Dodger Stadium Research Articles

The Front House

The Front House Cord Jefferson (bio) Garrett started noticing spots on the lawn a couple of months after the new tenants moved in. Just one at first, where the driveway met the sidewalk perpendicularly. And then a couple more a few feet away. Yellow-brown depressions, like cigarette burns on a big green sofa. Too much fertilizer can singe pockmarks like that into a lawn, but Garrett knew that these spots were not made by fertilizer, the application of which, even in inappropriate quantities, would have suggested an attempt at vigilance and care. The new tenants did not care, which was made clear almost as soon as they moved in. [End Page 5] Receipts and wrappers blew over from the Starbucks across the street and collected in the grass for two or three days before someone cleaned them up. Once, Garrett saw a condom wrapper linger for nearly a week, until finally he put on an old winter glove and disposed of it himself. Technically, the lawn wasn’t Garrett’s responsibility. He lived behind the main house, in a low brick duplex with a “½” in the address. He shared a wall with Adam, a gay man about his age who puttered around quietly and ran a small graphic design operation from his living room. Garrett and Adam didn’t get much outdoor space to themselves—each half of the duplex had only a six-by-two-foot patio bedded with river pebbles that crunched underfoot—and so Garrett liked to think that the greenery in front of the main house belonged to all of them. The lawn, the towering avocado tree that bore tiny but edible fruit in the spring, and the neon magenta bougainvillea that shaded the front house’s small side patio. Garrett had moved into the duplex twelve years before the new tenants showed up. It seemed to him back then to be a reasonably priced, not too sad home for a single man in his forties. Only two families had lived in the front house during those dozen years. The first, the Brannons, had brought homemade cupcakes to welcome him to the neighborhood. He watched their daughter, Alice, grow from a guileless child into a strange teenager who talked primarily about Wicca. After Alice went to college, the Brannons moved to Phoenix and the Rodriguez family moved in. Glenna Rodriguez was an OB-GYN, single, with two sons and a niece she’d adopted as a daughter. Garrett and Glenna had an amiable rapport that Garrett had quietly hoped would lead to something romantic, or at least sexual, but it never did. The closest they got was late one Fourth of July, when Garrett, his fears dulled by margaritas, put his arm around Glenna’s waist as they watched the fireworks over Dodger Stadium. He turned his head slowly to gauge her reaction to his touch, only to find that she had no reaction at all. She stared straight ahead, [End Page 6] her thin lips curled into a tight smile as her face went from being bathed in darkness to colorful light to darkness again, over and over. After thirty seconds or so, Garrett realized that Glenna having no reaction was, in fact, a reaction, and he took his arm away. They never discussed the brief flirtation, and Glenna bought a home in Alhambra at the end of the summer. She never said good-bye to Garrett. She didn’t even come over to take back the salad spinner she’d loaned him. Eventually, Garrett started to consider the spinner a monument to his rejection, and he threw it in the trash. After the Rodriguezes moved out, the front house stayed vacant while handymen repainted the walls and executed minor renovations. Garrett used this period to sneak into the home one afternoon, the back door having been left open to air out the paint fumes. The place was sprawling compared to Garrett’s half of the duplex, and its emptiness only exaggerated the size. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a long galley kitchen with Spanish tile, and a living room with a wood-burning fireplace and eighteen-foot ceilings. When Garrett stepped into the...

¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues / En los barrios y las grandes ligas

¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues / En los barrios y las grandes ligas is a collaborative work from Margaret Salazar-Porzio, Adrian Burgos Jr., Robin Morey, and other contributors that spotlights the many ways that baseball has served as a suitable vehicle to examine the cultural and social experiences of Latinas/os in the United States. This dual-language text accompanies a new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH), which “blend(s) together the major league stories and the community stories in order to name our extraordinary, everyday heroes of the game” (116). Laden with several sources from the exhibit's collection of artifacts, oral histories, newspapers, scrapbooks, and player testimonies, ¡Pleibol! merges the exhibit's artifacts and narratives together with the authors’ scholarly perspectives about how baseball helped forge Latina/o community, citizenship, and identity.The authors proceed thematically, sharing stories of the project's artifacts and narratives to reveal how the sport helped shape the lives, identities, and experiences of Latinas/os within both professional and community baseball. They consider the diversity that exists within the Latina/o label, paying attention to differences in region, nationality, citizenship status, labor, race, and temporality, which all contribute to the breadth of Latina/o experiences over the past century and a half. The opening chapter discusses two pioneers in Latina/o professional baseball, Roberto Clemente and Marge Villa. Clemente is idolized by many Latinas/os, especially those who share his Afro-Latino and immigrant identities, known among fans for his stellar tenure with the Pittsburgh Pirates and commitment to humanitarian work and as someone who overcame significant challenges to find success in the sport. Similarly, Villa joined the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in the 1940s as the only Mexican American out of eleven Latina players. The significance of Villa's career, as noted by Sandra L. Uribe, was her ability to assert “autonomy, cultural pride, and athleticism” in the sport by testing “socially constructed notions of femininity” (39). One of the strengths of this text is its attention to the role of women in the sport. Chapter 3 includes the contributions of women such as Olympian softball player and broadcaster Jessica Mendoza, Colorado Rockies owner Linda Alvarado, and community players like Carmen Lujan. Scattered throughout these analyses are photographs, artifacts, and oral histories that NMAH and other community organizations have archived, emulating the immersive experience one may encounter in a museum exhibit.The authors also note how baseball figures used the sport to claim physical spaces. This is best exemplified through Mexican pitcher Fernando Valenzuela and Spanish-language broadcaster Jaime Jarrín, both from the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. After the controversial forced relocation of Mexican Americans from Chávez Ravine to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium, the team came to represent the traumatic incident to ethnic Mexicans in Southern California. The careers of Jarrín, who began broadcasting in 1959, and Valenzuela, who joined the Dodgers in 1981, not only helped the Dodgers attract Mexican fans but also helped Mexicans reclaim a space that symbolized so much of their history and community identity. Latinas/os also used the sport to exert their agency in spaces at the community level, especially in the workplace. Many Latinas/os, specifically recent migrants, found work in places like citrus groves and beet fields, often laboring under difficult circumstances. One reprieve these workers and their families found was the incorporation of baseball into their work lives, forming company teams and using the sport as a vehicle to fraternize with each other or organize to improve working conditions. Outside the workplace, players used the sport to develop camaraderie with their peers, both at the professional and community levels. When they interacted with each other, they found commonalities “based on their shared cultural practices and the common experiences of dealing with race and ethnic realities on and away from the baseball diamond” (106). Baseball gave them the chance to reconnect with their roots, validate their identities, and redefine what it meant to be “American.”¡Pleibol! is successful in two ways. First, it repositions community history alongside the familiar exploits of professional players and organizations, turning “whispers from the margins . . . into roars” (116). This framework lends credence to the validity of community history as a lens to study how the sport has helped Latinas/os confront challenging social and cultural conditions in the United States and should encourage scholars to seek out communities and stories about baseball that are not represented in this book. Second, ¡Pleibol! achieves the goal of making complex scholarly analyses accessible to general readers, using baseball as a gateway to introduce audiences to discourse surrounding race, identity, and citizenship. Even the casual reader will become inspired to visit the museum's collections in person or at least discover new meaning in the ways that baseball has shaped the Latino experience.

Sports facilities and the local property tax base in recovery

AbstractThis study considers if major league sports facilities help the property tax base in their vicinity recover from recession. The Great Recession is treated as an exogenous shock to the property tax base, and proximity to three facilities in Los Angeles County, California is used to predict the speed at which nearby properties’ taxable assessed value recovers. California is a useful context because state law provides a consistent and uncontroversial way to measure property tax base recovery. Using parcel‐level data from 2006 through 2019 for properties within 3 miles of the Staples Center, Dodger Stadium, and Dignity Health Sports Park, only proximity to Dodger Stadium impacts recovery speed. The results indicate that an average property a mile closer to the stadium recovers in 87% of the time an otherwise similar property a mile further away does, a finding that is robust to placebo. The study’s implications are discussed.

When antivaccine sentiment turned violent: the Montréal Vaccine Riot of 1885.

On Jan. 30, 2021, antivaccine protestors briefly disrupted efforts at Dodger Stadium to administer vaccinations against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Other protestors have disrupted shopping centres to protest

