How Fernando Valenzuela Turned Dodger Stadium Into A Place Where Everyone Feels Welcome
As Los Angeles debates how to update the stadium and develop the parking lots around it, we should use Chavez Ravine's history -- both good and bad -- to shape a place meaningful to all.
The unexpected death of Fernando Valenzuela – especially on the eve of the first World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees since “Fernandomania”– brings to mind not just all the excitement Valenzuela created as a rookie in 1981 but also the critical role he played in created Dodger Stadium as a true multicultural “place” in Los Angeles. It’s also a reminder that the stadium’s role in the L.A. landscape is still evolving more than 40 years later, and it’s not clear whether the best stadium of the 1960s will be a true cornerstone of placemaking in the 21st Century.
Although Dodger Stadium was the best stadium of its era, the truth of the matter was that it was a pretty bad era (think Oakland Coliseum) – and it was long before baseball stadiums like Coors Field in Denver, Orioles Park at Camden Yard, and Petco Park in San Diego were used for placemaking purposes.
But Dodger Stadium has a complicated history with the Los Angeles and especially the Mexican-American community. Fernando bridged that gap and made Dodger Stadium into a place where everybody felt welcome.
The History of Chavez Ravine
The stadium is located in the filled-in Chavez Ravine on top of a hill less than two miles from Downtown Los Angeles. It’s right off the Pasadena Freeway and completely surrounded by parking lots in the best 1960s style. But in 2024 it’s almost impossible to get there. Freeway traffic is impossible, the queues for parking around the stadium are incredibly long, and parking costs between $30 and $50 for a regular game (way more for the playoffs). There aren’t very many other places to park around the stadium and there are few public transit options to get to the stadium.
Residents being forcibly removed from Chavez Ravine
And the backstory of how Dodger Stadium came to be was extremely alienating to L.A.’s huge Mexican-American population. Chavez Ravine had been home to a group of modest Mexican-American homeowners – one of the few places at the time in L.A. where Mexican-Americans could own homes. (The story is well-told in this award-winning documentary.) In the early 1950s, these homeowners were removed, some forcibly, by the City of Los Angeles to make room for a public housing project designed by the famous architect Richard Neutra.
But when Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley came to town a few years later looking for a stadium site, the L.A. City Council quickly pivoted, killed the Neutra project, and gave the land to O’Malley, who insisted – unlike other baseball owners of his era – on owning his own stadium. (That story – and its impact on Los Angeles – is well told in the book City of Dreams.) Although O’Malley realized he needed a Mexican star to win over L.A.’s huge number of Mexican-American baseball fans, that community never forgave him or the Dodgers for what happened in Chavez Ravine.
Walter O’Malley and Dodger executives with a model of Dodger Stadium
Then Came Fernando
As it happens, Fernando and I arrived in Los Angeles at the same time. Fernando was called up toward the end of the 1980 season and wound up as the starting pitcher on Opening Day in 1981. I came to L.A. early in ’81 for an extended visit but like so many people in those days wound up staying. As a young student in the urban planning at UCLA, which is renowned for its social justice orientation, I of course heard the Chavez Ravine story. But that didn’t stop my best friend Keith Breskin, later a prominent city manager in California, and I from going to Dodger Stadium all the time. We were single, we both worked downtown, and in those days it was easy enough to get to the stadium after work. Plus the Dodgers had a great team. And there was Fernando.
Valenzuela characteristically looks skyward before throwing a pitch in 1986.
I won’t go into detail about his exploits on the mound. But as the first major Mexican star playing for the Dodgers, he became a symbol – maybe the symbol – of the Los Angeles emerging at that time: No longer mostly white, with a rapidly growing Latino population and immigrants flowing in from all over the world. Simply by being who he was, Fernando gave Mexican-Americans a home at Dodger Stadium for the first time. But weirdly, it become a home for all Angelenos – it’s probably the most demographically diverse gathering space most people will ever experience in LA, which is a very geographically segregated city.
And they share what really is a very unique experience in understanding the whole concept of place.
The Dodger Stadium Experience
If you’ve never been to Dodger Stadium, it’s hard to explain the feeling that comes over you as you pass through the turnstiles for an evening game on a typical day. L.A. is hot and smoggy – especially near the stadium, which is 17 miles inland from the ocean. Traffic is miserable. After a long, hot day in traffic, culminating in a slow crawl up to the stadium, you’re in a bad mood.
And then you take your seat.
The seat itself is not especially comfortable. This is, after all, a very basic stadium built more than 60 years ago. As the sun begins to set behind you (unless you’re in the right-field bleachers) and the temperature begins to descend to a comfortable level, you get to look out over the peaceful Elysian Park hills beyond right field and exhale for the first time all day. It is the perfect antidote to L.A.’s big-city stress.
Dodger Stadium at dusk
Of course, after the game you have to get in your car and fight the traffic again, both in the parking lots and on the freeways. And here is where we must pick up where Fernando left off. Because while the inside of Dodger Stadium is welcoming, the outside is not. Welcome to L.A.
What Comes Next?
Urbanists have endlessly speculated about how to use those parking lots to connect the stadium at the top of the hill with the city below. (I even once pitched my own idea in the L.A. Times, which you can read here.) But nothing has ever materialized – and there’s no guarantee it ever will.
The parking lots are owned by parking mogul Frank McCourt, who managed to hang on to them even as he lost the Dodgers in a bitter divorce. But McCourt has always been cagey about what he’s going to do with them – which might be a good idea in notoriously development-averse L.A.
The latest idea is to build a gondola from Union Station, barely a mile away as the crow flies, in order to shuttle fans to the stadium. Local neighborhood activists don’t like this idea, believing it to be a stalking horse for development of the parking lots, which they view as a bad thing.
The proposed Dodger Stadium gondola
I confess to liking the gondola idea. In fact, a few years ago my colleague Kyle Shelton and I endorsed it, again in the L.A. Times. For the record the distance and altitude would be almost exactly the same as the successful aerial tram that goes from Downtown Portland up to the Oregon Health Sciences University, which was running out of land for parking up on top of Marquam Hill. And the truth is, even if nothing else were ever built up there, Dodger fans need an alternative to driving and paying fifty bucks to park.
But sooner or later development up by Dodger Stadium is inevitable – and, probably, appropriate for the 21st Century. The question Angelenos should debate is not so much whether there should be something up there but what.
The default solution would be one of those fake shopping and entertainment “places” that L.A. is so good at manufacturing – something like Universal CityWalk or The Grove. But Los Angeles should shoot for something more authentic – a real place that, while it may have some shopping and entertainment components, also reminds everybody of the place’s history. The future of Dodger Stadium and its parking lots should honor the shameful history of Chavez Ravine – and the excitement of Fernandomania 25 years later. Because everybody should always feel welcome at Dodger Stadium.