Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story

I had to scream that all those hills had been leveled the house is torn down I saw it in my dream and exactly the way I saw it that's a way it happened this is the tragedy of my life absolutely I was responsible for uprooting I don't know how many hundreds of people from their own little Valley than having a whole thing destroyed it's sort of taken on a mythical sense in people's memories and then with the feeling that it was unfairly taken from them so it's no wonder that that people have strong feelings about it he said please your sons and baseball team let's go to the Dodgers as a family I'll never go again I hated it I didn't enjoy it it was like dancing on a grave [Music] 1962 and Chavez Ravine a few miles from downtown Los Angeles baseball fans crowd the bleachers of the brand-new Dodger Stadium to welcome their team from Brooklyn the stadium sits on 170 acres of freshly cleared land land that chests 12 years earlier was home to over 300 families the neighborhoods of La Loma palo verde and bishop the neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine [Music] me myself I loved it there I loved it because we used to run up and down the hills and we know every little trail around there in the neighborhood I don't think anybody when I move out of your neighborhood when you've been them in there so long and you know everybody like a big family Elysian Park was our playground you know the whole park was right next to it we have to go down there and swim naked in the LA River we used to make dams you know with rocks you know make holes and then swimming that dirty water we won a lot of trophies there in Elysian Park believe me we did football you name a baseball basketball we were good we will get to the playground play the opponent they would come up with a brand new uniforms and here we look like those goddamn East Side kids you know raggedy-ass kids playing baseball that other team you know he said how could these guys beat us there were great times for me beautiful time the processions the lighted candle the men would dress like Roman soldiers they had this big drum boom boom boom got through the hill it was unbelievable when I seen all these pictures I was really surprised and I never seen anybody with that camera who would take these pictures nobody wouldn't go up the hill and take pictures and nobody could afford a camera I was just I was looking for a kind of a postcard view of the Los Angeles I had a friend who had a car and we drove around looking and found this hill and walked up the hill and but then they looked down the other side of that hill I was standing on and and there was this community below me looked like a village dirt roads and I was just going up the roads and and people walking around but he'll still exist right there he proceeded up and top with it so I was I was up there someplace when I took the shot yeah he was up I'm up I speak yolibeth I made photographs in 48 and most of them in 1949 and I had very little luck and in showing them or getting anybody to even look at them [Music] fifty years later Don found a publisher who thought his photograph should be a book and for the first time they were seen by the people of Chavez Ravine got a card table a couple of chairs with a box full of photographs from 1949 and a crowd formed around and who were exclaiming and some burst into tears it was quite marvelous it was pentagram Oh every time I see a bouquet I feel like crying okay I could see the house where I was born like my daughters were going there my daughter was born my wife [Music] when I was a kid nice to model airplanes kite nice to fly went up a hill it was so clear many years back you could see cloud del rey santa monica and st. peter just the city hall was the titleist building and it was very nice up to me it was just like a little ranch my grandchildren I'll take him up there for Isis dad was he born up here says yeah and they see the pictures on a book it says Jesus poor kids I said yeah that's the way it was in those days you know at Birth put it and hand-me-down clothes and books and what-have-you but uh you know what we were happy we're happy people I used to make like sleds out of cardboard boxes from Kelvinator or gaffers sattler and that the stoves or whatever it came in and just slide down it was like a toboggan except it wasn't grass 20 minutes to get up there again that was a recreation when I seen all these pictures and I was excited about seeing him but then I was kind of mad resentful about what happened when we had to move out in July 1950 the city of Los Angeles sent letters to the residents of Chavez Ravine notifying them that they would have to sell their homes to make way for low income public housing Frank Wilkinson of the City Housing Authority led the project our city was the first city in the nation to get the first hundred and ten million dollars billion dollars in today's money for public housing in LA what we were going to build ten thousand units in Chavez Ravine was one of the prime places we found simply because it was predominantly vacant so you could build without displacing so many people it was something that really hit him hard you know something like that that happened I mean it's when they're gonna throw you out they were forcing us out really and they would tell us you don't sell