1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK by David Krell

Reviewed by: 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK by David Krell Mark McGee David Krell. 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 384 pp. Cloth, $34.95. The old jingle for Certs mints ads used to tout they were "two, two, two mints in one." Well, 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK is three, three, three books in one. Somehow managing to have it all make sense, David Krell takes readers through an exhaustively researched mix of baseball, history, and pop culture. There is plenty of baseball here, enough for any fan. Nineteen sixty-two saw the expansion of the National League with the addition of the Houston Colt .45s and what would be legendarily known as the hapless New York Mets. The year before, the American League had brought in the Los Angeles Angels and a second incarnation of the Washington Senators. As evidence of his extensive research, Krell provides detailed and often colorful profiles on the players who would make up the first rosters of these expansion teams. Drama on the field was heavy on the West Coast with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants needing a playoff game to determine the NL pennant winner. The Giants prevailed and went on to the World Series where they lost 4–3 to the New York Yankees. The Dodgers may have lost the pennant, but 1962 found the team playing in Dodger Stadium. Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley made sure his new stadium in Chavez Ravine had every amenity a player or fan might want. As Krell discusses, the road to building Dodger Stadium was filled with obstacles ranging from negotiations for mineral rights with the city, the construction of an oil well, and disgruntled residents having to move from the area. Krell reveals how Houston and New York used the leverage of the Continental League, which never got off the ground, in order to land their teams. Just like the Colt .45s and the Mets, the Dodgers and Giants rosters of 1962 [End Page 269] are colorfully and extensively profiled, from Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers through Giants stars Willie Mays and Willie McCovey along with lesser players. The New York Yankees, winners of the 1962 World Series against the Giants, also are given similar treatment along with a game-by-game review of the Fall Classic. Krell's grasps of history and popular culture are equally as researched. There are thirty-three pages of notes as evidence of his hard work, including telephone interviews dating back several years from publication. There are surprise nuggets all throughout the book. How many times are you going to find the rise and fall of "Romper Room's" original host Sherri Chessen and the sad life of Marilyn Monroe chronicled in the same volume along with the debuts of The Beatles and The Beach Boys and the complexities of pitcher Bo Belinsky? Readers are taken on trips through the opening days of the space race with President Kennedy making what then seemed an impossible goal of reaching the moon by the end of the decade. They are there as Kennedy deals with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which put Russia and the United States on the path to nuclear war for thirteen tension filled days. On a lighter note, Krell provides insight into what people were watching on television, what movies they were buying tickets for, what plays were shining on Broadway marquees, and what books were at the top of the bestseller lists. In addition to the usual digging into newspaper and magazine articles and videos, Krell tracked down many personal interviews, including some of those involved in the times like actress Stephanie Powers. When those who were making a name for themselves in 1962 were no longer alive, Krell uses previously published interviews as well as one-on-one interviews with their children such as Chris Lemmon's remembrances of his father, Academy Award winning actor Jack Lemmon and Katherine Quinn, widow of Anthony Quinn, about his movies screened in 1962. As an exclamation point on the depth of Krell's research...

Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American CultureCity of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles

Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American CultureCity of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles

¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and in the Big Leagues/En Los Barrios y Las Grandes Ligas by Margaret Salazar-Porzio and Adrian Burgos Jr.

Reviewed by: ¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and in the Big Leagues/En Los Barrios y Las Grandes Ligas by Margaret Salazar-Porzio and Adrian Burgos Jr. Jorge Iber Margaret Salazar-Porzio and Adrian Burgos Jr. ¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and in the Big Leagues/En Los Barrios y Las Grandes Ligas. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2020. 148 pp. Cloth, $28.95. As an historian whose principal area of research is the role that Latinos/as have played in American sport, it is a thrill to see the publication of this work. This topic has been long neglected by both academicians and those who write for the general public. While there has been much work done on how other ethnic/racial groups (African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and others) have incorporated American sports into their communities, as well as on how individuals of these backgrounds have gained entry into all levels of these athletic endeavors, the Spanish-surnamed male and female athlete has been mostly unnoticed (particularly at the non-professional level). Fortunately, that pattern is now changing, and this book is a perfect example of that trend. While Latinos/as have played all American games, no game has a longer and more important history in the barrios and comunidades in this country than baseball. This book is a direct response to the previous years of "willful neglect" of a key aspect of our communal and individual lives. This work makes abundantly clear that the game has been important to these people for a very long time across the entirety of the United States. Additionally, action on the field has not been the only significance of baseball. As the authors repeatedly and effectively point out, the diamonds in these communities have served as locales that have reinforced cultural identity, as spaces for assimilation, and as settings for resistance. Stories that highlight these elements (for both men and women) are presented throughout this work. This study provides broad coverage of the story of Latinos/as and the sport of baseball. The texts and artifacts tell the story of the game at the local and professional levels from various parts of the country. Additionally, it covers the story of how the "color line" was manipulated to permit, or prohibit, Latinos from playing at the highest levels of the game. Of course, it is necessary to spend time discussing "the Great One," Roberto Clemente. The chapter on [End Page 212] his life, and his various artifacts, is certainly well done. It warmed the heart of this fan, who grew up admiring the Pirate legend. Here was a man who challenged the way Latinos in the majors were perceived, and whose efforts off the field (as well as his brilliance on the diamond) helped make it possible to "the present and future of baseball [to be] Latino." While the Clemente story is certainly well known, the role of Latinas in the AAGPBL is less so. The sections on the way women made their marks on the field and off of (as with the discussion of the events at Chavez Ravine) are certainly important contributions. The connection between how the Latino/a population of southern California was treated by the Dodgers and how these people "claimed their space" in Dodger Stadium is unquestionably a crucial point of discussion. With the demographic changes in the United States over the past half-century, if the majors are to survive, then surely all of the teams (of course, some more than others) in the AL and the NL must reach out to the Spanish-speaking population (via radio, TV, and in-park promotions). This is clearly shown in the section of the book that deals with the often-overlooked fanaticos whose hard-earned money helps to keep the professional game going. Further, the sections on Linda Alvarado and Jessica Mendoza demonstrate that the role of Latinas was not exclusively on the field of play, or in support roles. These two Latinas have more than capably filled the functions of owner and national broadcaster. The section on earning money through baseball is fascinating. While it is obvious a chosen/talented few make multiple millions playing this...

Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between by Eric Nusbaum

Reviewed by: Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between by Eric Nusbaum Andy McCue Eric Nusbaum.Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between. New York: Public Affairs, 2020. 331 pp. Cloth. $28.00. It is one of the enduring urban myths of Los Angeles that the poor, Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine was destroyed to build Dodger Stadium. It is a testament to Eric Nusbaum’s research that he recognizes that there was no community known as Chavez Ravine, but rather three smaller ones—Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. There is no doubt they were destroyed. And there is no doubt Dodger Stadium rises where the 1,300 households of those communities once stood. But, as Nusbaum’s Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers and the Lives Caught in Between shows, those two undoubted events are connected by forces that were beneficial to the Dodgers and inimical to the communities, but driven by goals that have little to do with either. Nusbaum’s story is one that builds on the earlier work of Neil Sullivan’s The Dodgers Move West; Gerald Podair’s City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles and my own Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers and Baseball’s Westward Expansion. But, he comes at the story from a different, and much more human, angle than the earlier works. Stealing Home weaves together three stories: The Arechiga family, Frank Wilkinson, and the fragmented Los Angeles establishment’s campaign for a greater Los Angeles. The Arechiga family was a multi-generational family living in several houses they owned in the Palo Verde neighborhood. The matriarch, Abrana Arechiga, had migrated from Monte Escobedo, Zacatecas to New Mexico, and then to Los Angeles, settling at 1171 Malvina Avenue in the early 1920s. She and her husband built the house, raised their children, and then helped the children build houses on Malvina and neighboring streets. She had numerous male relatives in World War II and lost a son-in-law at the Battle of the Bulge. Then came Frank Wilkinson. Wilkinson is portrayed as a naïve and some-what [End Page 236] hapless villain—an idealist who winds up as a tool of the larger, establishment forces driving the growth of Los Angeles. Wilkinson was the son of upper-middle-class privilege. His father was a deeply religious doctor who believed in helping people and passed that belief to his son. As Wilkinson ventured out into the world in the Depression years, widespread poverty drove him to reject his conservative father’s religion while committing himself to the social gospel. He joined the Communist Party. Like many other committed leftists of the time, he saw public housing as a solution to the problems of slums, as poor neighborhoods were termed in those years. As large federal funds became available to build public housing in the late 1940s, Frank was working for the Los Angeles Housing Authority. A true believer, he and his family lived in the projects. As the 1950s dawned, new federal funds made it possible for the authority to expand its program of public housing. The Housing Authority identified Palo Verde and its sister communities as an ideal site. The authority began buying up the land from willing sellers or using eminent domain on the unwilling. The Arechigas were willing sellers. But when a judge ruled the authority’s original offer had to be cut from $17,000 to $10,000, the Arechigas dug in their heels. By late 1953, the Arechigas and a handful of other families were all that was left of the 1,300 households. They were holding out for their money and for the last shreds of the community they had built. But by then, the real estate interests in Los Angeles had revolted. Through pressure on the city council, initiatives put before the voters, and relentless criticism from the Los Angeles Times, they had brought about a voters’ rejection of public housing. They had elected an anti-public housing mayor and smeared Frank Wilkinson with his Communist associations. For the real estate interests, the...

