fated Elysian Park Heights project, for which the Housing Authority removed all the residents and demolished the structures. Part V told the tale of how and why the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. Part VI detailed that First Family of Chavez Ravine, the Arechiga clan, in all their complexity.

Today! We wrap up our seven-part series with a few more odds & ends that didn’t make it into the previous posts, serving to underscore that everything you hear about Chavez Ravine is tainted by agendas and incompetence, so, take it with a grain of salt. With that in mind, we review a few of the key takeaways from our study here.

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What’s at issue with Chavez Ravine is that just about everything you hear, or read, is wrong.

Just to hammer home that point, here are a couple more tidbits that I couldn’t fit in to the preceding six posts.

Tidbit 1: No, no part of To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed in Chavez Ravine

The book was published in July 1960, when Dodger Stadium was already under heavy construction, so, no.

Then people will backpedal and say “well, houses from Chavez Ravine were moved to the Universal Studios lot for the movie!” Again, impossible: TKaM production began in the spring of 1962, so, houses would have had to have been moved three years previous, in 1959, when a handful of houses still existed. Didn’t happen.

Moreover, Mockingbird’s art director Henry Bumstead was quite clear when he stated that while the studio did purchase some old condemned houses for scenery, those structures were sourced in 1962 from areas in the path of freeway construction, not Chavez Ravine.

See here and here for the press kits. Here for a newspaper account. Here are Bumstead’s own words, again.

HOWEVER! Wanna know about a movie that was filmed in Chavez Ravine? The incredible Robot Monster! Take a look at the Call Sheet—

—which is attached to George Nader’s personal annotated copy of the script, that you may see for yourself on display at the 3-D SPACE museum in Echo Park!

As you can see, the crew met up at the Formosa on March 19 & 20, 1953, and then lit out for the corner of Effie & Bishop. Why? Because they needed a post-apocalyptic landscape:

More often than not, when people talk about Robot Monster’s shooting locations, they’ll mention the famous Bronson Canyon caves:

However, most of the picture is shot in the springtime fields of Chavez Ravine, looks to be just above Effie, on the La Loma side of Bishop.

Of course, you may watch Robot Monster streaming online if you poke around for it, but might I suggest you actually watch it in 3-D? Get it here!

(I am deeply indebted to Eric Kurland, CEO and President of 3-D SPACE, for sharing with me the Chavez Ravine/Robot Monster connection)

Tidbit 2: No, Christine Sterling was not evicted from Chavez Ravine

Because anything Chavez Ravine touches turns to lies, we have this whole story about how Christine Sterling was one of the removed. You see this repeated in her Wiki page:

As we know, all residents had left by 1959 and the totality of residents they “began evicting” that May numbered about ten. (Of course “but there’s a footnote! It must be true!” and, like all Wikipedia footnotes, the article it links to doesn’t make any mention whatsoever of this nonsense.) 

Though little remembered today, Christine Sterling was a huge presence in Los Angeles. Consider: while she’s now remembered (if at all) for something she did in 1930—the year of the opening of her pet project, Olvera Street—after the 1930s, she still made it into the newspapers over 400 times. If a public figure like Sterling had been ejected for redevelopment, that would have been a major story. 

Of course, everyone loves to repeat this patently fictional tale, e.g. PBS, KCRW, the LA Weekly, et al. 

Now, no surprise that Wikipedia is rife, as it generally is, with nonsense, but one would expect PBS or KCRW or maybe the Weekly to do even the bare minimum of fact-checking, which believe it or not used to be a “thing” in journalism.

Five minutes looking into the story would have told them: Sterling lived for a short time at 935 Chavez Ravine Road, until the early 1940s, when Sterling, now in her sixties, then moved in with her daughter June Park. (Née Rix: June was married to John Park, an engineer; June’s maiden name was Rix; Christine Sterling’s birth surname was Rix.)  John and June Park owned a home at 916 Chavez Ravine Road. Chavez Ravine Road was far to the south of the action, away from the neighborhoods of La Loma, Palo Verde and Bishop, etc. Incidentally, her daughter’s house, the other side of the Naval Armory, was lost not to the Elysian Park Heights project, but to Pasadena Freeway construction.

Let’s look at the phone books from 1951 and 1955:

Early 1950s, Christine Sterling is dividing her time between the Avila Adobe and her daughter’s house by the Naval Armory; by the mid-50s Sterling is now domiciled wholly on Olvera Street. Even the newspapers mention, in the mid-50s, that Sterling had moved onto Olvera Street and into the Avila Adobe:

Tidbit 3: No, there was never a school buried in Chavez Ravine

The story concerns Palo Verde elementary, built in 1925, at Effie and Paducah (A structure I discussed a bit back in Part II).

And because they were moving so much earth to build Dodger Stadium, they just tore the roof off the school and filled it with dirt, and “in a thousand years somebody’s gonna start digging, and they’re gonna find a school down there.”

No. What’s important to understand is that the stadium and the school co-existed for at least five years; Dodger Corp. used the school for storage until about 1967. Here’s a shot from 1962 next to one from 1972:

See the red arrows? That’s the site of the school. Note that there’s nowhere for dirt to come from, to bury the school. More importantly and most obviously, the topographic level at which the school once sat is the same. It was the same when built in 1925, and it remains the same now. Ergo, it was not buried. It was demolished. (The idea that the civil engineers at LADBS would allow anyone to backfill a structure like this is ludicrous.)

Note how next to the school, to its east, there is a hill (which had Davis Street running atop it). That hill is still there. Still in its same height and configuration and topography. It still has the flat land next to it where the school was built in 1925.

While I am not certain when the school was demolished, we know it was between 1964 and 1968:

Interestingly, Buried Under the Blue literally named themselves after this fiction:

(Big thank you to researcher Malcolm Gafton, who was the first to debunk this myth, and to Zhando Atosl, who graciously informed me as to the existence of the aerial photos, 1966 WS image, and Ruscha picture)

Tidbit 4: No, the Queen of Elysian Heights house doesn’t have a relationship to Chavez Ravine

I touched on this in Part VI, but, it bears fleshing out a bit, since the topic has made recent news.

There is a house in Echo Park at 1553 Ewing Street, which was made a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (courtesy Paul Bowers, of the Silver Lake Heritage Trust, using Charles J. Fisher as monument application author). It is a classic Queen Anne, built about 1888, at the corner of Echo Park and Ewing. It’s a great house: I love the gable with the shingle-clad pediment, the clapboard siding, the two-story bay, decorative brackets, the multi-light fixed transom windows, and that eight-light porthole window just slays me. Needless to say, I am thrilled it has become an HCM.

The house made the news recently, as there was concern about evicting an elderly renter, who had moved there in 1962. I won’t comment on the legality of new owner NELA Homes removing the renter, which is outside the scope of this post. Rather, let’s examine the claim that the house is where the all the Arechigas fled after the May 08 1959 demolition of the Malvina houses.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Lupe staying in place, and I’m glad she got some money. But, let’s look at some of the reasons people gave her money: contrary to what you were told, Lupe didn’t designate the house; the designation began back in 2020, and was the work of the Silver Lake Heritage Trust. And no, nothing was ever under threat of demolition.

And, to *our* Chavez-related point, the house-losing Chavez Arechigas, contrary to what you have been told one million times, didn’t live there.

It is true, the Ewing house was owned by an Arechiga. An Arechiga who didn’t live in Chavez Ravine, and who owned the house for all of five years. But, no-one who had a Chavez Ravine house destroyed, or lived in a Chavez Ravine tent, ever lived at Ewing: it’s a made-up and easily disprovable fantasy. And yet here’s a typical response after the November 9, 2022 designation of the house as HCM #1272:

This is an extremely odd statement, since the tract it’s on was laid out by a Scot named Maltman, and the long list of the house’s owners (names like Rudolph, Garfield, Murray, Champion, Staub, Wood, Shely, Runyon, etc.) reads like a “who’s who” of “Let’s Be Anglos.” It’s a victory for Mexican Los Angeles because, why? It had one Hispanic owner for five years? (Who then sold it to another Anglo named Maurice Eubanks.) No, it’s a victory because—as we are told in every single news story on the subject—the fabled Chavez Arechigas “fled there,” settling in the house because they’d lost their home in Chavez Ravine.

But that’s not even remotely true. Here’s what actually happened:

During the latter half of the 1950s, when time grew short for the Arechigas in Palo Verde (e.g., the eviction of August 1957, the eviction notice of March 1959), Manuel and Abrana’s only son Juan was already living elsewhere. Juan and wife Nellie lived in a house at 2651 Benedict Street, which they purchased in the spring of 1955 for $10,250 (they are in the phone books at that address through the rest of the 1950s).

In March 1959, without selling his Benedict Street house, Juan Arechiga purchased the house in question at 1553 West Ewing Street, which we are told became the “refuge for the Arechiga Family.” However, when Juan’s parents’ Chavez house on Malvina was famously demolished that May, his folks did not move into Juan’s house, but rather, Manuel and Abrana relocated into one of the two homes they owned outright, specifically, into the house they had owned, for some years, at 3649 Ramboz (see their 1960 phonebook listing here).

Did anyone “displaced” from Chavez Ravine ever go to the Ewing house? No. Juan’s sister Victoria lived in the house she owned on Allison. Aurora Vargas, the daughter famously carried out of “her” house in Chavez Ravine, was already living in one of the two houses she owned on Simmons Avenue. Again, the Ewing house was owned by Juan Arechiga, who lived miles away from Chavez Ravine, and who only owned the Ewing place for a short time; he sells the property in March 1964.

When you are told Lupe Breard “lived alongside the Arechiga family” remember this: Lupe moved there in 1962, when she was two years old. The Ewing-owning Juan and Nellie, with daughters Helen and Jeannie—who, again, were absolutely and positively not displaced from Chavez Ravine—were the ones with whom toddler Lupe lived alongside, before the Arechigas sold the place and left in early 1964, not long after Lupe turned four.

I’m not even sold that Juan ever lived in the house; three-year-old Lupe might remember them being there now and then, but probably as owners, not residents. Consider: Juan also owned the house on Benedict, in which he and his family had lived since 1955, during this entire time. Juan, it seems, bought Ewing as an investment property: the 1960, ’61, ’62, and 1963 telephone directories list Esperanza T. Marquez at the property, not an Arechiga.

Here’s Buried Under the Blue demanding the historical name of the house be changed to “The Arechiga Home” for no other reason than…one Arechiga, who lived two miles away from Chavez Ravine, bought and owned the place for five years, 65 years ago. And to reiterate: indisputably, no-one removed from Palo Verde, La Loma or Bishop ever lived there…well, that seems like a reasonable reason to use their favorite phrase “we demand“:

So, having run through a few odds & ends, let’s recap!

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The Top Dozen Dumb Myths about Chavez Ravine

In no particular order: 

Removing the people from Chavez Ravine was a racist act.  

The only logic or reasoning behind this assertion being “because everything was racist in the past, what happened must have been racist!”  However: The Health Department chose Chavez Ravine as a redevelopment site involving metrics that existed outside of ideology (e.g., the American Public Health Association’s rubric regarding blighted neighborhoods vis-à-vis lack of toilets, high disease rates, public dumping, makeshift structures, streets inadequate and grades too steep for emergency vehicles, etc.); their intention was to better the living conditions of the poor. 

Then the Housing Authority went through depopulating Chavez Ravine based on slum-clearance ideology, but consider, that organization was replete with Jews and Communists (Wilkinson, Jack Naiditch, Frances Eisenberg, etc.; Sidney Green, who signed the infamous 1950 “Wilkinson Letter,” was among the group of Communists dismissed from the CHA in the fall of 1952).  Jews and Communists spent their time writing for the People’s World, fighting for civil rights, and working to secure a just and equitable society for all peoples.  Those are the racists you’re talking about.

The other player besides the health and housing departments was the mayor.  Fletcher Bowron was a liberal pro-housing mayor, and although the left’s paternalistic, patronizing anti-poverty policies via social welfare legislation can arguably be deemed racist, it’s hardly the rabid White Supremacy critics describe it as.

The handful of Chavez Ravine residents who were actually evicted, were evicted illegally.

Not only was the process legal, it had been hashed out by the courts endlessly. It was the same kind of eviction that had been done—legally—hundreds if not thousands of times in Los Angeles. There are lots of reasons not to like it, but, just calling it illegal doesn’t magically make it so.

The Arechigas were evicted on Mother’s Day.  

No, they were evicted on a Friday, and Mother’s Day was on Sunday.  “Well, then, it’s just mean they were evicted on Mother’s Day weekend.”  That is true, but note:  The Arechigas were duly notified, on March 11, they had 30 days until eviction, and that said eviction was scheduled for April 10.  It was the Arechiga lawyer who got the April 10 eviction delayed another 30 days, thus, it was the Arechigas who made the whole thing go down on Mother’s Day weekend. 

Dodger Stadium is on top of the communities of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop/the communities of PV, LL and B are buried beneath Dodger Stadium.

The stadium, specifically, is on land that had had a brick factory.  If you’re referring to one of the parking lots, though, the stadium’s parking lot to the north is on land that had had those neighborhoods (and again, the neighborhoods were demolished years before the parking lot was even a gleam in someone’s eye, ergo, nothing is “buried”).

The Dodgers owe something to the descendants.

They do not.  The City of Los Angeles had one job:  deliver an empty plot of land.  The city, being the city, in the grand tradition of bureaucracies, of course did a poor job of this.  Then the city had to play mop-up at the 11th hour.  The Dodger corporation was in no way involved in removing people who had lost their homes years before (yes, that includes the Arechigas). 

We are told we must “hold the Dodgers accountable for their part in destroying Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop!” But no…we don’t.  Because DodgerCorp. were not “complicit” with the city in destroying one single house.  If they were, then, when and how?  Exactly: didn’t happen.

People in Chavez Ravine had to flee, and scramble to find housing, but it was impossible to go anywhere else, because of redlining.