we're gonna condemn your property you won't get anything out of it so that scared us a lot of people think the Housing Authority as a public entity has the right to buy your home they'll pay you a fair market value and then you are required to sell that's the power that we had and I prepared a certificate to every family so I visited there and I visited all those people saying when the project is built you and your family will be the first priority together you can pick the part of the project you want living that never happened they never build anything like that they did went ahead and build a Dodger Stadium and Richard Nitro and Robert Alexander were picked as the architects for the site and they worked for months designing writing doing beautiful plans as we had playgrounds Church fueled everything we were completely idealistic I'm feeling that what we were offering was better good for the city of LA but good for the people who were being displaced we were gonna have first crack at moving into those projects now if you could imagine a hundred acres of lush green beautiful hills and a handful of Mexicans living there with vegetable gardens and a few pigs and goats and a little church and you know being all condensed in a little postage sized tenement it just doesn't make any sense it simply doesn't wash we were ripped off my dad made a mistake you know the guys from the city came and knocked on the door and they offered him 9600 so my dad said wow you know I really made some money you know I've made a killing that's what he thought so when we moved out of there and my dad had to buy another house they were 9,600 there were 15 17 18 thousand dollars they didn't want to move they didn't want to lose their friends they didn't want to lose their homes that they built from nothing some people didn't move you know the story about what happened there but the majority the people moved when they got their initial papers because they didn't think that there was a way to fight it our community our Vario was well represented in world war ii and some of our GIS veterans were coming home from the wars and at that time that we're getting the news that the people were gonna be out rooted from the neighborhood and I remember my uncle meeting with some of these war veterans in front of my grandma's house it says there's a bunch of what they're trying to do to our parents and to us our government was good enough to take us out of our neighborhood to fight a a war we come home to what to find out that they're gonna outdo us from my neighborhood does a bunch of bull [Music] [Music] meeting over the leisure park with the city officials and community people and my grandma got up you know and she says he says you don't have no right to in Spanish right he says you know I have no right to buy us out or kick us out of our neighborhood none of my kids learned of my credential were raised and born here and then she says besides you bastard my son died for my property can you replace my son then she started crying that was it it was very sad that we had to move away cuz we were like a big family and a lot of my friends were there too my cousins and the one that really heard me a lot was my grandmother she we work very closely my father bought property out in Lincoln Heights and she couldn't go with us because we were too many I remember looking at my house I knew I wasn't gonna see it again I just looked at it once and I can I reduced to look at it again because I knew I was gonna break down my mother was already all broken and she needed somebody to be strong for her my father built that out I was born there it had a vine growing and it covered all the roof in the in the front and in spring it looked like it was wearing a white crown so we moved away it was gone and you know I've never felt about any other house the way I felt about that one [Music] by August 1952 palo verde la loma and bishop had become ghost towns the city's acquisition of the land designated for the housing site was nearly complete condemnation proceedings were underway against a few property owners who still held out it was in one of these hearings that the Elysian Park Heights housing project was dealt an unexpected blow we had a tremendous support for the program pretty well finished engineering and the architecture worked the only people who were opposing it or what is commonly called the real estate Lobby was headed up by the apartment house owners association and other people like that they called it creeping socialism they were trying to discredit it every way every way they could had petitions and initiatives to try to kill the program we should have been more suspicious than we were as I remember it was a very large site it was vacant land but the owner of that property was a prominent business person downtown LA and he demanded I think $100,000 and we were fighting for them over value he wanted as much as he could get when out of nowhere this Reuter for the property owner turned to me and said now mr. Wilkinson I want to ask you what organizations political or otherwise have you belong to this is 1931 he didn't say are you a communist he said what have you belong to I just turned to the judge and said I refuse to answer that question everyone any lawyer would admit is it done irrelevant and immaterial if that man had said that word I would still be here today and