Positive Presage: Baseball’s Arrival Signaled Better Days Were Ahead

Positive PresageBaseball’s Arrival Signaled Better Days Were Ahead Greg Ford (bio) Baseball was never my favorite sport growing up; I was a football fan. However, our national pastime has been part of my life, provided many memorable moments, and always served as an omen of better days ahead. I can still remember the first three Major League Baseball games I ever attended. The first came in July 1968, when my sister took myself and our mother to watch the Washington Senators—now the Texas Rangers—host the Chicago White Sox. What little I recall consists of the White Sox hitting homer after homer off Senator pitching, and when I recently found the box score from that contest, I discovered I had a something of a good memory. The truth is the White Sox hit only two homers that evening, one in the first inning by Luis Aparicio and another in the second by Duane Josephson. However, it was enough to propel them to a 4–2 win. The Senators, who went on to have another losing season, got a measure of revenge the following day, downing the boys from the Windy City’s south side 8–4. I became something of a Senators follower after that, which was a hard thing to be, considering the team’s consistent efforts at staying below average. The one time they weren’t was a year later, in 1969, when they finished fourth in the American League East with a record of 86–76. A few years later, they left Washington after two dismal seasons and found a home in Arlington, Texas. It was also in 1969 when I viewed my second live contest. My uncle, his two sons and myself attended a Chicago Cubs-Los Angeles Dodgers contest at Dodger Stadium. The Cubs, who led the National League East at the time, prevailed 4–0. It would just be a short time later that the men from the Windy City’s north side would suffer one of Major League Baseball’s greatest late-season collapses. That occurred when the New York Mets, the miracle team of that season, overtook them, and captured not only the National League’s Eastern Division, [End Page 75] but the pennant and the World Series title as well. Less than a year later, in late May, I got to see those same Mets rally to beat the Houston Astros 4–3 at Shea Stadium. One might ask that if I am not a die-hard baseball fan, then how come I remember those three games so vividly? Well, they were the only ones I attended during that stretch, so it’s pretty easy to recall each of them and what happened. Also, they took place during an innocent stage of my life, when I wasn’t paying much attention to the world around me, and when sports, whether on television or in person, was a place where larger-than-life heroes displayed their talents. If they wore the uniform of your favorite team, all the better. Also, even as a child, I understood the arrival of another baseball season meant the coming of better weather. Don’t knock it. When you’re growing up in the Northeast, winters and the accompanying snow, ice and freezing temperatures can be pretty depressing. In my case, I lived in Connecticut, a state with the stereotype of having great schools, because there isn’t anything else to do. Arguably, there is a lot of truth to that, and during the winter, it can get pretty monotonous, unless one finds a place to go sledding or skiing. Then, starting in March, spring training began. By early April, the New York Yankees and Mets—they were the two teams whose games were available for viewing in my area—would open their respective seasons and begin nearly daily broadcasts of home and away contests. That was especially exciting as a little kid, when, sometimes either team, or even both, would televise afternoon games. It was actually quite a treat to come home from school and watch a game, something I could not do with football or basketball. More importantly, as the baseball season...

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

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

"God Bless America" and Baseball's Anthem Controversies

"God Bless America" and Baseball's Anthem Controversies Justin Turner (bio) Many storylines from the 2016 and 2017 NFL seasons involved player protests during the pregame playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Baseball, by contrast, was largely spared from controversy. The only Major League Baseball player to kneel during the national anthem was Oakland Athletics catcher Bruce Maxwell, who first took a knee in September 2017. Maxwell cited inflammatory comments from President Donald Trump—who had referred to protesting NFL players with an expletive and called for their firing—as a motivating factor, along with the racism he witnessed growing up in Huntsville, Alabama.1 Maxwell's protest did not continue into the 2018 season, which was his last in MLB, and through the 2019 season, no other major league players have kneeled during the national anthem.2 Baseball has not been devoid of controversies over patriotic songs at the ballpark, but these have typically not involved "The Star-Spangled Banner."3 Rather, another nationalistic tune, "God Bless America," has been baseball's tonal tempest in the twenty-first century. First written in 1918, the Irving Berlin song carries religious overtures, reinforces the belief in American exceptionalism, and has become something of an alternate national anthem, particularly in recent years. Since September 11, 2001, it has assumed a prominent place at ballparks, often played or performed as part of the seventh-inning stretch. This relatively new profile, along with recent political developments, have made the song far more polarizing for baseball than the national anthem. "God Bless America" has a long history with baseball. The song became popularly known after Kate Smith's 1938 debut radio performance, and by the 1940s it was occasionally being performed at baseball stadiums. In the 1960s, the Chicago White Sox temporarily substituted the song for the "Star-Spangled Banner" in pregame ceremonies, prompting none other than Berlin himself to call for the latter's reinstatement. In response, the team conducted a poll and allowed fans to cast votes for the permanent pregame anthem, with "The Star-Spangled Banner" beating out "God Bless America," and "America [End Page 82] the Beautiful." "God Bless America" also persisted despite technological changes, as recorded popular music began to displace live organ performances at baseball stadiums. A 1980 newspaper article on the musical innovations at Shea Stadium, which abandoned organ music during the 1979 season in favor of contemporary songs, noted that a few old standards, including "God Bless America," were still played on occasion.4 Two specific performances of "God Bless America" at baseball stadiums demonstrate the song's importance in the cultural landscape. On July 20, 1969, baseball games paused to acknowledge the moment that the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. When game two of a Cubs-Phillies double header in Philadelphia was stopped, players lined up along the foul lines, the crowd observed a moment of silence, and the stadium played a recording of "God Bless America."5 Seven years later, the song spontaneously took part in a bizarre on-field incident. In the fourth inning of an April 1976 game at Dodger Stadium, William Errol Thomas and his eleven-year-old son ran onto to the field and attempted to set fire to an American flag to protest the treatment of American Indians. Before they could ignite the banner, however, Chicago Cubs left-fielder Rick Monday, who was positioned closest to the pair, snatched the lighter fluid–soaked flag and sprinted away. As Thomas and his son gave chase to Monday, Tommy Lasorda—then the Dodgers' third base coach—went after them, shouting expletives at the pair as security personnel detained them. The crowd erupted in applause and began singing "God Bless America," as a congratulatory message, "Rick Monday—You Made a Great Play," appeared on the stadium scoreboard. Lasorda later called it "one of the most heroic acts ever to take place on the field during a major league baseball game."6 "God Bless America" did not become a ballpark mainstay until after 9/11. The song developed a new primacy among patriotic tunes, thanks in part to an impromptu and emotional rendition by United States Senators and Representatives who gathered at...