What is redlining? As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the government began something called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The HOLC produced color-coded “Residential Security” maps that gauged areas where they could or should refinance existing loans. The ones coded “red” were deemed high-risk (“hazardous”); and yellow indicated “declining areas.” Any Mexican-American was more than welcome in either area. Now let’s look at one of their maps:

The area inside the black square, that’s Chavez Ravine. And what do you notice? The entire surrounding area is by and large red or yellow. It’s hard to believe that the residents of the sparsely populated Ravine area couldn’t find a house in Los Angeles, which was mostly red and yellow. (The white areas were parks, industrial, business, and areas that had mostly apartments. Remember, despite the prevailing narrative, most of Chavez Ravine’s residents were renters. They would have gone to any the majority areas.) Note that, for example, nearby Bunker Hill (majority Caucasian) is redlined. Most people believe that redlining was done largely or primarily on the basis of race, which is untrue: the vast majority of US citizens “redlined” were white.

And remember, HOLC went out of business in 1951, so, these maps would not have applied to the people of Chavez Ravine.

“But the HOLC shared their maps with private banks!” No, that was a wishful claim made years ago that has been debunked. “But the HOLC shared their maps with the Federal Housing Administration!” Maybe, but the FHA had their own maps (which they did on a block-by-block basis, and guess what, they burned all their maps in 1969 when a lawsuit came after them), but yes, the New Deal feds at the FHA and their hateful-of-Blacks Fannie Mae lapdogs were super racist, no doubt. “But okay even though the HOLC maps had nothing to do with mortgage refinance after the eminent domain in Chavez Ravine, it still made things really bad for Chavez Ravine in the 1940s!” Actually, evidence shows the HOLC did in fact loan heavily in red-shaded areas.

Oh, and I shouldn’t have to remind you, but no one had to flee or scramble, since in Chavez Ravine there was (in accordance with the law) an office to assist in finding people new homes, be they rental or purchase. The lady who ran the office was Vicki Alonzo.

People kicked out of Chavez Ravine had nowhere to go, because it was illegal for Mexican-Americans to own houses.

BUtB repeats this one a lot, but no-one ever indicates what that law was. Because it didn’t exist. (In fact, it’s especially funny the Arechiga family say it was illegal for Mexican-Americans to own houses, when they owned 11 houses…13, if you count the two in Chavez Ravine.)

It was difficult for Chavez residents to find housing, because of restrictive covenants, whereby most areas of Los Angeles were where POC weren’t allowed to buy houses.

Some residents of Chavez Ravine may have moved to Chavez Ravine because there was a covenant against their purchasing a house in, say, Brentwood. But, restrictive covenants were de facto done away with in Los Angeles in 1945, and declared Federally unlawful in 1948. Ergo, the people of Chavez Ravine displaced in 1950-1953 would have had no problem with them.

Moreover, most of Los Angeles’s restrictive covenants, written into subdivision title deed language ca. 1903, had expired by the 1940s. You know what I’ve never seen? A map of these restrictive covenants. Try and Google it—you’ll get a lot of pictures of the infamous HOLC “redlining” maps, but, no: maps that evaluate mortgage lending risk are not the same thing as the exclusionary language of a title covenant.

Chavez Ravine was home to generations of families.

Most moved there in there in the mid-20s, and were gone by early 50s. On average, 25 years. Which is one generation.

Residents didn’t get compensation/got below-market compensation.

Except, they were compensated at or above market rate. Each property had multiple appraisals, and the court awarded the highest appraisal, in accordance with the law.

Residents were forced to sell cheap, because the city caused a panic through a tiered buying system.

Some say this fiction was concocted by Mike Davis, but there’s no evidence of that. There’s actually no evidence the “tiered buying system” happened at all in any way shape or form: if such a flagrant violation of law were to happen during the very publicized and public workings of a highly-scrutinized public agency, it would have left a mark. Had there been unhappy homeowners because such a thing happened, it would have left a mark. There was an entire month-long investigation of LA public housing by a House of Representatives Subcommittee, in hearings that lasted through May of 1953, where residents aired their grievances in no uncertain terms, up to and including every last thing they didn’t like about how they were treated by the Housing Authority, and not a single person mentioned this? Copious interviews with residents, in the 1950s and beyond (with anger directed at length in, say, the 1957 issue of The Torch Reporter) and it was never mentioned? The Los Angeles Housing Authority were accepting Federal money, and as such were under Federal oversight; HACLA were, moreover, bound by the strictures of the Court, who directed and oversaw appraisals and payments; and as a public local agency were, again, under scrutiny, and yet we’re to believe HACLA went totally rogue, running roughshod over laws, to create community panic because…why? To save money? (Yeah, those government agencies given absurd amounts of other people’s money to play with suddenly becoming prudent and frugal…that’s a first.) HACLA was going to get all the property through eminent domain, as they had countless times before in the very commonplace and workaday performance of their tasks; why would they suddenly turn full-eeevil in this one particular case?

Chavez Ravine = Palestine.

No. Equating the two reveals a jejune understanding of both Los Angeles and the Middle East.

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As long as we’re on the subject of picking apart what people have said about Chavez Ravine…the Los Angeles Times published this opinion piece a couple weeks ago.

I’ll run through some of its contentions, quickly: people lived in Chavez Ravine because they legally weren’t allowed to live anywhere else (absolutely untrue); Frank Wilkinson came up with the Elysian Heights project (not by a long shot—he was the Director of HACLA’s Office of Information); the city offered people below-market monies for their homes (a debunked lie); the unjust treatment of the residents is a blight on LA history (were the residents treated more unjustly than other residents removed for projects? No, so how is CR in particular a blight?); the property was unjustly taken (though the process was in the courts for years…I’m going to need a breakdown of the judges’ decisions detailing exactly how they made purposely unjust decisions from the bench); taking of homes resulted an inability to build wealth (it can be argued the opposite is true: the people, compensated for their homes, bought homes elsewhere, which were in an area that had actual city services, and would therefore be worth much more today than the CR homes could ever have achieved); “some got nothing” (um, source?); the CR project was racist because the substandard neighborhood happened to have Mexican-Americans living in it (see my paragraph on CR and racism, above); the baseball stadium is not a “public good” (though it was deemed by the courts to be); the Dodgers should “give back” to the residents who were removed 73 years ago (the Times doesn’t say what they should be giving to these people, of course…they also neglect to mention that it was five years between the cancellation of the public housing project, and the Dodgers being offered the land).

Point being, the Times editorializes, based on a whole host of “alternative facts.” I decided to write about Chavez Ravine after I read the Reparations Bill (everything is racist! there was below-market compensation! the Dodgers got the land for an insignificant amount! schools were buried! it was all fraudulent! and we use terms like redlining without knowing what redlining is!) because it contained a plethora of similar falsehoods and delusions. So, I hope you have found these seven posts edifying, as I have attempted in them to correct the record.

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Now then, I will reiterate what I said in Part I: Hey, City of Los Angeles!

Hire me as part of the task force to establish a database. I will be absolutely fastidious and singleminded in my dedication to producing a database of all former residents with every house catalogued (and, ideally, pictured) up to and including dates of construction and demolition.  I’ll dig into City records and find what the houses were valued at, what the residents were paid, where they relocated, the whole magilla. Of course that will depend on what records were actually retained and maintained, but if the preceding 26,914 words over the last two weeks have indicated anything, it’s that I’m obsessively thorough, and will get to the truth.

And here’s something else I think we should do. A number of the houses were moved. 

Moved houses would have their destination listed in DBS records. If I find a survivor (roughly akin to this one, say) I suggest the city buy a relocated house, and return it to Chavez Ravine. There’s a lot of empty land up there north of the parking lot, put the house there, looking down over Dodger Stadium. The house can be turned into an interpretive center. Now that’s living history. Isn’t that a great idea? I think so too. 

That’s my pitch, Councilmember Carrillo, so drop me a line at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you, and thanks!

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This is seven-part series. Its component parts being:

Part I: Chavez Ravine and the Mainstream Narrative

The master narrative, as promulgated by the mainstream media; its result, a reparations bill; the good and bad of that bill. Published Friday, May 10.

Part II: What is Chavez Ravine

Its beginnings, development, and evolution to 1950; its history of demolition prospects; and, can you call it Chavez Ravine? Published Sunday, May 12.

Part III: Calm Before the Storm

A snapshot of life in the area in the 1940s. The mythos of small-town life; Normark’s documentary work; a study of the people of Chavez Ravine; churches, markets, bus lines, etc. Published Tuesday, May 14.

Part IV: The Rise and Fall of Elysian Park Heights

A history of public housing; Neutra’s Elysian Park Heights project; its proponents and opponents; the area’s demolition; the downfall of public housing, and its relationship to anticommunism; land use after the demolition and nullification of the contract. Published Thursday, May 16.

Part V: Here Come the Dodgers

About the Dodgers; what constitutes public purpose; an illegal backroom deal? Published Monday, May 20.

Part VI: The Arechiga Family

The Arechiga family history to 1950; eviction from Malvina Street; eventual removal in May 1959; the multiple Arechiga houses; life after Malvina; the next generation of Arechigas. Published Thursday, May 23.

Part VII: In Summation, plus Odds and Ends

Key takeaways; plus a collection of *other* commonly-held beliefs about Chavez Ravine, conclusively debunked. Published Monday, May 27.

If you have comments or corrections, please don’t hesitate to write me at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com.

And don’t forget, give us a follow on the ol’ Instagram!

The story so far: we introduced our subject in Part I by detailing how Chavez Ravine’s Master Narrative, from which came the Reparations Bill, is equal parts unsupportable claims and outlandish disinformation. Part II made sure you knew Chavez Ravine’s history. Part III provided a snapshot of life in Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop during the 1940s, before it was forever changed. Part IV ran us through the story of the ill-fated Elysian Park Heights project, for which the Housing Authority removed all the residents and demolished the structures. Part V told the tale of how and why the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles.

Today! We have arrived at the most famous story of all. That of the Arechiga Family.

I. The Most Famous Photo of All

On May 8, 1959, after years of court battles and multiple eviction notices, LASD deputies finally removed the Arechigas from the two houses they occupied.

The mere mention of the Arechiga family—just the sight of this one solitary image—is all you need to prove that racist Dodgers AKA the Displacers attacked and violently and illegally evicted hundreds of families from their legal homes in May 1959.

Of course, the actual facts behind the matter are more…nuanced. Claims of racism are just that, claims. Despite being popularly renamed “Displacers,” the Dodgers literally displaced no-one. And, despite what you’re told by the ruling chronicle, of Chavez Ravine’s “many families expelled” the sum total number of families dislodged by deputies was…one. The number of people actually forcibly removed was…one. Oh, and there was nothing illegal done to them.

Yes, to be strictly accurate—again, let me be clear, I do not approve of the taking of people’s property, but a thoughtful discussion requires we begin with legal clarity—the Arechiga family hadn’t owned their home for seven years, paying neither rent nor property tax, and had used the courts to stall multiple evictions over the course of years, until the day finally came when there was no other recourse but to remove them by force. 

At which point (we are often told) they became homeless. That is, of course, not true either. They simply moved nearby, into one of the many other houses they owned.

The greater Arechiga tale, when factually observed, is actually not much of a story. However, the Arechiga narrative has garnered enormous weight and influence: they are, in fact, talked about more now than when they hit the limelight in 1959-1960, back when they were front page news of every major newspaper from coast to coast.

Their tale underscores why iconic photos are so important—were it not incredibly easy to use the shot of deputies carrying Aurora Vargas, the story would be no more or less important than a recounting of any other people removed, say, from Bunker Hill (or from the sites of countless other projects in Los Angeles involving eminent domain). Don’t get me wrong: the people removed from Bunker Hill were and remain enormously important, as were/are the people of Chavez Ravine; it’s just that the Arechiga family aren’t more important. Regardless, they have since become the go-to hallmark of the story because they so deftly worked the media, and continue to do so, as we’ll see.

II. The Arechiga Story to 1950

Abrana Cabral was born in Monte Escobedo, a municipality in the southwest portion of Zacatecas, a landlocked state on the Sierra Made mountain range of central Mexico, in 1897. In 1916 Abrana, pregnant, marries one Nicholas Ybarra, and together they cross the Rio Grande into Texas in October of that year. In April 1917 Abrana births daughter Delphina in Morenci, Arizona. Nicholas died of syphilis in August 1918.

Manuel Arechiga, born June 1889, was also from Monte Escobedo. He too had fled Mexico for Arizona; he weds the widow Abrana in 1920. They have daughter Aurora Arechiga in Morenci in June 1921. 

Manuel worked at the Phelps Dodge Copper concern, but the cessation of World War One resulted in plummeting copper prices; many smelters were closed and jobs lost. Manuel and Abrana, seeking greener pastures, head west to Los Angeles, in 1922. They settle in the westernmost part of Chavez Ravine, on Malvina at the edge of the Palo Verde Tract. They have a son, Juan, in February 1923; daughter Celia in April 1924; Manuel Jr. in October 1926; and Victoria in November 1929.

III. Their Houses

The famous houses for which they are known are 1767, 1771, and 1801 Malvina (it is from 1771 that Aurora Vargas is famously carried, making it arguably one of the most famous houses in Los Angeles history). These three are the houses it is said the Arechigas built, because they owned them in 1959 (although by 1959, the Arechigas had already demolished 1801 themselves). In all likelihood they built none of the three, but rather purchased them over time.

In the 1930 census the whole family are shown as residing at 1813 Malvina, and they’re in the 1934 phone book at 1813 Malvina. There’s no record of the construction of 1771 in DBS filings; but Arechiga is shown as its owner in 1940. 

1767 was built by a man named Jose Rodrigquez in late 1923, though Manuel Arechiga is listed as its owner on Building & Safety permits in 1946.

In 1940 they’re renting a house at 1801 Malvina (the family numbering only seven now, since Manuel Jr. died, age eight, of tuberculosis), and Manuel’s 1942 draft card shows him living at 1801 Malvina. At some point Manuel purchases 1801 after 1940. 

Though they own 1771 in 1940, they’re not seen living at 1771 until a 1943 newspaper mention (seen below). In the 1950 Census, Manuel and Abrana live at 1771 with their son Juan, and his wife Nellie and their daughter Helen, along with Victoria. Aurora, Celia and Delphina have since moved on to start their own lives (Aurora lived on Hyde Park Boulevard).

