City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles by Jerald Podair

Abstract

Reviewed by: City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles by Jerald Podair Andy McCue Jerald Podair. City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 366 pp. Cloth, $32.95. Jerald Podair’s City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles offers even more than its spacious title promises. True, at its core it’s about moving a baseball team and building a stadium. But, Podair goes further, tying Walter O’Malley’s desire to build his own stadium with a clash of visions by major elements in the city of Los Angeles. One faction had a vision of Los Angeles as more than a regional city blessed with [End Page 216] the movie and aerospace industries. The other, rooted in immigrants from the American Midwest, saw it as a replica of the small towns they’d left, but with better weather and more opportunities. O’Malley would ally with the former group as their vision showed a willingness to invest in attracting a major league team and helping build a stadium for it. Podair also expands his analysis of the divergent visions to examine the redevelopment of the Bunker Hill neighborhood just south of the stadium site. Bunker Hill, once an enclave of Los Angeles’ richest, had become a nest of rundown housing in old mansions. For those with visions of Los Angeles as an international city, it was an obvious area for new cultural institutions. Others wanted to save the neighborhood, or at least provide decent housing for the poor who would be ousted from the area. Here also, the internationalists won and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Music Center and the Disney Theater now crown the hill. But Podair is not merely concerned with the elites. He unravels the story of the destruction of the Chavez Ravine community. He notes how it was destroyed by liberal proponents of public housing, and then abandoned after a counterattack by real estate interests. He also notes how the photogenic eviction of an extended Mexican-American family and the televised destruction of their houses created the impression that the Dodgers were the force behind the destruction of the community. He then deals with how that image was absorbed into the consciousness of the Chicano movement and eventually assimilated into what became a strong fan base in that community. He has an excellent section on the “culture” of Dodger Stadium’s crowds, its multiethnic character and the veneer of unity it provides the city. These are all good facets of City of Dreams, but Podair is at his strongest when he’s dealing with the construction of the stadium and the political and cultural battles that led to its approval. In this way, City of Dreams is an update of Neil Sullivan’s The Dodgers Move West (1987). Sullivan was primarily interested in the different ways New York City and Los Angeles had interpreted the public purpose clause for disposing of property. Podair is more interested in how the skirmishes over the stadium contributed to Los Angeles’ emergence as a less insular community. The biggest advantage Podair has over Sullivan is the access the O’Malley family gave him to personal and team archives. As far as I know, Podair is only the second researcher to be given such access and he makes excellent use of it, mining memoranda on the conduct of interactions with the city, or strategy in court cases, or changes in stadium design. We are left with a more nuanced portrait of the strategies and options that presented themselves to O’Malley and the decisions he made within those options. Walter O’Malley’s [End Page 217] private thoughts on what should be done and how to do it provide a fuller picture than this process has had previously. Podair also isn’t afraid to turn his scholarship into policy recommendations, arguing that O’Malley’s willingness to pay for his own ballpark is a model for what cities should be encouraging. Los Angeles city and county provided funds for infrastructure improvements around the stadium, but O’Malley paid for...