Recent Event Highlights: Last Family Removed from Chavez Ravine, The Downfall of Elysian Park Heights, Elysian Park Hieghts and Clearing Chavez Ravine, and 4 more...
There was a large, empty space in the middle of downtown where Chavez Ravine used to be. At the same time, the Brooklyn Dodgers were looking to move to a new place with their own stadium. People from the City Council in LA talked to Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, and offered him the space that used to be Chavez Ravine to use as a baseball stadium for the Dodgers. O'Mally was very pleased about this and soon the dogers were playing in a brand new stadium that stood where Chavez Ravine once was.
Rich downtown homeowners were very upset about Elysian Park Heights and the idea of public housing causing problems in their beautiful neighborhoods. They decided to attack the man in charge of Elysian Park Heights, Fred Wilkinson. They called him a communist. Americans were scared of communists because of the war, and so the whole project was called off.
In 1951, a man named Fred Wilkinson had a very ambitious plan for the 1948 Federal
Housing Act. He hired architech Richard Nuetra to build a fabulous complex called Elysian Park Heights that would give public housing to people that needed it. This complex was to be built right in the middle of a place known as Chavez Ravine. Chavez Ravine was a small, extemely poor village in the middle of Downtown, LA. In order for it to be cleared out, all of the families in Chavez Ravine were ordered by the government to leave their small village and go live somewhere else. These Families began clearing out in 1951.
The Federal Housing Act was passed in 1948 to assure that there would be public housing for those who needed it. The public housing would be known as the "projects."
Many soldiers would come home from fighting in Wold War II depressed and unhappy. They started drinking to solve this problem. When the drunk soldiers would walk the streets in LA, a lot of the people they would see were Zoot Suiters, young Chicano men that wore baggy suits and had greasy hair. The soldeirs thought that why should they fight for these ungrateful, filthy Chicano men. The Chicanos didn't like the white soldiers because they were rude to them and didn't understand the predjudice they went through every day simply for being Mexican. Because of this hate bewteen races, many fights broke out between the drunk white soldiers and the upset Chicanos. These fights were known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
Sleepy Lagoon is a place located north of Los Angeles. In 1942, a Chicano kid was killed there. 21 people were arrested, but only 12 were convicted for this murder and were sent to jail. Many hispanic people were upset over the Sleepy Lagoon murder. The Chicano kid had died in a fight between Chicanos, and they thought the government did not have the right to decide the fate of the other Chicanos involved in the fight. It was thier own problem to deal with how they wanted to.
In 1942, Japanese people in America were sent to concentration camps. They were thought of as "dangerous" because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in the United States during World War II. This was on of the first events that caused Americans to be afraid of foreigners and immigrants
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