IV. Living their Lives

From the 1920s through to the 1950s, the family lived their lives in Palo Verde—which we might expect to be uneventful—but they made the papers now and then. For example, teenage Victoria Arechiga turned her back on her pet goat, who butted her down the hill, sending her to hospital for X-rays.

Less “human interest story” was the car-crash killing done by Porfidio Vargas, an Arechiga family member.

Jose Ambrosio Barboza Vargas was born in 1897 in Irapuato, Mexico. He, his father and mother, Jose Gregorio and Maria, and five siblings, crossed into Texas in 1907. Ambrosio and Jose Gregorio made their way to Los Angeles and were one of the first families to build in Chavez Ravine, in 1913, as part of Stimson’s settlement program. In 1915 Ambrosio, 18, married Tiburcia Gonzalez, age 16. They had nine children (of whom Porfidio was third born, birthed in March of 1919). Ambrosio became an American citizen in Los Angeles in 1932. Their house was at 1767 Gabriel, a stone’s throw from Malvina.

Porfidio met Aurora Vargas, who lived one block over at 1801 Malvina. They were married in 1938; she was 17.

In June 1941 Porfidio was 22 years old and a member of the Palo Verde gang. He and his gang crashed a party being held in Rose Hill gang territory on Boundary Avenue. A brawl ensued, and Palo Verde gang member Juan C. Flores, of 1738 Gabriel Ave., was stabbed, near fatally. After that, Porfidio got into a game of chicken with a Rose Hills gang member, Ramon Araujo. Neither budged, and the cars crashed head on, at the corner of Boundary and Roberta (which converged, once, before eminent domain came and took out huge swaths of houses for Rose Hill Park). Remarkably, both Vargas and Araujo survived, but both of Araujo’s passengers—Peter Barraras, 16, and Peter Del Gado, 18, were killed. Porfidio Vargas fled the scene, but was arrested the next day.

Vargas and Araujo went before the Municipal Judge for felony negligent homicide, but were set free because gang members threatened all the witnesses.

Porfidio was inducted into the US Army in June 1943, and sent to Europe. In December 1944 he was one of the very first to die in the Battle of the Bulge, which would claim 20,000 American lives in the Ardennes that winter, leaving Aurora a widow.

Another sobering story involves Juan (AKA John) Cabral Arechiga, Manuel and Abrana’s only living son. In December 1942 Juan, 19, gets married to Nellie Tavison, also 19, and have daughter Helen in September 1943.

Then, on March 18th, 1944, Juan Arechiga kidnapped and raped an underage schoolgirl. Juan abducted Mary Louise Fernandez, 17, of 622 North Broadway, a junior at Lincoln High, whom he grabbed on Ord near Broadway as she walked home after school. After abducting her, Arechiga beat her, threatened her if she made noise, and drove her into Chavez Ravine and raped her in the dirt. Fernandez immediately turned him in and it goes to trial, where Juan is found guilty. People will say well, of course they found him guilty, poor people only get some terrible public defender who doesn’t even care about him because the system is broken, etc.  

No. His parents Manuel and Abrana hired the famed trial lawyer Rosalind Goodrich Bates, but despite top-tier defense, the jury still found him quite guilty. Juan goes to San Quentin in December 1944, and serves four years for kidnap and rape. 

Other than those instances, the Arechigas led a quiet life. Until that fateful day…

V. The 1950s

July 1950, everybody gets the letter saying your days are numbered: we, the City Housing Authority, are coming for your house, which we are taking through condemnation. This includes the Arechiga properties, which stand at 1767, 1771 and 1801 Malvina.

Remuneration was fixed at $10,050 by the Superior Court of California, wherein, for their property, the Superior Court looked at three appraisals of their property, and then picked the appraisal with the highest value. 

They are given $10,050 for the three lots, which doesn’t sound like much, but the going rate for a house were you to buy one in Chavez Ravine in 1951, was $2000.

But, you say, that can’t be right! But it is: the average cost of a home in 1950 in Chavez Ravine was $2000. Here, for example, are some random home values from very nearby, via the 1940 Federal Census.

1766 Malvina, $700; 1767 Gabriel, $1500, 1722 Malvina, $1500; 1255 and 1259 Effie, $900 and $1600. Unfortunately, come the 1950 census, the US Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census discontinued providing home valuation. But, let’s say that home values doubled in the decade 1940-1950. That puts us right there with the $2000 average 1950 valuation. Bear in mind, the average cost of a home in 1950 was $7,354 in the United States; that the Chavez homes were only 30% of the national average is completely understandable, given all we know about their general construction, the neighborhood services, etc.

Bear in mind as well, the average value of three homes in Chavez Ravine, at $2k per, $6,000. The $10,050 appraisal on the three Arechiga properties is nearly double the average going price in the area.

If you don’t agree with the amount of money they award you, you file an appeal. The people who filed appeals got more money; many of the Arechiga neighbors did. The Arechiga family, however, for whatever reason, did not feel the need to file an appeal.

A couple years go by, and they never file an appeal, and eventually the appeal window closed in February 1953, and that is that.

Ooops, not yet. Come October 1953, the Arechigas file suit in Superior Court against the Housing Authority. The Housing Authority asked for a writ of possession, which would have dispossessed the family immediately. The Arechiga lawyer, George Gailliard Bauman (attorney, hardcore Republican, and president of the conservative Small Property Owner’s League) blocked the move and obtained a 30-day stay of execution from Superior Court Judge Samuel L. Blake.

That 30-day stay of execution lasted five and a half years.

The Arechiga’s argument was someone told us our property was worth $17,500. You only deposited $10,050 in our account. Give us the extra $7,450, and we’ll pack up everything and go.

Problem is, they had two years to file an appeal, as many neighbors had. The Arechigas didn’t, so, the judgement became final. In court, the judge realized that if people were to sidestep procedure and insist on setting their own price in eminent domain proceedings, nothing—no roads, no schools, no court houses, no public housing—would ever be built. The Arechigas were told sorry.

1953 ends. 1954 goes by. So does 1955, and then 1956. The Arechigas live in the cleared-out Ravine. (Of course I shouldn’t have to repeat this, but no, during this entire time there exists not the slightest inkling of anything related whatsoever to the Dodgers.)

In 1957, the Arechigas, after waiting four years to get evicted, finally get evicted. But I thought they didn’t get evicted until 1959! you say.

The Arechigas didn’t own their house from 1953-1957, while they battled in court. The matter goes to the District Court of Appeal in 1957, and the presiding judge said “when the judgement in the condemnation case became final, they were divested of all interest in the property regardless of the purpose for which it might later be used.”

Now you may not like it, but, fact is, when the State takes your home for eminent domain, you don’t get to keep it. If you think it only happens to poor people of color, consider the hundreds of homes in southwest Pasadena, taken by Caltrans, for the 710 project. That never got built, and those homes aren’t going back to the owners, are they. 

Fact is, the Arechiga place on Malvina, was legally not their home. They lived there for years without paying rent or property taxes. The City could have very easily said well this is our home not yours, we’re turning off the water and power, but they didn’t do that, did they. 

And at this point, in the spring of 1957, we finally have some mention of the Dodgers! In May the National League owners granted permission for the Dodgers to move to Los Angeles if certain conditions were met.

After the Arechigas lost their court case (again) in 1957, they were served an official eviction notice and on the 21st of August, 1957, deputies showed up with a Writ of Possession and evicted them, and began hauling out their belongings.

Daughter Victoria Angustain (Victoria Arechiga had married Miguel “Mike” Angustain, an employee of the Department of Recreation and Parks) punched and bit officers removing the furniture, but hey—if deputies are such fascists (as we are so often reminded), they’d beat Victoria with truncheons, right? No, instead the Arechigas were granted a two-week stay on the eviction order (Councilman Roybal intervened), so the deputies had to haul all their belongings back into the house, and that two-week stay turned into another two years of squatting.

It was wrong to turn them out, Victoria stated, because (besides wanting their oil rights!) they had no place to go:

Which, you are going to find out, was a big fat lie.

1957 turns to 1958 to 1959, with the Arechigas waiting patiently for the next eviction order. (They had had their final appeal denied in April 1958—read the judgement here.)

The subsequent order to vacate comes on March 9, 1959: they are served a 30-day eviction notice: you are going to be out on April 10, 1959, no ifs ands or buts. Abrana looks at the notice on April 10th:

April 10 was the day the Arechigas were supposed to be out, but they stalled further, and were granted another 30-day-stay.

May 8th, therefore, became, after nearly a decade of stalling, the day they were supposed to be out (you will hear “the City was mean and evil and evicted them on Mother’s Day weekend!” but for accuracy’s sake, their eviction occurring on Mother’s Day weekend…was entirely the work of the Arechigas and their lawyer).

VI. The Big Day

Friday, May 8th, 1959: at 11:30 in the morning, eight male and three female LASD deputies arrived to enforce the March 11 Superior Court Writ; they were led by Capt. Joe Brady. They were joined by fifteen cars full of television reporters and the press. Three moving vans had already arrived. It was the deputies’ intent to take possession of 1771 Malvina (home of Manuel and Abrana) and 1767 Malvina (home of Victoria and Miguel Angustain). 1801 Malvina had already been demolished by the Arechigas, for reasons unknown. (Alice Martin, 1456 Davis; Sally Ramirez, 1850 Reposa; and Glenn Walters, of 1853 Reposa, also left that day, without incident, although Walters was detained for obstruction during the Arechiga dust-up. Martin had bought back her house from the City, for $2,500, with the proviso that it be moved, but was then found to be not structurally sound enough to be moved.)

Deputies entered, then engaged in discussion with Victoria and Abrana about leaving (Manuel remained outside; Aurora wasn’t there). Workmen began to remove personal items into moving vans.

Aurora Vargas arrived on the scene. She ran past the deputies, and announced to the reporters, they’ll have to carry me out! And with that she ran up into the house.

Remember, the only people that lived in the 450sf house were Manuel and Abrana. Aurora lived miles away, and only showed up to be on TV: the deputies complied with Aurora’s demand, and it has become one of the most famous images in Los Angeles history—

Aurora kicked the officers and punched them, and was arrested for battery. (Though Victoria Angustain left peacefully, she later fought and struggled with police, but they let it go.) Released on bail, Aurora’s alleged battery went to trial: a jury of ten women and two men found her unanimously guilty, three counts of battery and one for obstruction, which was easy to do since there was so much film of her kicking and punching officers.

The cameras rolled and rolled—

—it was the perfect media circus. It made the news coast-to-coast. Of course, as is their way, the media “helped” a little; here for example is the aforementioned Alice Martin and her roommate, Ruth Rayford, of 1456 Davis:

At the end of the day, eight years after the Arechigas lost their house, they finally lost their house. Their belongings were loaded into three moving vans—

And the houses were demolished.

But the Arechigas did not depart. They were prepared with their tents and cookware and set up camp. The removal and demolition was a huge national story, covered coast to coast, and Los Angeles was a national, in fact, international embarrassment.

The City Council granted them the opportunity to speak at a public hearing, which they did on May 11.

300 people packed council chambers, loudly denouncing the thugs who made innocent people homeless. The Arechigas agreed: they had been set upon without warning, impoverished, and now had nowhere to go. The newspapers reported that they were homeless:

Homeless, they lived in a tent:

Then, they lived in a donated trailer:

Of course, they weren’t homeless. Not by a long shot.

VII. The Arechiga Homes

That is correct: despite what you’re constantly told, they were not made homeless. Not even remotely so. And we’ll set aside the fact that not one person in Chavez Ravine was made homeless, not one, because the Housing Authority worked diligently to relocate and find new homes for every single Ravine resident, as per the law. No, what made the Arechiga family interesting and unique is that…they could have just gone to one of their many, many other homes.

The Arechigas, however, just didn’t feel like going to any of the many houses owned by them, or houses owned by their son, or the homes owned by their daughters; between the folks and John and Aurora and Victoria, ten houses, eleven if you count the one daughter Celia owed and lived in out in Santa Fe Springs. Rather, they liked living in donated housing in Chavez Ravine, eating donated food, yelling at councilmembers, and getting in the papers.

The day after the big Council hearing, May 12, 1959, somebody thought to look at the tax rolls, and well look at that, they own eleven homes.

Victoria (who owned three of the eleven) said, basically, “well we never denied owning eleven houses, it’s your fault you never asked us if we did”—

You will be told “they didn’t REALLY own all those homes!” Here is that claim, for example, in the “Battle of Chavez Ravine” Wikipedia page—

Sigh. I hate to have to do this, but because you’re being fed b.s., I’m now forced to detail all the homes they owned.

The home of Manuel and Abrana Arechiga:

Yes, they and they alone owned it outright. It is located at 3649 Ramboz Drive in City Terrace, and was brand new when Manuel and Abrana bought it in 1956. 

…and by 1959 they’d already paid off more than half the mortgage (they had purchased it for $8,500 in 1956, and in May 1959 only owed $3,700 on the mortgage). At the time of the Malvina eviction, they were renting it to their cousin, Estella Moldanado. It was to this house Manuel and Abrana moved in 1959, immediately after leaving their “homeless tent” in Chavez Ravine. Here they are, in the 1960 Los Angeles telephone directory: 

And this is the OTHER home legally purchased and owned by Manuel and Abrana Arechiga:

This house is at 2410 Glover Place. Three bedroom, built in 1925. They had their 42-year-old daughter Delphina Hernandez (Abrana’s daughter from Nicholas Ybarra) living in it.

Daughter Victoria was also not made homeless, she and her husband Miguel Angustain Jr. owned property at 1430-32 Allison Avenue, a stone’s throw from Chavez Ravine.

Strictly speaking this is THREE houses, since there are three separate standalone structures on the lot. Two houses in front running down the sloped site, this being the house in back:

In fact here’s a shot of the family hauling the furniture from Chavez Ravine up to their house:

What of daughter Aurora Vargas, the one famously carried by force from “her” home at 1771 Malvina? She owned both these homes:

These are two houses at 659 and 657 Simmons Avenue, for which Aurora Vargas had paid $8,500 and $5,600, respectively.

