This book here is a true history book. The author Eric Nussbaum has given was the reader a true look at the history of Los Angeles before it became the city it is today or even was a hundred years ago. He goes into the description of how Chavez Ravine was really named after a family, and how after decades and even well before the city was even close to the mountain the people who lived there had their own life and way of doing things and living day to day.
You get a glimpse at the early baseball in Southern California with the Angels of the early Pacific Coast league. They played at Gilmore stadium corner of Fairfax and also Wrigley field in L.A. I found all of that very interesting. He also moves on to the Zoot Suit Wars what happened and the after-effects. Still the people of Chavez Ravine were living okay with a few leavings some going to fight in WWII.
This would all begin to change after the war. Housing was a boon and regulations were changing. Also, laws were being passed to make it easier for the government to move people off the land which they wanted. How men of different areas wanted the land and what was thought to be a potential housing development soon was not to happen because you could not build anything there for it would collapse.
Now enter the man who owned the Times another who owned Clifton’s which was a cafeteria-style restaurant and had good food, also politicians then O’Malley and you begin to see that maybe if we build a stadium, we can get the Dodgers to move from Brooklyn.
This where Frank Wilkerson comes in for, he was trying to stop the building but was unsuccessful to the point of being put on trial by the city and labeled a communist. Later the author would discover over 200,000 pieces of paper written and surveillance by the FBI on him and they say Hoover was not corrupt. They even found evidence of a hit that was put out for him but did not let him or his family know. It was okay to destroy this man and family besides everyone else that moved from the Ravine.
You find out how they moved everyone and tore down their homes without getting their items out beforehand. The stadium would be built down into the mountain instead of up, and a school and a church were buried and are underneath the parking lot along with a cemetery. When the stadium opened the first day, they had no drinking fountains they forgot to put them in. Really a good book and also a sad one for the people living there and for what the government did to Frank Wilkerson, but everyone thinks it was okay. The author did a g job with all of the research as well. Very much worth the read.

"He may not have realized it, but when [LA Dodgers owner Walter] O'Malley acquired the [Chavez Ravine Dodger Stadium] site, he was also acquiring the previous decade of dirty politics and legal warfare and the aftereffects of an essential, almost primordial fight over what it meant to be a city. He was acquiring not just the Los Angeles territory but also the history of those three communities and the weight of the crimes perpetrated against them; he was acquiring the hangover from the war over public housing the had made this land available in the first place."

Not so much a book about baseball, or even the (misguided) use of public funds to build stadiums in US cities. Instead this is a look at mid-20th Century Los Angeles politics, and the fight (reflecting national trends) between collective principles and mythic individualism; between communist sympathies and crony corrupt capitalism; between public housing and private real estate developers, and between Mexican immigrants and the White elite.

This book has huge range, stretching from the Mexican-American War in the 1840s to Fernandomania in the 1980s. 'It manages to summarize the entire history of baseball (including it's made up origins) and dive deep into topics like the House Un-American Activities Committee. At times its range is a bit befuddling and it's hard to keep a hold of all the plot threads, even for the two main characters whose lives run through and frame the core issue of the book. The first was Abrana Arechiga, an immigrant first to Arizona and then to LA who lived in a vibrant community in Chavez Ravine and who refused to leave her home after it was commended to be replaced by public housing. the other was Frank Wilkinson, also an Arizona transplant to LA, who was a spiritual crusader who believed in the power of public housing and who was brought low by corrupt real estate and political enemies and the HUAC. Their stories don't have neat good guys or bad guys or happy endings, but do reflect the complexities of using politics to attempt to do good and the ways government can be captured and perverted by the rich, and how myths (of Los Angeles or of baseball) can be used to cover all sorts of ugliness.

Thank you Perseus Books and NetGalley for this free ARC in return for my honest review. I spent 3 years in Los Angeles in the mid-70's and fell in love with the area. And in the past year I have been fortunate to have read 3 different books about Los Angeles and its Urban Development, athletics and the Dodgers. This book specifically deals with those people who lived in what is now called Chavez Ravine, prior to the baseball stadium these were 3 different communities (Palo Verde, La Loma & Bishop) and most of the focus is upon Palo Verde and the Abrana Arechiga family. The family moved from Mexico to escape the revolution and ended in Arizona and from there made their way to Los Angeles to settle in these hills about 1 mile from downtown. So near, yet so far away, basically forgotten by Los Angeles until a dreamer, Frank Wilkinson, a wanderer and dreamer becomes involved in Urban planning, as well as the Communist Party. Was Frank a Communist? I guess by those old definitions he was, he certainly believed in affordable housing projects and once he got himself into a position of some importance he is the force behind the initial attempts to have Palo Verde, et al, be declared a slum and begin condemnation proceedings to have the land purchased and used for these Housing Projects. Oh gee, we want affordable housing, let's put it where the Mexicans live and displace them.
We trace the history of Wilkinson, the Arechiga family and the Dodgers move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in this well researched book. The Dodgers wanted to move west and LA was finally able to offer them this land in Palo Verde because most families had left and accepted the condemnation awards. But the Affordable Housing fell through and eventually the Dodgers get this land to build Dodger Stadium which was state of the art in 1962 and remains so through today.
We follow the hopes, dreams, tragedies and fiascos that all these interests are involved in and along the way we can try and figure out who are the good guys, the bad guys, and wonder if there are either. This is a story that most Angelinos know nothing about, and few outside of LA are aware of what happened and how it came to pass that the Dodgers moved to LA and were able to wrest this land from the city and from the families that had lived there for over 40 years. A very well written book that gives us a lot of the inside and unknown stories about Chavez Ravine. It is a fascinating book that will appeal to broad range of readers who will read this book from differing points of view.

