All cities are corrupt, but during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Los Angeles had a rare kind of corruption—a corruption in service of middle-class ideals, a corruption determined to serve double duty as a sort of civic improvement league.
Oh, the city had its share of urban tension, as the Zoot Suit Riots showed in 1943, and its share of scandalous tabloid tales, as the Black Dahlia murder proved in 1947. It had a money machine in the Hollywood movie studios, a unique geographical opportunity to take advantage of the municipal sprawl allowed by the automobile, and a chip on its shoulder the size of Santa Catalina. Los Angeles was big—the city's population had already reached a million by 1930—and the Second World War established it as a major gateway to the Pacific. But what the city lacked is a sense that the rest of the nation, the rest of the world, respected it as one of humanity’s great urban centers.
Partly that was because Los Angeles wasn't, in fact, a great urban center. It was too new and one-dimensional. It lacked a downtown or anything resembling a municipal identity. And however much Los Angeles wanted to seem as sophisticated as New York, it also felt a yearning for the proper middle-class respectability that, for example, San Francisco imagined it had found as the supposed Boston of the West.
So, in essence, all the rival powers of a major city—the city reformers, the rent-seeking businessmen, the power-hungry ethnic politicians, and the goo-goo urban uplifters—set aside their differences and joined in the great project to make Los Angeles appear both exciting and decorous. And they would run over anyone who got in their way.
In the middle of the twentieth century, Los Angeles had a corruption that ran deep, deeper than in any other American city. Everything was contaminated, from the town fathers to the street sweepers, the Catholic Church to the inner-city slums. But it was dishonesty, venality, and exploitation channeled into something like the Better Business Bureau. The city government, at its peak, ran like a cross between Tammany Hall and the Jaycees. Los Angeles was the Kiwanis club of urban corruption.
Raymond Chandler tried to explain it with the grim sense of bottomless fraud that infuses such Los Angeles stories as Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1953). As late as the 1974 Chinatown or even the 1997 L.A. Confidential, movies were still trying to reveal the experience of Los Angeles. Disneyland, in its way, may have been the perfect image: the corrupt industry of fairs and carnivals turned into a middle-class attraction. But Hollywood's adopting of the Hays Code of film decency in 1930 stands as its own example of putting a veneer of respectability on an industry commonly imagined only a few steps removed from pornography. And in his new book City of Dreams, the historian Jerald Podair offers yet another symbol for Los Angeles in the twentieth century: the completion of Dodger Stadium in 1962.
Podair's thesis is as charming as it is nutty. Arguing that the building of Dodger Stadium transformed Los Angeles "from a neighborhood city to a world metropolis," City of Dreams walks the reader through all the twists and turns of the effort to establish the Dodgers in Southern California.
In Podair's telling, the story begins in New York in the mid-1950s, when Walter O'Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, decided that he needed to erect a new stadium for his team. Despite O'Malley's connections with Tammany Hall, he couldn't get the particular form of public-private partnership he wanted—mostly because the power broker Robert Moses, lord of New York urban planning, stood in the way. O'Malley proposed building a purely baseball stadium at his own expense, retaining ownership, while the city used eminent domain to get him a reasonable price for the land he needed. Moses wanted a multiple-use stadium, owned by the city.
Eventually, Moses got what he desired, with the opening of Shea Stadium in 1964. And O'Malley, making good on his threat to flee to California, got what he wanted when he received personal ownership of 352 acres in Los Angeles's Chavez Ravine, along with $2 million budgeted by the city for excavation and $2.74 million budgeted by the county for access roads.
It was the sweetest of deals, made all the sweeter by the fact that O'Malley would go on to build for the Dodgers one of the greatest baseball stadiums in history, while Moses managed only the misery of Shea Stadium, finally bulldozed in 2009.
Like the tale of Disneyland, the story of Dodger Stadium is usually told in glowing terms, a story of uninterrupted gladness. City of Dreams reminds us, however, that the fights over the stadium dragged on for several contentious years after the Dodgers' arrival for the 1958 season. The proposal to aid O'Malley divided the city "in deep and profound ways," Podair writes, and the divisions cut strangely across Republican and Democratic lines. For some, the passing of this level of public wealth into private hands was just too much to stomach, while for others, the stadium seemed a perfect use of public power to achieve a result that would create a downtown for the city and provide tax benefits for years to come.
Even while he carefully traces the battles over the Dodgers' new home, Podair clearly believes that the teams' supporters were right. The subtitle of his book is "Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles," and he insists that the stadium gave the faceless metropolitan sprawl a focus and an identity that it had lacked before.
At least about the uniqueness of Dodger Stadium, Podair is clearly right. The Los Angeles City Council did finally approve the deal, but only by the narrowest of votes. Opponents then forced a ballot measure, which again resulted in a thin victory, 52 percent of the vote, for the Dodgers. Still not giving up, opponents filed suit against the project, before the California State Supreme Court shut them down in 1959.
At last, O'Malley was able to build his masterpiece. Although the Dodgers are sometimes blamed for the destruction of the Elysian Park area of Chavez Ravine, the city government was the actual culprit, emptying out the ethnic neighborhoods in the late 1940s as it sought (and failed) to construct urban-renewal buildings for the poor as part of the nationwide movement that would see St. Louis erect the disaster of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. By the time O'Malley arrived, Chavez Ravine had sat nearly empty and mostly unproductive for several years. And in its space, the Dodgers built a wonder of modernist architecture: sunny and new, yet family friendly. Beautifully situated with sightlines to the hills and the city skyline, yet surrounded by acres of easy parking. A pitchers' park, fitting the Drysdale and Koufax-dominated teams that would win World Series for Los Angeles in that green gem of the national game.
Podair argues that the stadium created a downtown for Los Angeles and thereby helped fulfill the corrupt city fathers' vision of the city taking its place as a major metropolis on the world stage. The truth, however, is that Dodger Stadium belongs to Los Angeles only incidentally. The stadium achieves its effects not by being near the (mostly nonexistent) downtown of the city, but by being apart from the city. This isn't Boston's Fenway Park or even Baltimore's Camden Yards. Downtown remains visible from Dodger Stadium but unconnected, and the middle-class visitors from the valley could come and go in their cars without ever feeling that they had been to the city. Los Angeles was faceless for years before the Dodgers came to town, and it would stay faceless.
In other words, the Kiwanis club of urban corruption in Los Angeles wanted a national baseball team, and it was willing to use its powers to make sure that it got a national baseball team. Walter O'Malley came out all right in the deal, and so did baseball, with the triumph of Dodger Stadium to play in. But Los Angeles itself benefited little, and certainly less than Jerald Podair imagines in City of Dreams. The place was a corrupt hick town of a big city before Johnny Podres threw the first pitch in Dodger Stadium on April 10, 1962. And it remained a corrupt hick town of a big city for years afterward. Maybe that's what Los Angeles still is.