In 1959 son Juan Arechiga owned a house at 2651 Benedict Street — classic Spanish Revival, built in 1929 — which he had purchased in the spring of 1955. You will be told that it was being taken by eminent domain, and Juan was forcefully made to sell his home, in order to build a stretch of the Golden State Freeway (a story repeated in Eric Nusbaum’s book Stealing Home, for example). But that’s not true: Juan sells it himself, in 1965, to an outfit called Quality Bilt Homes. QBH tear it down, and erect an apartment building on the site (which opened in 1967, and still stands). Juan’s house on Benedict:

Juan Arechiga also owned another house. It was this two-unit at Ewing Street & Echo Park Avenue:

You will be told that this house is important because it’s where the Arechiga family “fled” after the Malvina demolition. But as is the case with so much Chavez Lore, you are being lied to. Juan (who did not live in Chavez Ravine) bought this house in March 1959. In May of that year his parents were evicted from Malvina, and they moved to their house on Ramboz. NO-ONE removed from Chavez Ravine ever lived in this house; this house has no relationship with or to the Arechiga/Palo Verde tale. Juan owns it for all of five years, and sells it to a man named Maurice Owen Eubanks in March 1964. (FYI, 1553 Ewing St./2004 Echo Park Ave., AKA the “Queen of Elysian Heights” made the news recently, and I’ll cover that in the next installment, Part VII.)

And lastly, here’s the home of daughter Celia, which sort of counts but sort of doesn’t. Like Delphina, Celia didn’t muck about with the Chavez Ravine doings much.

Also, it was out at 9112 Arlee Ave., Santa Fe Springs, seventeen miles southeast of Chavez Ravine, so it doesn’t really fall under the umbrella of the Los Angeles Arechigas…but still.

Just to give you an ironclad understanding of the eviction-involved Arechigas:

Manuel and Abrana live the rest of their lives in their house on Ramboz; they pass in 1971 and 1972, respectively. Juan and Nellie pass in 2010 and 2018; Aurora in 2006.

Juan and Nellie’s daughter Jeannie, born in 1955, gives birth to Melissa, in 1975. And with that, comes a whole new era of Arechigas vis-à-vis Chavez Ravine.

VIII. Arechigas: The Next Generation

Manuel and Abrana’s great-granddaughter Melissa Arechiga takes on the Chavez Ravine mantle in 2017 when she begins “Buried Under the Blue,” her activist group for reparations to descendants of residents. BUtB get their 501(c)3 in July 2019. In May 2022 she wrote this petition which directly led to the Reparations Bill.

It’s an interesting petition. If you’ve read this post, and the preceding five, you’ll see that BUtB’s assertions are…creative, so much so, I feel no need to address them point-by-point.

Couple things I will point out, though: first, it’s curious to see that paragraph five, concerning Judge Praeger, is a cut-and-paste (with a sentence added at the end) from this pamphlet. Melissa Arechiga snatched the paragraph from a pamphlet published by the Small Property Owners League of Los Angeles, who were right-leaning conservatives, which is rather ironic. Ultimately, of course, Praeger’s judgement is a minor footnote in the greater tale, since it was immediately and unanimously overruled by the State Supreme Court and the Chief Justice.

Secondly, what’s important to note is the meat of the matter, their demands:

Now, were I a cynical man, I might raise an eyebrow. After all, a demand for money was the entirety of the Arechiga kerfuffle in the first place.

And now, the same family wants more money…again.

A friend of mine likened this to a grift, which I thought was a bit strong; it’s more a strong-arm guilting, I said. He said if BUtB had actual truth and facts, it would be a guilting; but without those, it’s just a con. I’ll leave it for you folks to decide that.

Here’s what may be the most important point. Buried Under the Blue is run by Melissa and her mother Jeannie Arechiga; the acorn that grew this oak is the oft-repeated assertion that Jeannie, three-and-a-half years old, lost her home that fateful day in May 1959. That is mentioned in their BUtB bio, and is therefore repeated in the mainstream press. But it’s baloney. Jeannie didn’t live in Chavez Ravine, and never lived in Chavez Ravine. Jeannie lived with her family in their house on Benedict (pictured above), about three miles northwest.

So when you read the BUtB bio about how Jeannie’s experience at the May 1959 eviction “continues to affect her mental health and well being” always remember: her parents took a 3½-year-old from her home, drove her to where there was sure to be commotion, and placed her in the way of deputies performing their duties, because there were television cameras there.

As long as we’re on the subject of BUtB provider-of-origin-story and co-founder Jeannie Arechiga, let’s look at the story that 3½-year-old Jeannie was tossed into the back of a police car next to her aunt Aurora, famously standing up to The Man by tossing their sandwich out the window—

—which is of course a total fabrication. The only person put into the back of the police car with Aurora Vargas was Glenn Walters, who was detained for obstruction. There was a ton of media there that day, and if cops were throwing three-year-old-girls into the back of police cars, that would be the image every media outlet in the world would now lead with instead of the “Aurora Being Carried Out” shot.

*****

In any event, Buried Under the Blue lobbied our elected representatives, and got their demand for reparations sent to Sacramento:

BUtB does much of its outreach on social media; for example, it has 17,000 followers on Instagram, and 23,000 likes on its TikTok. Here is Melissa Arechiga, the new face of Chavez Ravine, with a typical Instagram post:

And that is the tale of the Arechigas! Come back in a couple days when we wrap up our whole tale in Part VII, a breakdown of the main myths about Chavez Ravine. See you there!

**************

This is seven-part series. Its component parts being:

Part I: Chavez Ravine and the Mainstream Narrative

The master narrative, as promulgated by the mainstream media; its result, a reparations bill; the good and bad of that bill. Published Friday, May 10.

Part II: What is Chavez Ravine

Its beginnings, development, and evolution to 1950; its history of demolition prospects; and, can you call it Chavez Ravine? Published Sunday, May 12.

Part III: Calm Before the Storm

A snapshot of life in the area in the 1940s. The mythos of small-town life; Normark’s documentary work; a study of the people of Chavez Ravine; churches, markets, bus lines, etc. Published Tuesday, May 14.

Part IV: The Rise and Fall of Elysian Park Heights

A history of public housing; Neutra’s Elysian Park Heights project; its proponents and opponents; the area’s demolition; the downfall of public housing, and its relationship to anticommunism; land use after the demolition and nullification of the contract. Published Thursday, May 16.

Part V: Here Come the Dodgers

About the Dodgers; what constitutes public purpose; an illegal backroom deal? Published Monday, May 20.

Part VI: The Arechiga Family

The Arechiga family history to 1950; eviction from Malvina Street; eventual removal in May 1959; the multiple Arechiga houses; life after Malvina; the next generation of Arechigas. Published today, Thursday, May 23.

Part VII: In Summation, plus Odds and Ends

Key takeaways; plus a collection of *other* commonly-held beliefs about Chavez Ravine, conclusively debunked. To be published Monday, May 27.

If you have comments or corrections, please don’t hesitate to write me at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com.

Our story so far: we introduced our subject in Part I by detailing how Chavez Ravine’s popular mainstream narrative is aggressively counterfactual. Part II answered the question of “what is this Chavez Ravine?” Part III gave a rough sketch of what life was like in Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop during the postwar era, before it was depopulated. Part IV ran us through the history of the Elysian Park Heights project, under whose aegis the area was cleared.

Today! You’ve probably heard of the Dodgers. And you know their stadium is in Chavez Ravine. How did they get there? Let’s find out!

I. A Team Called the Dodgers

In the previous installment we dealt with Chavez Ravine as it related to postwar public housing projects and the subsequent demolition of homes in the Ravine, etc.

During that time, out in Brooklyn, there was a baseball team called the Dodgers. They played at an aging (built 1913), small stadium, with little parking, called Ebbets Field. The team and stadium were owned by a fellow named Walter O’Malley.

O’Malley was in the works to build a new, capacious, privately-owned domed baseball stadium on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, but was thwarted by government. New York City Building Commissioner Robert Moses insisted it be a city-owned stadium, and had to be located in Queens. O’Malley and Moses battled over this for years on end, both certain they’d get what they want.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles had been hot to get a major league team for a very long time, and we pestered all sorts of teams to give Los Angeles a shot at relocation. In 1955 the City Council wrote a letter to O’Malley to say heyyy, we could use a team here, but O’Malley brushed them off. (Some people will try and tell you that when Council attempted to court O’Malley in 1955, that these communiques involved Chavez Ravine and somehow prove a conspiracy against La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop. That is, of course, a fiction; it’s nonsense on the face of it, since those neighborhoods were already depopulated and demolished pre-1955. But much more revealing: here’s a “Buried Under the Blue” post alleging Council’s letter reveals we were attempting to displace Ravine denizens and destroy its neighborhoods in 1955…and here again is another one…but then you read the actual letter and it says nothing about Chavez Ravine.)

In late 1956 O’Malley was in Los Angeles, and even gave a speech about how and why he would not move the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

O’Malley had been working for ten years to replace Ebbets Field, stymied by Moses, and was hoping against hope he’d still be able to build his dream stadium in Brooklyn. But by the spring of 1957 he’d had enough of New York’s corruption, so he looked to sunnier climes.

In May 1957 we finally got O’Malley out to Los Angeles, to look at a half-dozen prospective sites. O’Malley goes up in the whirlybird—May 2, 1957—and from the air examines Wrigley Field (which O’Malley had acquired the previous February) and the Coliseum, etc. But then O’Malley saw the stacks, AKA the famous four-way freeway interchange, right next to a huge piece of empty land.

He had seen Chavez Ravine, and concluded if he was going to spend twenty million dollars out of his own pocket to build Los Angeles a stadium, that’s where it was going to be located. 

The city had zero money for any of its lofty and various Ravine plans (lake/college/zoo/expansion of the Police Academy, etc., much less a massive ballpark). The idea that someone else would spend the millions to build a 50,000-seat stadium was a godsend.

There exists a persistent mythological narrative that the City had always planned to displace the people of Chavez Ravine for a stadium. Not only is that not true, as borne out by the simple chronology of events, but there is a paper trail to prove that contention false. A July 1956 Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks study, investigating the idea of a stadium in a dozen some-odd places around Los Angeles, noted this about Chavez Ravine, when it dismissed the idea: “The rugged topography of this area does not appear to be desirable for the proposed use,” adding “most of the property considered for this use is owned by the City of Los Angeles and is vacant. Abutting land is in private ownership and, except for a few small residences, is vacant.” So not only did they note the area to be vacant (when revisionists say it wasn’t) the Powers That Be still didn’t consider it useful stadium territory.

II. Regarding Public Purpose

The City had long since repurchased their land from the Feds, so it belonged to the City to do with as they pleased. There existed the stipulation—as written into the Housing Authority deed transfer—that the land be used for a public purpose. A lot of people will yell at you that “a baseball stadium is not a public purpose!”

Um, when there’s 56,000 people there, I fail to think of a better definition of public purpose. I’m not a sports guy and personally don’t care about baseball—but I do acknowledge there’s enormous public purpose value to the vast civic pride the Dodgers bring. Above and beyond the Dodgers, I remember when 56,000 people were crammed therein to see John Paul II perform mass. People also filled it to see The Beatles and Bowie and the Stones and Springsteen and Guns n Roses and Michael Jackson, and on and on (even Elvis, sort of, who filmed Spinout in the stadium parking lot) … speaking of race cars and public purpose, did you know there used to be awesome road races in the parking lot?

Anyway, I say that fits the definition of public purpose, though some certainly insist it does not, but…

… you want to know the kicker? The whole “public purpose” clause of the Housing Authority deed restriction was made void by the Court in a unanimous decision anyway, so there’s literally no reason for people to talk about it … but they sure do anyway. In short: the CHA transferred the land to the City with the “public purpose” clause, that did not in any way define what “public purpose” actually meant or entailed. Arguments over the public purpose deed restriction were made in trial courtrooms through the summer of 1958 in Los Angeles Superior Court. The matter went to the State Supreme Court, where it was decided the the public purpose restriction had in fact been fulfilled.

But oh! they continue, that may be true buuuuut….public purpose doesn’t have to be legal, it’s moral, and all that civic pride is only just making money for the owner, it’s therefore immoral and not a public purpose! Well if we’re going to talk about money: Chavez Ravine, before its condemnation by the government, containing all those La Loma/Palo Verde/Bishop residents, paid a yearly sum total of $7,400 in property taxes. In the first year after having opened the stadium, the Dodgers paid $345,000, a 50-fold increase of money into the City coffers. Over the last sixty years the Dodgers have paid nearly a billion dollars into the City coffers just from property taxes. Not to mention the state and local taxes, employment opportunities, entertainment spending, and so forth. When the City spends money on roads, schools, wastewater treatment, public safety, and all that jazz, a billion dollars of that money came to the city via a private entity building a stadium on their own dime.

Again, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of public purpose in January 1959 (City of Los Angeles v. Superior Court) when it said that the contract with the Dodgers brought such enormous benefit to the City, and had thus fulfilled and nullified the deed restriction. After which, the California Supreme Court unanimously sustained its ruling repeatedly through 1959.

But oh! you will be instructed, the city should have built its own stadium, then it would be *ours*, and not in the private hands of dumb private people! Sorry, but as I just mentioned, in the late 1950s the City of LA did not remotely have that kind of money to build a stadium, and if we had, the City would never have received that $1billion in property taxes. 

But because I hear a lot about how the City lost out because it did not build its own municipally-owned and run stadium, let’s devote a few paragraphs to the difference between the privately-funded, and the taxpayer-funded, American ballpark:

Now remember, a privately-funded ballpark is as rare as hen’s teeth…for a reason. Yes, Walter O’Malley got two 99-year leases for $1 a year—cue the chorus of it’s a backroom deal conspiracy and he stole the land!—but the fact stands, he spent $23million out of his own pocket to build the stadium (oh, and before you say he was “given” the land, nope, he deeded land he owned, worth about $2million, to the City of Los Angeles, in exchange for Chavez land, worth about $2million). Then O’Malley spent his $23million to build the stadium, which, adjusted for inflation he therefore spent, in today’s money, $242million. That’s a quarter of a billion dollars out of O’Malley’s pocket to build the stadium, which, 62 years later, remains an exceptional stadium.