You wouldn’t think that a book about the land that Dodgers Stadium currently sits on would feature baseball as a bystander, but that’s exactly what the reader encounters in Stealing Home by Eric Nusbaum.

Stealing Home is actually three separate stories and conflicts that mirrored similar debates that would eventually spread across the country. Baseball is more of a vehicle to discuss these topics. Is building a baseball stadium in the public interest and more centrally “Does the public interest trump the rights of individual citizen homeowners? This debate erupts in a clash between business interests and a group of rural Mexican immigrants who built the community from the dirt.

Underneath this central story is another deeper question “What does America want to look like in the future”? This question takes two forms: New Deal vs. Corporatism. On one side, you have these committed New Deal supporters who believe in the power of government through public housing projects to do great things pitted against business and corporate interests who believe that there are better (more profitable) use of lands that are considered public. This debate became wrapped in the Communist hysteria of the day.

The second is urban modernization vs. rural as the bringing about of Dodger Stadium required the wiping away of the older more rural area and its people. But as this book illustrates it did not happen quietly or without consequence even for the “winners.”

It's hard to tell all these interconnected stories in a coherent way but Eric Nusbaum does it in a way where I as a reader could both understand how the pieces fit together and was interested and engaged in what happened to the people we meet throughout the course of this book without feeling overwhelmed. Useful reading for baseball fans and those who ponder broader questions of America’s divisions.

Eric Nusbaum’s Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between vividly recounts the arrival of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and more precisely Dodger Stadium in 1962. The book unspools with a cast of characters but mainly seeks to convey three main narratives: the story of Abrana Arechiga and how she was evicted from the Palo Verde neighborhood, the home of the future LA Dodgers; the story of Frank Wilkinson who was committed to bringing a federal housing project, the Elysian Park Heights, to Los Angeles; and the history of baseball, or more precisely how the Brooklyn Dodgers wound up in LA. Those three narratives come to a head in the decade of the 1950s at Chavez Ravine. Nusbaum has amassed a wide array of sources such as court documents, governmental documents, newspaper articles, and oral histories to convey the story of Dodger Stadium. It is a book written with verve and attention to detail.

The history of Mexicans in the Chavez Ravine area--originally comprised of three neighborhoods, Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop—is not a story frequently told and thus, perhaps the most unique narrative in the book. Nusbaum does an excellent job unfolding the history of one family led by Abrana and Manuel Arechiga. The history of Mexicans in the Southwest was precipated by the coming of the Mexican Revolution with many winding up in Morenci and Clifton, Arizona working in mining, as the Arechigas did so. Later, in the 1920s, the family migrates to Los Angeles winding up in Palo Verde. Nusbaum gives some context for Mexican life at this time, including repatriation of the 1930s, military service during the World War II, and the subsequent racial baiting of the Zoot Suit Riots. The Chavez Ravine Mexican neighborhoods are meticulously detailed, but I only wished that we had a greater grounding of Mexicans in this community and how, and if, they interacted with other local communities such as those in Boyle Heights well captured in George Sanchez’s Becoming Mexican Americans, for example.

The history of Frank Wilkinson is also well drawn as he was drawn to activism around public housing viz. his work with Fr. Thomas O’Dwyer who oversaw the Catholic Church in Boyle Heights. Sadly, while Wilkinson was firmly dedicated to the mission of public housing, he was on the receiving end of red-baiting during the HUAC hearings of the 1950s. This scapegoating leads to Wilkinson’s demise from the mission of public housing and effectively turns his life into shambles as he is painted as a Communist. The third thread of the arrival of baseball to Los Angeles is a fascinating one. The winner in this fascinating book is baseball; the losers are the Mexican/Mexican Americans of the Chavez Ravine, Wilkinson, and the dream of public housing. The greatest irony of the arrival of Dodger Stadium is that the LA city administrators never checked on or regulated the Mexican community of Chavez Ravine for more than 3 decades. Only when it became a highly valued real estate commodity did the City take interest, and in this assessment, Nusbaum cogently argues, “It was also about a generational failure. These communities had been victims of neglect and systemic racism for decades.” The book is recommended for those interested in the history of Los Angeles, Latino history, and the history of Dodger Stadium.