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

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

Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine . By John H. M. Laslett

Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine . By John H. M. Laslett. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. xi + 219 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95, paper; e-book.) The cover of Shameful Victory features an architectural drawing of the site plan for Dodger stadium above a photograph of four Los Angeles county Sheriffs forcibly carrying Aurora Vargas down the stairs of the Arechiga family home on the day of their eviction from Chavez Ravine, May 8, 1959. Each image tells one history of Chavez Ravine and together they reprise another story told in a mural by LA artist Judith Baca, depicting Dodger stadium as a UFO invading as Mexican American, Chavez Ravine families look up in fear. Laslett includes Baca’s and other critical counter-stories in the book’s last chapter on the … mwillar{at}calstatela.edu

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

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...

Review: Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes, by Iain Borden; Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds.; and Car Country: An Environmental History, by Christopher W. Wells

Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 280 pp., 40 color and 40 b/w illus. $28, ISBN 9781780230269, by Iain Borden. Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013, 320 pp., 112 color and 102 b/w illus. $59.95, ISBN 9781606061282, by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds.. Car Country: An Environmental History Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012, 464 pp., 7 maps and 44 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780295992150, by Christopher W. Wells. In July 2013, a New York Times headline proclaimed “the end of car culture.” Though the summer driving season offered plenty of evidence to the contrary, recent data indicate that fewer Americans are driving fewer miles in fewer cars, and even forgoing the adolescent ritual of getting a driver’s license upon turning sixteen. Thus, the Times felt confident in declaring that the country’s century-old love affair with the automobile was finally, inevitably, running out of gas. But if the romance with the car is cooling down, studying its fraught legacy is still plenty hot, as a spate of recent publications makes clear. In fact, in the hundred years since the first Model Ts rolled off the assembly line at Highland Park, Michigan, the car and its social, spatial, and economic impact have been under almost continual scrutiny, producing triumphant Fordist narratives and muckraking antisprawl screeds in almost equal measure. More nuanced, scholarly studies emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century with The Automobile and American Culture (1980; David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, eds.), a notable early example that attempted a comprehensive analysis of what its editors called the “auto-consciousness” of the United States. The continued evolution of that consciousness is fully evident in the three books under review here, each of which tackles a distinct aspect of the culture of automobility. In Car Country , Christopher W. Wells tracks its environmental evolution; in Drive , Iain Borden scrutinizes its experiential representation; in Overdrive , seventeen contributors examine its urban and architectural influence in Los Angeles, the world’s original autopia. Unsurprisingly, all three books deal principally with twentieth-century developments in the United States, though each pushes these parameters in important ways. Car Country begins with the infrastructural consequences of streetcars and railways in the 1880s. Overdrive , which …

Dodger Stadium

Other| November 01 2013 Dodger Stadium Jason Bredle Jason Bredle Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2013) 2013 (81): 25. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2332030 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jason Bredle; Dodger Stadium. the minnesota review 1 November 2013; 2013 (81): 25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2332030 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Jason Bredle2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Three Tenors Antitrust Case: What Did We Learn?