Conversely, from the 1920s to the 60s, all the major American ballparks were constructed as municipal stadiums, built by local governments, paid for by taxpayers. The last privately funded baseball stadium had been Yankee Stadium, and that was in 1923. So when people say the City of Los Angeles could have/should have built the stadium itself instead of having someone else do it, remember again, we didn’t have the money, and more importantly: municipally-constructed stadiums are crap.

You read that right, total crapola. After all, look at taxpayer-built Candlestick Park or Shea Stadium. Oh wait you can’t, they’re both demolished.  Milwaukee stadium, built with public funds in 1953, torn down. Kansas City, built with public funds in 1955, demolished. It’s an amazing fact to consider, but a dozen-plus major league baseball stadiums have been built and torn down just during the time since Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.

Municipal stadiums, being government owned and run, suffer (or, more likely, suffered) one and all from bad design, poor maintenance, and cost overruns. 

Dodger Stadium, though, being privately built and owned, remains as a monumentally important piece of architecture, and an actual, functional stadium. Because O’Malley said “I want the largest and most modern stadium in the world,” that’s what he paid for, designed by Emil Praeger of Praeger-Kavanagh-Waterbury. It’s the third oldest baseball stadium in the US, after Wrigley and Fenway (which both predate WWI). 

And irrespective of it housing the Dodgers, it’s an amazing piece of Mid-Century Modern, with those folded plate roofs and inverted canopies and martini glass planters; it embodies all the futuristic optimism that defines postwar Southern California.

Here in Los Angeles the last time we built a stadium was in Inglewood. It opened a couple years ago, after a guy named Stan Kroenke spent three billion of his own dollars on the thing. Now he’s on the hook to make sure his investment pays off. If it were run by local government, well, you know how that would go. 

III. Illegal Backdoor Deals!

The stadium and the team is there in Chavez Ravine, and you will be told “it’s because of illegal backdoor deals!”

Um, no. Not only was the whole enterprise under intense public scrutiny, and approved by the City Council after lengthy debate, and approved by the courts (up to and including the California Supreme Court), it actually went to the voters. The terms of the much-debated October 1957 contract were pretty simple: O’Malley would deed a piece of land to the City (Wrigley Field) valued by city appraisers at $2.2 million, and in an even swap, the City would deed Chavez land to O’Malley, valued at city appraisers at $2.2 million. Then, O’Malley would build a 50,000-seat stadium out of his own pocket.

This was put before the City Council, who approved it.

It was then handed to the People of Los Angeles who, like the City Council, could have tanked the whole thing and put Chavez Ravine back to square one:

Not only was the Dodger contract approved by the voters, but the Ninth District—which covered the Chavez Ravine area and was represented by Councilman Ed Roybal—had one of the largest margins of approval for the referendum.

So, never having been engaged in an “illegal backroom deal” maybe I don’t know what one is, but I can absolutely tell you what it’s not: something endlessly hashed out in the press and by the courts, and thereafter being approved by City Council, and then being approved by the majority of the voters. The Council or the people of Los Angeles could have easily nailed the Dodger coffin lid shut and sent them packing, if franchise relocation and stadium-building had in fact been the violent and criminal thing we are constantly led to believe. Dodger relocation, the Chavez Ravine deal, and so forth: exactly the polar opposite of anything illegal or “backdoor.”

One more thing. In June 1958, after the voters approved Dodger Stadium, Judge Arnold Praeger said “I don’t care what the City Council and people of Los Angeles say, I rule the City’s contract with the Dodgers as invalid!” At which point the California State Supreme Court voted unanimously (7-0) to reverse Praeger’s decision, and Chief Justice Phil B. Gibson embraced the Supreme Court ruling, to uphold the contract between the City of Los Angeles and the Dodgers, for which the citizens of Los Angeles had voted. Again, literally the opposite of a backdoor deal.

Anyway. Groundbreaking for the stadium is September 1959, and it opens in April 1962, and that is that. Hey, I don’t know from baseball, but there are few things I love more than a Japanese garden.

Before groundbreaking, however, the final holdouts had to be removed. That story, coming up next in Part VI: The Arechiga Family!

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This is seven-part series. Its component parts being:

Part I: Chavez Ravine and the Mainstream Narrative

The master narrative, as promulgated by the mainstream media; its result, a reparations bill; the good and bad of that bill. Published Friday, May 10.

Part II: What is Chavez Ravine

Its beginnings, development, and evolution to 1950; its history of demolition prospects; and, can you call it Chavez Ravine? Published Sunday, May 12.

Part III: Calm Before the Storm

A snapshot of life in the area in the 1940s. The mythos of small-town life; Normark’s documentary work; a study of the people of Chavez Ravine; churches, markets, bus lines, etc. Published Tuesday, May 14.

Part IV: The Rise and Fall of Elysian Park Heights

A history of public housing; Neutra’s Elysian Park Heights project; its proponents and opponents; the area’s demolition; the downfall of public housing, and its relationship to anticommunism; land use after the demolition and nullification of the contract. Published Thursday, May 16.

Part V: Here Come the Dodgers

About the Dodgers; what constitutes public purpose; an illegal backroom deal? Published today, Monday, May 20.

Part VI: The Arechiga Family

The Arechiga family history to 1950; eviction from Malvina Street; eventual removal in May 1959; the multiple Arechiga houses; life after Malvina; the next generation of Arechigas. To be published Thursday, May 23.

Part VII: In Summation, plus Odds and Ends

Key takeaways; plus a collection of *other* commonly-held beliefs about Chavez Ravine, conclusively debunked. To be published Sunday, May 26.

If you have comments or corrections, please don’t hesitate to write me at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com.

The story so far: In Part I, we outlined how the habitual narrative—including most everything that made it into the Reparations Bill—is a mixture of urban legend, conspiracy theory, manipulated facts, confirmation bias, and outright nonsense. In Part II, we examined the area’s genesis and growth into the 1940s. In Part III, we looked at a snapshot of life in the Ravine in the 1940s, immediately before the turn of events that would erase the neighborhoods and reshape Chavez Ravine forever.

And why was Chavez Ravine depopulated and demolished? Because the City knew best! Read all about it:

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It’s a sunny summer day in 1950. You live in Chavez Ravine. Minding your own business. You enjoy the open spaces, the fresh air. You love the yards full of ripe vegetables, the streets full of happy children, the hills full of grazing sheep. You get home from work one day—

—and you’re met by these two guys. 

The suit is very officious. He’s got a fellow in tow who translates into Spanish for him. That guy seems nicer, but what he’s saying is terrifying: “We’re here from the government, and we’re here to help you.” There are no more chilling words in any language.

Then they pull out this letter, hand it to you, and move along to the next house.

Good news, it says, we’re taking your home. 

The Mexican fellow is named Ignacio “Nacho” Lopez.  He’s a Spanish-language newspaper publisher and civic activist.

The suit is named Frank Wilkinson. He’s an ardent leftist, and as such, he and his buddies know what’s good for you.

That’s a statement that may bristle some readers, but it is absolutely accurate. The common narrative is frequently “greedy Republican developers kicked out the residents of Chavez Ravine” but that could not be further from the truth.

Don’t believe me? Read on!

I. A Short History of Public Housing

It’s 1929, there’s a stock market crash, and faith in laissez-faire capitalism is shaken. Therein begins our nation’s shift into Keynesian economics, whereby large-scale macroeconomic state intervention is considered necessary, and therefrom we enact a welfare state and other programs protecting the working class against the ravages of capitalism. 

The Roosevelt Coalition steered us into a world of mass social engineering. From this came the fifty-some alphabet agencies, like the NRA and the WPA. Mass American slum clearance began in 1933 under the PWA, the Public Works Administration, and ramped up in 1934 via the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration.

Progressive Democrats believed that remaking the physical environment would improve living conditions and engender better social behavior, so, we take your home—despite it having fresh air and chickens—and put you in the projects, AKA huge reinforced concrete filing cabinets for humans. The courts said no, that’s literally un-American and you can’t do that, so Roosevelt said ha ha! here’s my Housing Act of 1937, which gave the State absolute power on the matter. 

And with that came the USHA, the United States Housing Authority, whose first Director was Catherine Bauer. Bauer was trained in Europe and under the sway of Le Corbusier, from whom blossomed large scale concrete mass housing. Bauer literally traveled to Russia to see how they were doing it, came back and said, well, if its good enough for the Soviets it will be good for America!

Meanwhile Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw, a staunch supporter of the New Deal, through LA’s Municipal Housing Commission, got assistance from the PWA to clear slums in 1934. He then established Los Angeles’s Housing Authority in March 1938 and contacted Bauer and said hey Ms. Bauer, be a pal and give us $25,000,000 for slum clearance. Bauer wrote Shaw the check, at which point Los Angeles starts taking people’s homes and businesses and began building housing projects.

Before the start of World War II—before we really started cooking building housing projects—we’d cleared 175 acres and built about 3,500 units. 

You will be told that there was something illegal (or at least special) about the removal of all the residents of Chavez Ravine for public housing, but, we literally did it all the time. Between 1937 and 1942 thousands were removed for the construction of Ramona Gardens, Pico Gardens, Pueblo Del Rio, Rancho San Pedro, Aliso Village, William Mead, Estrada Courts, Rose Hill Courts, Avalon Gardens, Hacienda Village…and were those all illegal evictions? You might say confiscating people’s homes is morally repugnant—you might be right—but it was typical and standard fare. Hard to argue something’s illegal when it’s cleared by the courts time and time again.

The aforementioned ten prewar housing projects were built via Roosevelt’s New Deal program. His successor, another Democrat named Harry Truman, had the less-remembered “Fair Deal.” Truman’s Fair Deal had a housing act in 1949, with greater powers than his predecessor’s 1937 legislation: just under the 1949 Housing Act, Los Angeles cleared 276 acres of slums and built 4,350 units, at Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens, Aliso Apartments, Pueblo del Rio extension, Rancho San Pedro extension, Imperial Courts, Estrada Courts, Mar Vista Gardens, and San Fernando Gardens.

Here’s where you’ll accuse me of whataboutism, but, what about the two and a half thousand people forcibly removed by the Housing Authority from the area between First and Temple Streets, in 1949-50, for the expansion of the Civic Center? Or the 9,000 people removed for the Bunker Hill project? How are the people of Chavez Ravine special, and above and beyond every person whose home was taken and demolished for a school, police facility, fire station, civic/government building, or freeway? Point being, the idea of demolishing Chavez Ravine was neither new nor unusual, especially after the 1949 Housing Act (which demolished 400,000 structures nationwide).

It is often asserted that the people of Chavez Ravine are noteworthy or remarkable because in their case the government project wasn’t eventually built (neither was the vast early-1950s expansion of Rose Hills, cancelled along with Chavez Ravine, which took people’s homes and that didn’t get built either; no-one ever mentions other government projects that took homes and remained unbuilt, like the 710 Freeway extension).  Fact is, the Chavez Ravine homes were bought, paid for, and demolished, before the project was cancelled; the people to whom the lands might be returned had moved on. More to the point, the concept of Chavez Ravine Exceptionalism was argued in the courts repeatedly, and the government was affirmed as owner each time, irrespective of the project being cancelled.

Back to 1950: Chavez Ravine denizens get the letter that says we have to kick you our and remake the landscape in toto.  The Housing Authority chose that land because when the health department did a survey, one third of the houses had no toilets, and a quarter had no running water.

While a third were made from standard building materials, the other two-thirds were in poor condition or constructed of packing cases, or old lumber of insufficient grade to legally build with, and the like. The area’s tuberculosis rate was four times that of the city. A typical sampling of news notices regarding the area:

In short, Chavez Ravine was boilerplate slum clearance and project building, just like the two dozen other federally-subsidized projects Los Angeles had built. 

II. Elysian Park Heights

In Los Angeles, slum clearance/building public housing projects was a common and routine activity, but: our particular Chavez Ravine project was to be quite different from the others we’d built. A lot different.

What made the Chavez Ravine project—named “Elyisan Park Heights”—so dissimilar, was the scale and scope of what was going to replace the semirural sunny slopes. The Elysian Park project was massive, intended to put us in the league with the “big boy” cities constructing huge high-rise housing projects.

LA’s public housing had been, up to then, low-rise, two-story, comprised of open spaces with courtyard living. Here’s a handful of examples, to give you an idea of the traditional massing of Los Angeles public housing:

For Chavez Ravine, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, with the Federal Housing Authority, bought up 806 individual Ravine parcels, in an effort to build this:

Their plan was to chop down the hills, fill in the ravines, pave the thing in concrete, ring it with 24 thirteen-story concrete apartment blocks, and fill in the middle with another thousand units, in 163 two-story buildings.

Yep, large housing towers, just like the big projects in eastern cities, which by and large did not go well. Many large-scale postwar projects have had to be demolished because they became ungovernable and dangerous. Los Angeles’ Elysian Park Heights: built on the same model as Chicago’s Cabrini Green—which fared so poorly, and we had to tear it down. Los Angeles’ Elysian Park Heights: built on the same model as St. Louis’ Pruit-Igo—which became so unmanageable, we had to blow it up. 

At 3364 units, Elysian Park Heights would have been larger than Queensbridge in New York; Queensbridge is America’s largest, and arguably the most dangerous, housing project. 

Let me be clear, I’ve nothing against public housing. It fulfills a necessary purpose and by and large, it is well-run and provides decent and affordable housing for people in need. But there is, statistically, a major difference between low-rise and high-rise public housing. Studies show that crime increases proportionally with height. Only 27% of government housing in America is highrise, and yet that 27% provides the vast majority of the problems, from drug dealing and murder, to unemployment and single parenthood. In every instance, highrise public housing has led to greater segregation by race and of the poor, impacted by underfunding and government neglect, which only perpetuated the cycle of both physical and societal decay.

People say “but Neutra was such a great architect! OURS would have been amazing!” Here’s Neutra designing the thing with all his Viennese best intentions. 

Of course you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no telling what Elysian Park Heights actually would have turned out like. That said, yeah, nah, I *am* gonna tell you what Elysian Park Heights would have turned out like, Neutra be damned: an isolated urban high-rise reservation. With the poor shunted off into concrete height-limit filing cabinets, the whole thing would have incontrovertibly descended into a dystopian nightmare of bizarre proportion. That’s just my opinion, but I sure have a lot of precedent to back up my argument.