the project would have been built but my lawyer said nothing not a word he's just pale white he told me later Frank if I had objected to that question people would have known that I mean he was the communist cuz I have check to that place I said what about me he said well you have a problem to one of the top communist agents assigned to operation abolition his Frank Wilkinson recently convicted for contempt of Congress for refusal to answer questions concerning his communist party membership and activities I listened to this interview closely because in it you will hear Frank Wilkinson a communist agent explain his communist jargon in the committee hearings today you were called an international communist agent are you a communist until they have resolved this matter and declared these kind of questions under compulsion to be illegal and unconstitutional I've refused to answer the questions away from the committee just as I refused to answer them correctly to the committee what I've been told that was fired you know I'm out destroyed destroyed neutralized this way the FBI list says I was successfully neutralized me crews of television people arrived at the courtroom walked in to take pictures of those being mayor Bowen was removed he would have been a shoo-in in 1953 if this was very important the press at the time another paper crusading against the mayor powerin was wiped out and the new mayor Norris Poulson came in and started the negotiations to turn the site not back to the people but to turn over to Walter O'Malley and the bushland Dodgers we spent millions of dollars came ready for it and the Dodgers picked it up for just a fraction of that it it was just a tragedy for the people and for the city it was a most hypocritical thing he was possibly happen the city promising you a decent home for refusing to answer the questions of the house on American Activities Committee Frank Wilkinson spent a year in jail it was the beginning of Frank's own legal battle against the FBI which had targeted Frank as part of a deliberate effort to destroy the nation's public housing grams our lawsuit started in 1980 lasted 12 years it's lost hope and love the law firm who represented me cost him a million dollars in pro bono money it was an ACLU test case and we finally won our winning that we get a hundred and thirty two thousand pages on my life from 42 to 80 and in the Hearst destroyer self-esteem Here Come Mario Mario so right Louganis party [Music] so locator losses good little Sargeras babies [Music] Sallu llama yeah buddy [Music] see that trees over there yeah it's just this hill right they don't get down see in the stadiums see this hill and for the stadium sit we're looking right there down at the bottom the parking that they had a lower the hill so they can have room for the stadium see so they Lord they lowered the hill and that dirt covered the whole valley the pull of ready school it was a Grammar School it was a two-story building they took the roof off the school you know on the floors and everything and just left the walls and they just fill it with dirt and eventually covered it so in a thousand years somebody's gonna start digging they're gonna find a school now when I saw the bulldozers moving the land I said you know I'm never gonna go see a Dodger game though I was a Dodger fan I went to one reunion and they handed the Dodgers olive branches symbolically I was two months old when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles just wanted to clarify I was I was two months old and and honestly when we started working with the community I didn't understand what took place 40 years ago I didn't understand what happened in the communities here and and I think the lack of understanding on the part of the Dodgers was was perceived as a lack of caring what what kind of crap is that we give you a olive branch it just pisses me off that's a beautiful steel I love the Dodgers I'm a fan of them now always hopefully someday I was working safe to steal there's a helper character who never made it what is well what if they would succeed it with a project that they want to put there you think we will still be there that I have some but you know it is that something that we'll never know all we know is that we were uprooted from our neighborhood and we went our separate ways the really sad thing is that so many of us don't know each other we've all gone and we've done our things but it's like on a vacuum it's like we lost our brothers we lost our sisters so there's generations of people that will never know that they did know each other a lot of time passed I think it's about a dozen years and by then Dodger Stadium is built I was in town working photographing on assignment and I thought I would go visit the old neighborhood I was driving up these roads and I kept running into Dodger Stadium and I just couldn't figure it out and I thought there it must still be there if I could find the right Road to get in but I never could find the right Road [Music] you

Channel: Jordan Mechner

Views: 244,965

Keywords: documentary, los angeles, photography, mccarthy, public housing, HUAC, 1950s, America, eminent domain, latino, mexican-american, civil rights, history, film, dodgers, baseball, ry cooder, jordan mechner, cheech marin, community, pbs, california

Id: eBOtKhAAUHs

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020