IntroductionOne of the unforeseen aspects of the Three Tenors legacy is that the franchise has been elevated to star status in the U.S. antitrust community (Verscheiden 2007). This group of legal boffins is a niche audience admittedly, but the enthusiasm of their analysis has been noteworthy. The Three Tenors case has been extolled as an important development, clarifying the way certain legal principles will be applied in examining anticompetitive behavior in a joint venture context, with implications for future cases (McChesney 2004; Meyer 2010; Verscheiden 2007). But of what relevance is this to managers working in music organizations?This article will provide the background to the Three Tenors case, summarize the court case, the ruling of the Federal Trade Commission (hereafter referred to as the FTC), the backlash that ensued from lawyers and law professors, the 2005 appeal, and the backlash to the appeal decision. It will then provide some organizational analysis to look more deeply at how the problems arose, before turning finally to what can be learned from the case and its practical implications for music and entertainment managers.Unless stated otherwise, the facts of the case as outlined below are drawn from the Initial Decision (Public Record Version), published by James P. Timony, Administrative Law Judge on June 20, 2002, which is in the public domain and available online (FTC 2002). While Warner and PolyGram were both involved in the antitrust saga, they were treated as separate cases by the FTC, and this analysis focuses on the PolyGram case. The record label Decca also appears in the case. Decca was owned by PolyGram, and was the repertoire center, or location-specific-creativeunit (Bakker 2006, 92) responsible for the Three Tenors recordings within PolyGram at the time of the case. Decca, based in London, distributed its recordings through PolyGram operating companies, each responsible for sales in a given country. In the 1990s Decca's recordings were marketed in the U.S.A. under the label London Records, and its catalog assets are now owned by the Universal Music Group.BackgroundThe first Three Tenors concert took place on July 7,1990 at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The concert united Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti for the first time. The event coincided with the 1990 FIFA World Cup, launching a tradition that was repeated for future World Cups. PolyGram recorded the concert and it became the most successful classical recording of its era, selling more than twelve million audio units and over three million video units (FTC 2002). This first Three Tenors album was referred to in the legal case as 3T1 (and will be henceforth referred to as 3T1).The Three Tenors (Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti) united four years later for a concert on July 16, 1994 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. This concert was recorded by Warner, and is referred to in the legal case as 3T2.The third Three Tenors recording in the case was of an open-air concert in Paris that took place in front of the Eiffel Tower on July 10, 1998. In the spring of 1997 Ahmet Ertegun, the Chairman of Atlantic (a Warner subsidiary based in the U.S.A.), had met with Alain Levy, his counterpart at PolyGram requesting that Pavarotti (who was under exclusive contract to PolyGram) be released to record the project for Warner. Rather than release him (in return for certain considerations), PolyGram proposed that the two organizations create a joint venture agreement. The ensuing joint venture (hereafter referred to as JV) involved Warner distributing the recordings within the U.S.A. and PolyGram distributing them outside of the U.S.A. The parties agreed to a 50/50 split of profits and losses. An US$18 million advance was paid, ultimately shared between the parties, which also included the rights to market a greatest hits compilation and a box set. This third Three Tenors recording was released on August 18,1998 (and in addition to audio products included video and home television broadcast). …