Point being: EPH was to be obnoxiously huge like those projects back east, which are famously plagued by dead elevators, broken windows, drugs, crime, and malaise. Now consider, in Los Angeles we’ve had to tear down plenty of our little ones. We’re tearing down Jordan Downs and tearing down Rose Hill Courts. EPH would have just been a high rise version of Aliso Village, which we had to tear down because it was more dangerous than Fallujah. Miraculously, concentration and isolation in high-rise inner-city ghettoes was something Los Angeles had somehow managed to avoid. Oh, but don’t worry, Neutra will figure out how to give us a 3500-unit project that will magically prevent pesky modern problems like crime and despair. (Just so we’re clear, I’ve nothing against Neutra, a brilliant Modernist who produced many of the most compelling icons of the age, but his talent lay in designing homes and offices for his deep-pocketed celebrity clients.)

II. Who Wanted Elysian Park Heights?

I told you about Wilkinson, the Red with the black heart delivering Chavez Ravine’s death knell, and at this point you say “yeah, he just delivered the letter, surely the people who wrote the letter though were evil greedy developers doing back room deals?!” Naaaah, it was just the Housing Authority, publicly supported by socially conscious trade unions, International Ladies Garment Workers Union, League of Women Voters, NAACP, AFL, CIO, churches, liberal veterans and citizens groups. Fact is, progressive Los Angeles was convinced that razing slums and replacing them with public housing would improve living standards, reduce poverty and crime:

While on the other side of the ideological aisle you had conservative fellows like Fritz Burns, who argued that private ownership was the most important of American rights so let’s help get these folk up to code, and then leave them be to prosper…but nobody listened to him. The people of Chavez Ravine listened to him. But the Powers That Be didn’t listen to him or the people of Chavez Ravine.

And the people of Chavez Ravine, they wanted to be heard. In April 1951, the people of Chavez Ravine spoke up to protest the City Housing Authority:

But the City didn’t listen. So, in May 1951, the people of Chavez Ravine, mostly the mothers, stormed Mayor Bowron’s office. 

He didn’t listen then, either. Yes, Bowron was a Republican, but a liberal pro-housing mayor. Most importantly, the people of Chavez Ravine were saying to hell with you to the Civic Leaders of the Los Angeles Mexican-American community. El Congreso, and Asociación Nacional México-Americana, and other Mexican-American organizations were pro-public housing and were aghast that the people of Chavez Ravine had aligned themselves with conservative members of the City Council and members of the conservative privately-run housing industry, who believed in bringing already existing homes up to code. Mexican-Americans turned their back on liberal social engineering, stating, in effect, “because it’s not ethically or morally right to do this to people who like open air and yards and gardens and chickens, even if you did just get $110,000,000 in federal money to do it, don’t do it.”

Note in the news clipping above, the mention of Agnes Cerda. Below, the home of Mr. Manuel and Mrs. Agnes Cerda, 1026 Effie Street (George L. Gardner & Sons, 1925). 

It was from here she and Manuel ran the City Center District Improvement Association. The CCDIA, like the rest of the denizens of Chavez Ravine, abjured the left in general and rejected the entirety of the Mexican-American establishment in particular, up to and including Councilman Edward Roybal, the first Mexican-American elected to City Council since the 1880s. Rather, Chavez Ravine’s community organization sided with the conservative real estate lobby. Agnes Cerda, at the April 1951 hearings, loudly denounced the City Housing Authority as being un-American.

They fought the good fight, but all the fight in the world could not change the course of government.

III. The Demolition of Chavez Ravine

So the California Housing Authority buys up most of Chavez Ravine in late 1950, and demolitions begin and continue all through 1951, until it was mostly gone.

Here are the Sanborn Maps from July 1950 and August 1953. Covered here is all of Palo Verde and most of La Loma—a small portion of La Loma beneath Solano Canyon east of Brooks is missing, and we have none of Bishop, which consisted of homes the other side of (south of) Effie. But this is the majority of “Chavez Ravine” and for our purposes it is extremely illustrative:

So when people tell you that “Black Friday,” i.e. May 08, 1959, is when the bulldozers came and tore out all the homes, remember this image. There were 311 structures in 1950, and 80 in 1953, indicating that 75% of Chavez Ravine was demolished in three years. 

People will tell you that the owners of the homes were illegally evicted, coerced, forced out, none of that is true; you may not like what happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t repeatedly challenged and yet supported every step of the way by the courts, in lengthy, heavily scrutinized court battles.

You will be told homeowners were not compensated. A shameless falsehood: they were compensated millions of dollars, at market rate, and often above market rate.

There is a constantly repeated story, that homeowners were tricked and coerced and forced into selling because the “corporate developers” (despite there being no developers involved, corporate or otherwise, but, whatever) offered lots of cash to the first few homeowners who sold and to subsequent homeowners they said well, we won’t be able to give you that kind of money for long, so you better hurry, whereby owners were thus tricked and intimidated. There is zero evidence of even one such occurrence; were it true, it would have been mentioned in the myriad of court cases and appeals (certainly in the Transcripts of Hearings Before the City Council, which can be read at the City Archives, and definitely in the ever-fascinating Investigation of Public Housing Activities in Los Angeles, House of Representatives Hearings before a Special Subcommittee on Government Operations, US Congress, 83rd Congress, First Session, 13, 18-21 and 27 May 1953) where homeowners testified about the intricacies of selling their homes, including descriptions of dealing with Housing Department officials and policies. This tale regarding dastardly minor government bureaucrats provoking panic among homeowners because…they’re dastardly entered the public arena about ten years ago and, while sometimes credited to the late Mike Davis, has its actual origins in the typically anonymous vortex that is the internet.

To repeat the California Law under which Chavez Ravine homeowners were compensated (and under great scrutiny I might add): “the owner must be paid the highest price which the land will bring if exposed for sale in the open market.” There was no ceiling on the money paid either, and in fact, appraisals and thus monies paid often ran above assessed valuation, because, the court had to do three appraisals on each property and then were mandated by law to write a check for the very highest appraisal. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying developers don’t cheat people all the damn time. But in this case? It wasn’t developers. It was local liberal government functionaries with a ton of money dumped onto them by the Federal Government. Imagine, $33,000,000 of Federal money dumped in the Housing Authority’s lap…and we’re supposed to believe a bunch of socially conscious liberals made a concerted and meticulous effort to nickel-and-dime the poor and disenfranchised, just to screw them?

Really. We’re supposed to believe for the first time in human history, political functionaries are given the opportunity to throw somebody else’s money—taxpayer money—at a project, that they DON’T throw that taxpayer money at the project? That’s what we’re supposed to believe? That somehow there was in fact ONE time since the development of political systems and public administration in Sumer in 3000BC, that it was in this lone and particular case, it was OUR left-liberal housing authorities who decided “let’s screw the poor!” Well, you believe what you want, but I’m here to say that dog don’t hunt.

Having said all that, let’s look at some images of CR demolition.

IV. The Fate of Elysian Park Heights

So, why don’t we have Elyisan Park Heights, in all its overscaled-albeit-Neutra glory?

Because on December 26, 1951, the City Council, openly defiant against Mayor Bowron and the Housing Authority, cancelled the contract with the feds to build public housing… they’re like yeah no, we don’t like this anymore, we’re done. 

But then The State said autonomy?! Not on our watch! The Feds insisted that the City Council had no authority to cancel a relationship with the Federal Housing Authority, so, local government put it to the voters as a referendum called Proposition B in June 1952. 

The No on B people had argued that to destroy an established, functioning, low-income neighborhood like Chavez Raine, and in its place to plant the seedbed of a vast future high rise slum, was a terrible idea; their argument being, bring the houses up to code, and let the poor people have their yards and chickens.

The people of Los Angeles agreed and voted overwhelmingly against continuation of the Federal Housing contract. Twelve of the fifteen council districts voted to nix public housing. The voters defeated Prop B., 379,000 to 258,000—and yes, the three districts that voted yes, to maintain the federal contract and build lots of big public housing projects, were the three rich white districts that were never going to have to live in proximity to public housing. 

And with that public housing (and thus the Elysian Heights project) was dead. Or was it? Pro-public housing Mayor Bowron was furious, and insisted that I’m just going to build Chavez Ravine anyway. Thus public housing became a huge topic during the mayoral race for the next nine months, wherein Congressman Charles Norris Poulson and incumbent Fletcher Bowron argued about very little else besides public housing projects. Come election day, May 26th 1953, Poulson beat Bowron by a wide margin; voters resonated with Poulson’s intention to formalize the cancellation of the Federal housing contract. New mayor Poulson then made good on his promise, in July 1953, putting an end to new projects, which were Chavez Ravine, Rose Hill, and Pacoima (numerous other public housing projects that had already broken ground were allowed to continue construction, and Pacoima did in fact still got built).

And with that, Elysian Park Heights was dead.

V. Red-baiting Hysteria!

You will be told that nothing of what I just said matters, because in reality the project was cancelled due solely to the rabid Red Scare anti-Communist hysteria at the time. The common narrative is that the people of Los Angeles had no will of their own, no! They were duped by McCarthy and manipulated by the Red Scare political machine that tore through the nation! It is a fact that evil Joe McCarthy killed our noble, wonderful public housing (that sought to destroy Chavez Ravine).

Well, not exactly. The people were removed and their homes demolished by the left; of that, there can be no argument. The EPH housing project was cancelled a couple years later in part because of worries pertaining to socialism, and/or the communists involved in the implementation of the plan. Nowadays, any concern about socialism/communism is considered the bastion of far-right nut jobs, but back then, it was a rational and justifiable reaction to an existential threat.

For years on end, when I tell people that the destruction of Chavez Ravine was a product of the American Left and implemented by a communist named Wilkinson, they lose their minds. “You’re just trying to smear Wilkinson…you’re just a liar like McCarthy!” Fact still stands, Wilkinson was a communist, not a liberal who got labeled a communist by McCarthy (fact being, McCarthy never actually said one word about Wilkinson). Wilkinson joined the Communist Party in 1942 and remained an active member until 1975; he does, after all, discuss this fact in his autobiography; it’s mentioned in all of his lengthy obituary notices. Ry Cooder has a whole song “Don’t Call Me Red” where Frank is narrator—and calls Fritz Burns a bastard despite a) yes we can call you Red, Mr. Devotee of Stalin Wilkinson, and b) Fritz Burns was pro-people and you were pro-statist, Frank.

People will then say “yes he was a documented Communist as were many members of the LA Housing Authority, well what does it matter, they were trying to do good, but there was all this Red Scare hysteria! The reason Dodger stadium is terrible is because of anti-Communist HYSTERIA!” Yes dear, we’ve all heard about the anti-Communist hysteria:

It breaks my heart that Americans today know nothing about Communism and anti-Communism. They just repeat what they have been told by the media (see above), a Frankenstein of ludicrous tropes and shameless disinformation bolted together via the holy trinity of deflecting, misleading, and fabricating.

Look. I know a thing or two about the matter. Like Wilkinson, my father was a Party member. Leonard Marsak was a professor at Reed when he was hauled before HUAC. He invoked the First and Fifth and told HUAC to go screw. The man was blacklisted, and didn’t work again for six years. Growing up, we had Reds and ex-Reds over all the time, and dinner-table talk about postwar Party membership went on for hours. So yeah, it’s a topic I was exposed to and which I have since studied in no small measure.

With that said, I’m now going to tell you something you’ve never heard, which will make you clutch your pearls and exclaim “of all the colossal impudence!”

It’s this: “anti-communist hysteria” — really a thing? or a justifiable reaction to being locked in an existential struggle with an enemy bent on our subjugation and destruction? 

Bear in mind, my schoolteachers and the media fed me the same story you also received: that conservatives ginned up a ridiculous fear-mongering narrative in order to control the populace. And that the entire Cold War was manufactured as a political tool, so that we could be repressive at home and aggressive abroad. You and I both learned that at school, and it’s remained the Dominant Narrative ever since.

However, like so much I’m debunking here, that narrative is crap. I don’t mean it’s just an argument devoid of nuance and complexity—though it certainly is devoid of both; I mean it’s a palpable untruth. I’m not going to bog down the tale of Chavez Ravine with a refutation of your dearly-held beliefs about the big bad McCarthy Age (of course we live in an age where people yell constantly about genocide, yet know nothing about real genocide). Suffice it to say, the Soviets were some bad dudes, and their spies infiltrated our nation, to America’s great detriment. If you really want to learn more about the McCarthy Era (side note, there was no “McCarthy Era,” as McCarthy was just a bit player in the greater world of a broader and suitably legitimate postwar anticommunism) click here. 

VI. After the Cancellation

So, Norris Paulson is elected mayor—because he promised voters he would uphold the will of the people and of the City Council—and then made good on his allegiance to the people and Council, in nullifying the housing contract. LA had very recently built a dozen major projects and some were still under construction, and they were all completed (including the Pacoima project, AKA San Fernando Gardens, which strictly speaking didn’t break ground till after Poulson’s election), and the two that would remain unbuilt were the Rose Hill Courts extension and…Chavez Ravine.

Many people today insist that, after the final cancellation of the federal contract in July 1953, the City should have given the land back. 

Well, to whom? Those houses had been bought and paid for two and a half years previous. The people they gave money to, 2+1/2 years ago, bought new houses, or if they were renters, were provided relocation assistance from the city, and moved on.

Can’t give em back the old houses, because those were torn down or moved off site. Only thing left to do with those 300 acres, find a use for the land. As I mentioned in Part I of this post above, one family said “well you took our house to build public housing, and you didn’t build the public housing, so, that means we get our house back.” They took this argument to Superior Court in October 1953. The City’s title was upheld by the courts. The City’s title was upheld, again, in 1957, by the District Court of Appeal.

1953 goes on, and ends. 1954 comes and goes. 1955, and 1956, then 1957 trod by, and during all that time the Chavez Ravine area has been lying fallow. Not to say proposals weren’t floated: it was considered for a zoo, a cemetery (it was the dream of Maytor H. McKinley, President of Utter-McKinley mortuaries, to build a memorial park that would rival popular tourist attraction Forest Lawn), proposed to house a new jail, an expansion of the police academy, a golf course, a park, the Music Center (which when built on Bunker Hill displaced more people than lived in Chavez Ravine), and was even considered by Walt Disney for Disneyland.

