A Region Of Cities

Abstract

Abstract On 8 October 1957 the newspapers confirmed what the public suspected. The National League baseball team the Brooklyn Dodgers was moving to Los Angeles. Falling gate receipts at Ebbets Field, which suburban fans found inaccessible, together with the failure of squabbling borough chiefs to agree on a new site for the team, prompted the Dodgers to look elsewhere. Los Angeles, already home to the football Rams, beckoned with an audience of proven sports fans eager for a crack at the national pastime. The advent of nationwide jet passenger service enhanced the city’s chances, and bold action on the part of city leaders clinched the deal. Pointing to land formerly slated for “communistic” public housing, they forced out impoverished squatters and offered the Dodgers a site for their stadium at the heart of the metropolitan network of freeways. The Dodgers’s decision, together with the news that the New York Giants were also moving west, endowed Los Angeles and San Francisco with the mantle of major-league status. In the opinion of many Americans, the cities of the West had finally arrived. To some extent such a perception was accurate. With the passing of each year after 1940, the impact of technology and the flow of government dollars furthered the integration of western cities into the national economy and culture. But to the extent that such a perception implied that cities were new to the West, it was wrong. Western history had had a significant urban dimension from the beginnings of nonnative settlement. What was more, in the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth, western cities contributed to the shape of the American metropolis, helping to determine what modern-day living is all about.