Barrio, Bulldozers, and Baseball: The Destruction of Chavez Ravine

Barrio, Bulldozers, and BaseballThe Destruction of Chavez Ravine Andy McCue (bio) The cover of a Ry Cooder cd encapsulates one of the urban myths of Los Angeles. The illustration on the 2005 album shows Death driving a bulldozer through a hilly community of simple houses. Death sports a baseball cap and chomps on a cigar holder like the ones used by Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley. For those slow on the uptake, the cover of the booklet inside the cd case shows a picture of earth-moving equipment at the groundbreaking ceremony for Dodger Stadium.1 The myth in the music, and the story repeated to this day by some former residents and activists, connects two undoubted facts.2 The poor, Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine was destroyed. And Dodger Stadium stands there today. The myth is that these facts are logically connected, that the first was done to create the second. The myth is constantly reinforced by powerful photographs and film from the archives. The pictures that appeared in Los Angeles newspapers on May 9, 1959, showed Aurora Vargas being forcibly carried down the steps of her wooden frame home by policemen. The picture is presented as a poor Mexican American family torn from their home to permit construction of Dodger Stadium. Context can be everything. In some cases, pictures need their thousand words. Some of the context came quickly in 1959, but has largely been forgotten. Mrs. Vargas was part of the extended Arechiga family. Soon after the eviction, Los Angeles newspapers reported the family owned and rented out eleven houses around Los Angeles.3 The Arechigas were not poor. They were in a dispute with the city of Los Angeles about the value of the Chavez Ravine house. The squatters who inhabited the hills around the Arechigas property were poor, but they weren’t part of the story. The rest of the context, however, was quickly lost. It’s a story of a divided city elite, a disenfranchised minority community, and the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. [End Page 47] Chavez Ravine sits in the hills just a bit north of downtown Los Angeles. Its name grew from the quickest path from the old central area of the city into the hills, up a ravine owned by Julian Chavez. In the late 1940s, it was a community of about 1,100 families, overwhelmingly Mexican American and mostly poor. Crispin Martin, who played Pancho in some of the Cisco Kid movies, lived there, but his financial status was the exception. Some of the streets were unpaved. Utilities could be haphazard. There were solid houses, but there were also ramshackle dwellings teetering on hillsides. Goats and chickens wandered freely. An elementary school and a Catholic church served as focal points.4 Chavez Ravine evoked different images. The residents saw a close community where somebody always had an eye on the kids playing outside and you could count on help if hard times hit. The elites of downtown Los Angeles saw an eyesore. They saw roaming animals, trash, wooden shacks, and poor Mexicans. The liberals in the elite wanted to improve housing conditions and conservatives in the elite wanted to clean things up. Driven by World War II, and then Cold War defense spending, Los Angeles had boomed during the 1940s. The county’s population had grown 49 percent, to nearly 1.4 million.5 But the number of available housing units had grown by only 32 percent.6 Veterans and their families were living in Quonset huts in city parks and other appropriated areas. The elites knew they had a problem and the liberals among them saw an opportunity for public housing, then a byword of urban planning across the country. In 1949, Congress passed the Public Housing Act, providing funds to build eight hundred thousand housing units across the country. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles acquired $110 million to build ten thousand units at eleven sites. In October 1950, the Los Angeles City Council signed a contract with the housing authority for the project. The 3,364 units to be built in Chavez Ravine were dubbed Elysian Park Heights...

Policy essay on “Policing the homeless…”

in the fall of 2005, the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) pilot tested a place-based enforcement effort—the Main Street Project—to deal with home-lessness in a downtown section known as Skid Row through the use of fines and citations. After anecdotal evidence of its success, the LAPD instituted a large-scale version—the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI)—in September 2006, which placed 50 full-time officers on the street in downtown Los Angeles who were charged with breaking up homeless encampments, issuing citations, and making arrests. After clearing out specific areas, the officers maintained their presence for 7 days and then moved to other parts of downtown. The LAPD’s intervention was limited to the Central Police Division, which is located in downtown Los Angeles close to Dodger Stadium, the Staples Center, and the Los Angeles Convention Center, whereas four other adjacent divisions (Northeast, Rampart, Hollenbeck, and Newton) formed the comparison sites that received no official police intervention. The findings showed that (a) the intervention was associated with reductions in nuisance, property, and violent crimes; (b) there was no evidence that crime was displaced to (and thus increased in) the other four police divisions; and (c) there was some spillover effect such that comparable reductions for all three crimes were observed in the nonexperimental divisions ad-jacent to the Central Division, which had no apparent concerted police effort. In all, the results of this carefully executed study demonstrate once again that it is what the police do that matters in targeting places for crime treatment and eventual crime reduction (Sherman, 1995).

Disney, Dodgers, and the Urban Design of Los Angeles

In fascinating study of the confluence of popular culture and urban policy and politics, Eric Avila illuminates the complex and often subtle interplay of conflict and consensus that helped shape the Los Angeles landscape and mindset of the twentieth century. Tracing the evolution of the spatial and racial divides of the city back to the Progressive Era, he argues that the period from 1940 to 1970 marked watershed in Los Angeles history in which the heterosocial vision of New Deal liberalism was replaced by the homogeneous and privatized perspective of New Right conservatism. Such popular culture institutions as film noir, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and freeways-all of which came of age after the proliferation of the automobile-reflected and reinforced racial and spatial order of chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs in which privatized, consumer-oriented subjectivity premised upon patriarchy, whiteness, and suburban home ownership dominated urban policy making (pp. 4, 7). In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila adds the insight of cultural studies to our understanding of the history of the American city. He defines cultural history in its most simplistic manner-it is the amalgamation of the stories that people tell about themselves and their world (p. xiii). This broad definition allows historians to explore all levels of culture from art, literature and theater, to film, amusement parks, and baseball parks. Yet because twentieth century Americans were predominantly urban people, culture, especially popular culture, studied outside of its urban context is limited in what it can tell us about ourselves. By exploring cultural forms in the context of space and time, Avila argues that culture encompasses a struggle over the very identity of the city and its constituent social groups (p. xiii). In the context of postwar suburbanization, popular culture in Los Angeles both reflected and enhanced particular way of seeing the city that legitimized the political and economic domination of white, middle-class America.