Chavez Ravine’s schools are closed and shuttered, as were the churches, and the last of the houses were removed, save for a few that were stuck in the appeals process (they got more money…and the Arechiga family would have to, if they’d only taken the time to contest their property’s appraisal with the appeal board…as many of their neighbors had done). In May 1954 the City Council voted unanimously to spend 1.3 million dollars for the City of Los Angeles to get their own land back, by purchasing the land from the Federal government. The City paid half in May of 1954, and finalized the deal in July 1955. Thus it was owned by the City free and clear, and in the purchase language of the contract regarding the grant deed, a proviso stipulated the land be used for a public purpose.

And there we are. It’s the late-mid 1950s, and the nearly-empty land had been sitting for years, owned by the City. People wondered what to do with it…until…one day…

Thanks for reading Part IV, all about the Elysian Park Heights project! Come back for the next installment, Part V: The Dodgers Come to Town!

This is seven-part series. Its component parts being:

Part I: Chavez Ravine and the Mainstream Narrative

The master narrative, as promulgated by the mainstream media; its result, a reparations bill; the good and bad of that bill. Published Friday, May 10.

Part II: What is Chavez Ravine

Its beginnings, development, and evolution to 1950; its history of demolition prospects; and, can you call it Chavez Ravine? Published Sunday, May 12.

Part III: Calm Before the Storm

A snapshot of life in the area in the 1940s. The mythos of small-town life; Normark’s documentary work; a study of the people of Chavez Ravine; churches, markets, bus lines, etc. Published Tuesday, May 14.

Part IV: The Rise and Fall of Elysian Park Heights

A history of public housing; Neutra’s Elysian Park Heights project; its proponents and opponents; the area’s demolition; the downfall of public housing, and its relationship to anticommunism; land use after the demolition and nullification of the contract. Published today, Thursday, May 16.

Part V: Here Come the Dodgers

About the Dodgers; what constitutes public purpose; an illegal backroom deal?; a stadium is built. To be published Monday, May 20.

Part VI: The Arechiga Family

The Arechiga family history to 1950; eviction from Malvina Street; eventual removal in May 1959; the multiple Arechiga houses; life after Malvina; the next generation of Arechigas. To be published Wednesday, May 22.

Part VII: In Summation, plus Odds and Ends

Key takeaways; plus a collection of *other* commonly-held beliefs about Chavez Ravine, conclusively debunked. To be published Friday, May 24.

If you have comments or corrections, please don’t hesitate to write me at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com.

The story so far: In our introductory Part I, we saw how, when it comes to that fabled place called Chavez Ravine, what you likely believe is untrue, your having been fed the disinformation-heavy Regime Narrative. In Part II, you were given an outline as to the area’s location, genesis, and evolution. Today: a quick snapshot detailing life in the Ravine in the late 1940s, before it changed irrecoverably.

I. Small-Town Life

People idealize Chavez Ravine the same way they idealize Mayberry. Small-town life has the sort of community we long for, the village culture any city-bred American fetishizes. The unlocked doors. The fresh air. The nobility of people who worked hard, walked everywhere, and whose children rode bikes and played baseball in the streets. Slow-paced, tight-knit fellowships where folks grew their own food and shared with the neighbors.

But any real small town (unlike the fictional Mayberry) has its shadow side. The outdoor toilets, the high rates of disease, the xenophobia, spousal abuse and sexual assault, etc. etc. That notwithstanding, people still abandon Los Angeles for Mt. Airy, NC and Tipton, IN and Abbeville, AL et al. seeking a lost and mythologized ethos. The tale of Chavez Ravine’s simple life might attract those folk—irrespective of any right/left political dichotomy (“right wing” homesteading vs. “left wing” anarcho-primitivism, say)—who lean into what’s now called New Urbanism, whose golden thread traces back through Thoreau to Epicurus.

Of course, Chavez Ravine’s story is made all the more engaging to mythologize, since the area died not of natural causes—in the traditional way small American towns have often fallen to decline via industrial consolidation, agricultural automation, and other decay-causing elements—rather, Chavez Ravine was murdered, its residents displaced by the government. Heck, I wrote an entire book about a people displaced by the very same thoughtful and benevolent government. That I did, in large part, in an effort to separate fiction from fact…just as I’m doing here. (Don’t forget to come back on Thursday for Part IV, which will have all sorts of stuff about the friendly fellows from the government.) But for now, let’s just look at that Mayberry-flavored life in Chavez Ravine.

II. Normark Images Set the Scene

1950 was a pivotal year for Chavez Ravine, the year the Housing Authority began its work to remove all the residents. But immediately before that occurred, in late 1948 a 19-year-old photography student named Don Normark began to shoot the area in detail (it reminded him of the Swedish immigrant community he had lived in as a child). Though Normark spoke no Spanish, he was trusted by the residents, who welcomed his photography. Fifty years later, those images resulted in the 1999 book “Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story.”

His images display in detail the people and lifestyle in Chavez Ravine. The text, having been taken from oral histories, is fantastic, but naturally flawed. There’s all manner of wild inaccuracy, e.g., that the neighborhood of Palo Verde was named by the residents after a particular green tree, and of course Normark’s book is the origin of the fancifully absurd myth that Palo Verde Elementary School had its roof torn off and was filled with earth.

Oral histories are valuable, in their way, but no scholar considers a single word valid without verification. Chavez Ravine residents, if in their 20s in the 1940s, were approaching their 80s when Normark conducted his interviews. I’ve worked on a number of oral histories with the elderly, and I can tell you from experience, they tend to make “cognitive leaps” to fill in gaps. And (for example, as is frequently the case of cops questioning suspects) memories become contaminated throughout the process of interviewing.

In any event, point being, great photos, so let’s look at a few, to get some neighborhood flavor:

III. Who were the people of Chavez Ravine?

Who were the people who lived in Chavez Ravine?  One hears regularly that it was “all Mexicans who’d lived there for generations” but again, it was one generation, and it bears investigation, just how Mexican?  The vast majority of its residents were native born:  70% born in America.  That makes them Americans.  Americans of Mexican descent, but at the end of the day, Americans. And of the 30% minority who were actually foreign-born, the majority of those people had become citizens. And of those foreign-born in Chavez Ravine, only 60% of those people were from Mexico.  The other 40% were largely Italian, or from Central Europe.

You hear a lot about how people lost their homes, but most residents of Chavez Ravine didn’t actually lose their homes, because Chavez Ravine (like Bunker Hill) was primarily a renter’s community; only 40% of residents owned their homes.  Specifically, of 1283 occupied dwelling units, 767 were rentals.  Monthly rent averaged $17.  Many of the homes had no plumbing, but outhouses.  Not a single house in all of Chavez Ravine had central heat.  The average value and/or cost of a home, $2000.

You will hear a lot about how the city wouldn’t pave streets, or pick up trash properly, which we’re often told is proof that LA was racist against Mexicans. But it was a rural area and simply remained so.  Consider this—the neighborhood of Alpine, adjacent Chavez Ravine (specifically, tract 115 of the 1940 census), is quite revealing through the statistical abstracts: Alpine had a greater foreign-born population than Chavez Ravine, with a far greater number of Mexican nationals than all of Chavez Ravine.  And yet Alpine, with more Mexicans than Chavez Ravine, had all the amenities of municipal services, paved streets, running water, regular trash pick up, street lights everywhere; and this was not an affluent area, but very blue-collar Mexican-American, and they had the same services as some bougie place like Hancock Park. As has been documented, many of the homes in Chavez Ravine were illegally built without permits, so the City apparently felt little need to pave streets, in what was a rural and renegade area (which is exactly what we find so appealing about the place).

III. Street Scenes of Small-Town Life

Note: the eight images in Section III, above, were shot by Leonard Nadel for the Housing Authority in 1950. They can be found at the Getty.

IV. Frank De Leon’s Market and the Bus Line

In 1946, the residents of Chavez Ravine banded together to get a bus line. Frank De Leon, who had a market at 1146 Effie, used it as HQ for the central committee to make this happen.

And such was life in Chavez Ravine: selling chickens, playing stickball, and getting a bus line!

And naturally, as I mentioned before, with yin there is yang, so, there must be a less savory side—

—which is an important part of understanding Chavez Ravine in all its nuance and complexity.

Oh, and as long as we’re on the subject of the vaguely unpalatable—Ravine residents were wining the war against the rats:

And that, dear readers, is a snapshot of life in Chavez Ravine in the 1940s. Join us next time when the 1950s dawn, and Chavez Ravine changes forever…

This is seven-part series. Its component parts being:

Part I: Chavez Ravine and the Mainstream Narrative

The master narrative, as promulgated by the mainstream media; its result, a reparations bill; the good and bad of that bill. Published Friday, May 10.

Part II: What is Chavez Ravine

Its beginnings, development, and evolution to 1950; its history of demolition prospects; and, can you call it Chavez Ravine? Published Sunday, May 12.

Part III: Calm Before the Storm

A snapshot of life in the area in the 1940s. The mythos of small-town life; Normark’s documentary work; a study of the people of Chavez Ravine; churches, markets, bus lines, etc. Published today, Tuesday, May 14.

Part IV: The Rise and Fall of Elysian Park Heights

A history of public housing; Neutra’s Elysian Park Heights project; its proponents and opponents; the area’s demolition; the downfall of public housing, and its relationship to anticommunism; land use after the demolition and nullification of the contract. To be published Thursday, May 16.

Part V: Here Come the Dodgers

About the Dodgers; what constitutes public purpose; an illegal backroom deal?; a stadium is built. To be published Saturday, May 18.

Part VI: The Arechiga Family

The Arechiga family history to 1950; eviction from Malvina Street; eventual removal in May 1959; the multiple Arechiga houses; life after Malvina; the next generation of Arechigas. To be published Monday, May 20.

Part VII: In Summation, plus Odds and Ends

Key takeaways; plus a collection of *other* commonly-held beliefs about Chavez Ravine, conclusively debunked. To be published Wednesday, May 22.

If you have comments or corrections, please don’t hesitate to write me at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com.

Welcome back! The story so far:

Last time, in our introductory Part I, I pointed out that the whole “Chavez Ravine was destroyed by right-wing real estate developers who illegally evicted everyone because they hated Mexicans and violently displaced them and gave them no money for the homes they had been in for generations in a dirty backroom deal so that the Dodgers could build a ballpark and now my grandmother’s house is under third base” is a fantasy—a beloved fantasy—but a fantasy nonetheless. It’s one I’ve heard in various permutations for years; before there was social media, I used to hear it at parties and in barrooms. 

And each time, I was told (augmented by the teller’s self-satisfied nod) this was the hidden history. The story no-one knows because it’s the history that doesn’t get taught, it’s the history that’s suppressed. Because all we’re taught in school is how great those greedy colonizers were!

Ok boomer. Maybe your school taught the wonders of the greedy colonizers in, like, 1963, but I went to public school in the 1980s and even then we were already being hit over the head with the Howard Zinn reworking of history.

Consider the fact that the best-selling historian of Los Angeles is Mike Davis, a Marxist who goes on about how horrible Los Angeles is…and the best-selling historian of the United States in general, of all time and by enormous margin, is Howard Zinn, an ideologue who also peddles nonsense, and who sold two and a half million copies of his famously fact-challenged book.

Point being, it’s time to tell the actual history that doesn’t get taught…

Today’s episode: we begin at the beginning and ask, what is this Chavez Ravine of which you speak, anyway?

I. Spanish Colonization, to the Mexican Revolution of 1910

We’ll start way back. So it’s 1542, and the Spaniards explore the coast as far north as Santa Barbara, but then didn’t bother actually settling the land for another 200 years. In 1769 they began the system of colonization, establishing three presidios and twenty-one missions up the coast. In 1777 an independent civil pueblo was established in San Jose, and down in Southern California they followed suit, when in 1781 the Spanish government said okey-doke, send some pobladores, let’s establish El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciúncula (though some argue its original name was El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles).

The government of Alta California, 2000 miles south, didn’t care much about the new pueblo and let it alone. But then the citizens down there in the Mexico colony of New Spain, inspired by the American Revolution fifty years previous, staged a bloody revolution that claimed half a million lives, resulting in an independent Mexico. One minor difference from our revolution: Mexico established a monarchy and crowned an emperor in 1822, though Agustín I was executed by the military in pretty short order. In any event, California was now under Mexican rule.

Mexico famously dismantled the mission system of Alta California and began handing out land grants for ranchos, beginning in 1834. It was during this time that a man named Julián Antonio Chávez traveled to Alta California from the east.

Chávez arrived in Los Angeles, got involved in local politics, and in 1838 became the town’s assistant mayor (suplente alcalde), and served as a judge on the Court of Sessions, mediating water and cattle disputes.

California was under the Mexican flag for 25 years, until a war began in May 1846, ending when US troops captured Mexico City in September 1847. In November 1847, after the de facto end of the Mexican-American war, Julian Chavez purchased some land, 81.75 acres, from a man named Estefan Quintano. Julian’s brother Mariano purchased some adjacent land. This map, ca. 1865, gives you an idea of the layout of things:

What’s what: top, the lands of Juan Bouet, Mariano Chaves, and Julian Chaves (so is spelled on this map), now thickly populated with development between the river and the Golden State Fwy. Below, an arrow shows what would become the corner of Effie and Boylston; the most developed part of Chavez Ravine, the contiguous neighborhoods of Palo Verde and La Loma, were to the north of Effie, in the two blocks 5 and 6, and part of 7. Third arrow, the Solano Tract, bordered by Casanova Street and Solano Avenue. Bottom arrow shows the position of Lilac Terrace.

Above, similar map, from 1868. Note the Hebrew Cemetery at bottom, beneath lots 6 and 7 of Block 45, and the Roman Catholic Cemetery adjacent lot 7 (both would disappear long before Palo Verde and La Loma are established; the Hebrew Benevolent Society removed their dead to Home of Peace in Whittier by 1910, and the Roman Catholics disinterred to New Calvary). Again, above Effie, note lots 5, 6 and 7 of Block 46. That’s where Palo Verde and La Loma will develop.