This was a wonderful, beautiful read, a mix of family, city politics, and baseball. There are many books about the Los Angeles Dodgers, particularly about its move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. This book should become one of the most important ones, for the very reason that the battle to break ground at Chavez Ravine has little to do with baseball. For the City of Los Angeles to make Dodger Stadium happen, they uprooted the communities of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop and forced its families to relinquish their homes.

This book focuses on the Aréchiga family, later known for being the faces of the last holdouts of the Palo Verde community before being forcibly evicted from their homes in 1959. It tells of Abrana Aréchiga finding her way to a strange land that would become Palo Verde, raising a large family (and a chicken coop). It tells of a Mexican immigrant community facing racist housing discrimination, settling into the one of the few parts of Los Angeles they were allowed to, building a life, and calling it home. And it tells of how they fought for their rights to their land, as eminent domain overruled those rights.

A decade before the forced evictions made way for Dodger Stadium, public housing advocates knocked on the doors of the Aréchiga household. A bitter fight in City Council ensued over a planned housing project to replace the Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop communities. After the proposed project was shut down, the city worked almost immediately on bringing big-league baseball to LA, eyeing the former housing project site for a new ballpark.

There is definitely a lot of baseball in this book. There are the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Willie Davis, and Jaime Jarrin. The central baseball figure is Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, he and his grand vision for a ballpark as an entertainment park. These pages were where I got my baseball fix in, learning more about the history of beautiful Dodger Stadium, its architecture and construction depicted in fascinating detail.

But baseball takes a backseat to the heroes of this story, who lived in the forgotten homes below today's Dodger Stadium parking lots. Most of us will never experience the pain of losing a home of four decades, or of being the target of city officials, or of being acutely reminded of bulldozed homes at each very sight of a ballpark. This book does the very important job of telling the stories of those who did experience such pain, reminding us of the great costs those families unwillingly bore for the sake of a ballpark they did not choose.

The author vividly paints a picture of a community lost in what was once Palo Verde. The city politics are thrilling and page-turning, turning a normally dry, disillusioning domain into exciting drama. The different characters come to life, tugging at the emotions of anger and sadness, filling one with both intrigue and nostalgia. The author carefully weaves together three storylines as they collide at Palo Verde: a family and their home displaced, a housing official and his ambitions dismantled, and a city and its national pastime deified above all else.

So that we don't forget, I highly recommend "Stealing Home" for all Dodger fans and any Angeleno who has ever attended a game at Chavez Ravine.

I was unaware of the drama and happenings surrounding the construction of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles prior to reading this book. Given the political climate of the time, and how these ventures typically occur, I should not have been surprised with how the story unfolds. This book is fantastically researched and explained for the casual reader and avid nonfiction reader alike. The mixture of sports, politics, and family dynamics is appealing, and creates a deeper appreciation of how the process actually occurred. I now have a greater appreciation for those who were in the hills of Chavez Revine prior to the Dodgers taking over the land.

A fascinating look at the history of Dodger stadium not the baseball playing but the actual development of the stadium,The families that were displaced when the Dodgers came to town.Its sad to read of these displaced families Mexican Americans who lost their homes,A true view of what happens when corporate world wants your land up your home.#netgalley#persusbooks

Dodger Stadium is considered to be one of the crowing jewels among ballparks in the United States, nestled in a prime location with beautiful scenery overlooking the park that fans in certain sections can admire during a lull in the action. How the stadium came to fruition, however, is a very controversial journey that is still being talked about today, almost 60 years after its opening. This excellent book by Eric Nussbaum describes that journey, which took several twists and turns.

While there isn't a lot about the game of baseball or the Dodgers in the book, at least compared to the political aspects of the book, a baseball fan will still enjoy Nussbaum's writing about the team, some of its players in the early days in Los Angeles and also of Walter O'Malley, the owner who moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

While these passages make for interesting reading, they are not the heart and soul of this book. The true heroes of this book are not any baseball players but the Archeiga family, who refused to leave their home in Chavez Ravine, the area where the ball park was eventually built. When their home, along with all others in the predominantly Mexican neighborhood, was being taken by the government to make way for public housing, the Archiegas refused to accept the money that was being offered after appraisal by the government.

What followed was a great political story that would make a great novel – except that it was all true. This was where Nussbaum was at his best. Two personal stories are good examples of this. Whether he was writing about a man whose goal was to bring public housing to Los Angeles, only to be shamed by the crusade of an anti-Communism committee or he was telling the story of the local city councilwoman who was a key figure in getting O'Malley to move the Dodgers to the west coast, Nussbaum writes about the story in a manner that will keep the reader engaged, entertained and on an emotional roller coaster. Most of the time, it will be anger – anger at the politicians, at O'Malley, at practically anybody whose last name is not Archiega.

No matter what type of non-fiction a reader enjoys, this is one book that should be picked up and read cover to cover. It will explain why despite the beautiful view one gets inside and outside Dodger Stadium, there is a very poignant story underneath.

I wish to thank Perseus Books Public Affairs for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.