Above, 1884. Note the upper area is no longer called the Stone Quarry Hills; it had been set aside for Elysian Park, dedicated in 1886.

Now remember, the area was once known as the Stone Quarry Hills (sometimes Rock Quarry Hills). Prior to the 1850s the whole city was built of adobe, but the newly-minted American citizens decided to start building in stone and brick. Locals go looking for clay and stone and this area is geologically fortuitous. It’s also outside the boundary of the city, and so a number of brick foundries sprouted up among the ravines (the first brick building in Los Angeles is built 1853). This is the perfect place for brick kilns because kilns are dirty dusty factories, but also, foundries require dynamite blasting of hillsides to get at earthen resources. (Note Block 3 of Lot 45, two images above, owned by Keller; that becomes site of LA’s largest brick factory.)

Despite being an area known for its filthy factories and frequent dynamite blasting, in 1905 a man named James Richard Riggins gets the idea to subdivide:

Here we are in 1910: the Palo Verde Tract laid out, at left.

Still no folks in the Palo Verde tract, or the tracts to the east that would become years later known as “La Loma.” The yellow squares at upper right are structures in Solano Canyon, which remain extant.

II. Chavez Ravine is Settled

Above, now it’s 1914. A new tract to the west of Palo Verde, Tract 2130, has been developed. 23 structures have popped in what would become the Palo Verde neighborhood, bordered by Boylston, Effie and Bishop. A handful of structures have been built east of Bishop, in the area that will someday be referred to by residents as La Loma. Beneath Effie, Keller’s brick factory and attendant industrial structures.

1921: The Palo Verde area is up to 64 structures now, including the school buildings at Palo Verde & Effie (which would be replaced by a large single structure in 1924; Palo Verde Street would be renamed Paducah). La Loma has enlarged to 24 structures.

What accounts for the increase in the number of structures, from none in 1910 to nearly 100 in 1921? That is largely due to this man, Marshall Stimson.

Stimson was an attorney and a bigwig in Republican politics (at the time of his involvement with Chavez Ravine, he was Chairman of the Los Angeles Republican League, later head of the Republican State Central Committee, our delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1912, and helped put Herbert Hoover in the White House). Stimson bought blocks 42 and 46 and began to market the homesites in lots 4 and 5 to poor Mexicans, because there were suddenly so many of them.

Why were there suddenly so many impoverished Mexican nationals streaming over the border? In 1910 Mexico had another revolution, resulting in the 1911 overthrow of President Porfirio Diaz. By 1913 the revolution—the famous one with Pancho Villa and Zapata—had claimed the lives of more than a million noncombatants. Not military deaths (of which there were about 1.5 million) but 1.1 million Mexican civilians were slaughtered, resulting in a flood of refugees streaming over the U.S. border, escaping Mexico’s murder and starvation, not to mention a deadly smallpox epidemic.

Stimson began selling homesites but even the starving Mexicans escaping war wouldn’t live so close to the brick foundries. People will tell you “he moved 250 families into Chavez Ravine in 1913,” but in reality, the number was less than 100; moreover, Stimson’s intention was to flip homesites to make money, and did so (he developed Watts in much the same way). There’s no evidence of his moving 250 families (not sure why people say he moved 250 families, when he himself said the number was 200), save for him saying he did so, in a statement made 40 years after the fact when he was 75 years old (reminds me of John Rechy, who was 75 when he came up with the Cooper Donuts story, an event that had supposedly happened 45 years previous…and which turned out to be a fabulation).

III. Brickyard Closure and Territorial Expansion

The large influx into Chavez Ravine was largely due to the October 1926 closure of the brick works, which took effect in October 1928.

Above, a closeup from the 1921 Baist Real Estate Atlas page I featured above. Note that at upper left, Palo Verde Elementary is a stone’s throw (or in this case, a brick’s throw) from the C. J.. Kubach/H. W. Keller K&K Brick Company at 1500 West Bishop Road, which covered forty acres, employed fifty men, and produced 80,000 bricks a day. Another massive brick yard—Los Angeles Brick Company, established 1886—was a bit further south at 1000 Chavez Ravine Road, and was similarly forced out of business.

People will tell you that the yards were closed because the “residents of Chavez Ravine banded together and fought the brickworks.” That is not true. The brickworks were shut down by the North Civic Center Improvement Association, who met at the Alpine Street School, 930 Alpine Street. Had efforts been centered in Chavez Ravine they would have met at the Palo Verde primary school. (Moreover, the NCCIA was headed by George Strong, who lived on White Knoll, south of Lilac Terrace; it spearheaded other efforts in the area, like installing a traffic signal at Broadway and Sunset.)

The 1920s had been a time of expansion and settlement; the mid-20s saw the addition of churches and schools. The Palo Verde School at 1029 Effie was built in 1923 and designed by Pierpont & Davis in Institutional Spanish Colonial; two years later saw the erection of another primary school at 1345 Paducah, designed by Winchton Leamon Risley. Also, the Reverend Benjamin Harold Pearson built a Methodist mission at 1205 Effie in 1923. The Los Angeles Diocese built the El Santo Niño Roman Catholic church at 1034 Effie in the summer of 1925; its architect was none other than Albert C Martin, who produced a modified, simple expression of Mission Revival.

By the mid-1920s Chavez Ravine had taken on a number of squatters, who built without permits or purchasing land (which would account for why so many structures were not tied in to the municipal waste system). It will be interesting to see how this shakes out when forthcoming reparations-themed land claims are examined critically:

In 1928, the Evening Express published an engrossing description of Chavez Ravine, a “picturesque place in a hidden and silent valley of great loveliness.” It describes the “humble shacks, unpainted except by the elements” and the usual suspects: a man pushing a tamale cart, a woman chopping wood, dogs sleeping in the streets. Houses are built of old packing cases, and surrounded by guava trees; at night the people dance as the sheep graze. Modern sensibilities will bristle at the 100-year-old tone of the depictions, but it remains an intriguing early portrait, by the always-fascinating Theodore Le Berthon. Read the piece in its entirety here.

Come the 1930s Chavez Ravine persevered—along with the rest of America—through the Great Depression, and building slowed considerably. The end of the decade saw us plunged into wartime. A WWII-era image from the chapel of Santo Niño:

The south end of Chavez Ravine saw the construction of the U.S. Naval & Marine Corps Reserve Armory, which broke ground in 1938; it was presented to the 11th Naval District by the WPA in October 1940, and its first reservists marched in September 1941, just months before the Axis attack on Pearl Harbor.

The scattered houses on the rise behind the Armory are on Lookout Drive, on Mount Lookout. To give you an idea as to the location of the Naval Armory in relation to greater Chavez Ravine neighborhoods, take a look at this aerial comparison from February 1931 and May 1960:

The Reserve Center plays an important part of Los Angeles lore in general, and Chavez Ravine in particular. Soldiers stationed and trained there became embroiled in violent altercations with local men expressing anti-American sentiment, resulting in the famed sailor-pachuco unrest of June 3-8, 1943, commonly known as the “Zoot Suit Riots.”

One more shot of the the area:

And, because I feel like I have to repeat this one million times, no, nobody’s house is under second base…

Ry Cooder famously sang “2nd base, right over there, I see grandma in her rocking chair” and it made a whole generation of people think that’s a real thing. Second base? Site of an abandoned brick yard. I know Cooder was being metaphorical, but that’s not how one single person ever took it.

Another map, this time from 1943:

II. Early Demolition Plans for Chavez Ravine

Much like Bunker Hill—which, before it was chosen for massive redevelopment by the Community Redevelopment Agency in 1949, had weathered multiple proposals for total demolition dating back decades—Chavez Ravine had outlasted other redevelopment plans.

In 1935, the entire area of Palo Verde and La Loma was slated for redevelopment:

It was the intention of the Municipal Housing Commission to replace the “shacks” with “artistic, ultra-modern homes and apartments”—

This was part of Mayor Shaw’s slum clearance plan that began in 1934, dependent on Federal money. After the passage of Roosevelt’s 1937 Housing Act, Shaw and the City Council established the Los Angeles Housing Authority in March 1938. By August Shaw had secured $25million in Federal monies for slum clearance (which his mayoral successor Fletcher Bowron used to appropriate and clear 175 acres to build ten housing projects by early 1942), but by that time, Chavez Ravine had been earmarked for a new project:

This was to be the Pacific Mercado World Mart and Exhibition, a 400-acre affair to open in 1940, and hosting a World’s Fair to commemorate Cabrillo in 1942. It would have consumed all of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop:

But that was not to be, either. Much of the area was taken by the Feds for the aforementioned Naval/Marine Reserve Station and Armory, and with the onset of WWII, plans for Chavez Ravine stalled for the rest of the 1940s.

We will examine how folk lived their lives in the Ravine in the 40s come this Tuesday’s installment, but first:

III: Are You Allowed to Call it Chavez Ravine?

People will scold “you can’t say Chavez Ravine! You have to call it La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop!”

Well, you can go ahead and call the area those three names, and please do so to your heart’s content.

There is, however, no reason for anyone else not to refer to the whole area as Chavez Ravine. After all, when you’re talking about New York City, no-one yells at you “you have to call it Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island!”

For example, I have a buddy from Watts—whose family moved there in the 1940s—and were I to mention “South Central” to him, he wouldn’t scream “you can’t use that term! You have to call it Adams-Normandie, Jefferson Park, Baldwin Hills, Leimert Park, Crenshaw, Manchester Square, Broadway-Manchester, Nevin, Central-Alameda, Chesterfield Square, Exposition Park, University Park, South Park, Florence, Vermont Knolls, Gramercy Park, Vermont Square, Green Meadows, Vermont Vista, West Adams, Harvard Park, Vermont-Slauson, Hyde Park, and Watts!” He wouldn’t insist I was trying to “erase Watts” when I spoke about the places that comprise South Central as South Central. Because that would be dumb.

“But Chavez Ravine is just…a made-up name for the area!” Well, so are the names La Loma and Bishop. (Palo Verde at least makes sense because some fifty-year-old real estate developer named Riggins developed a subdivision, laid it out, and named it the Palo Verde tract.) People go on about how the communities of Bishop, La Loma, and Palo Verde were “founded,” except they weren’t founded, rather, some vaguely-defined areas were given nicknames: Bishop because it was somewhat near Bishops Road, and La Loma because it was on a hill. 

Consider Bunker Hill. An area bounded by Hill Street, Figueroa, Fifth, and Temple: when the area was laid out by Beaudry and Mott in the 1860s, it wasn’t known as Bunker Hill. But, there was a Bunker Hill Avenue that ran through it. About thirty years later, boom, the whole area had become known as Bunker Hill (at which point, no-one talked about Bunker Hill neighborhoods like Olive Heights anymore). 

See how that works? The part gives the name to the whole. Same thing happened here: the greater area adjacent Chavez Ravine became known as Chavez Ravine. Beats calling it Sulphur Ravine, right? Or Cemetery Ravine? (Actually I think that would be cool.)

And consider this: when you are a big muckety-muck, you get large tracts of land named after you—à la Van Nuys, Baldwin Hills, Griffith Park, Glassel, Wilshire, Silverlake, Sherman Oaks, and so on. Julián Chávez was an important person, so it’s an honor, for him and us, that the place in general is named after him. I would understand if people got in a twist had it been named Norris Poulsonland, but it wasn’t. Why are you hating on poor Julián Chávez so much?

“But calling it Chavez Ravine is a racist thing the Dodger corporation made up to erase us!” Eh, nah. The vaster area, and those particular places within it, was referred to as Chavez Ravine dating back to the 1920s. For example:

“The people from La Loma, Palo Verde and Bishop never called it Chavez Ravine!” Really? Because here’s a picture from 1953 of a Palo Verde woman literally referring to her neighborhood as Chavez Ravine.

When Arechiga descendants fingerwag and inform us no resident ever referred to themselves as Chavez Ravine, here’s literally a picture of the family—Melissa Arechiga’s great-great grandmother Abrana Arechiga with her great aunt & uncle, residents of Palo Verde—referring to themselves as Chavez Ravine:

And again: here is the patriarch of the Arechiga clan, Manuel Arechiga, in Palo Verde, with a sign that talks about “the homes in Chavez Ravine”—

So, that’s my take on the whole “you’re not allowed to call it Chavez Ravine” directive from on high: anyone who feels the burning need to call Chavez Ravine something other than its name, have at it, but don’t be upset if your attempts to “school” the rest of us fall flat.

So now you have a decent handle on the what and where. Next time, in Chapter III: Calm Before the Storm we’ll develop a snapshot of life in Chavez Ravine, and talk a bit about the people and their daily lives in the late 1940s, before everything changed.

This is seven-part series. Its component parts being:

Part I: Chavez Ravine and the Mainstream Narrative

The master narrative, as promulgated by the mainstream media; its result, a reparations bill; the good and bad of that bill. Published Friday, May 10.

Part II: What is Chavez Ravine

Its beginnings, development, and evolution to 1950; its history of demolition prospects; and, can you call it Chavez Ravine? Published today, Sunday May 12.

Part III: Calm Before the Storm

A snapshot of life in the area in the 1940s. The mythos of small-town life; Normark’s documentary work; a study of the people of Chavez Ravine; churches, markets, bus lines, etc. To be published Tuesday, May 14.

Part IV: The Rise and Fall of Elysian Park Heights

A history of public housing; Neutra’s Elysian Park Heights project; its proponents and opponents; the area’s demolition; the downfall of public housing, and its relationship to anticommunism; land use after the demolition and nullification of the contract. To be published Thursday, May 16.

Part V: Here Come the Dodgers

About the Dodgers; what constitutes public purpose; an illegal backroom deal?; a stadium is built. To be published Saturday, May 18.

Part VI: The Arechiga Family

The Arechiga family history to 1950; eviction from Malvina Street; eventual removal in May 1959; the multiple Arechiga houses; life after Malvina; the next generation of Arechigas. To be published Monday, May 20.

Part VII: In Summation, plus Odds and Ends

Key takeaways; plus a collection of *other* commonly-held beliefs about Chavez Ravine, conclusively debunked. To be published Wednesday, May 22.

If you have comments or corrections, please don’t hesitate to write me at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com.