Let the People Walk to Dodger Stadium
Gondolas and underground tubes are swell, but better to build a decent sidewalk.
If you build sidewalks, they will come.
Photographer: Stephen Dunn/Getty Images
Dodger Stadium is one of the most hallowed temples of American sports, and probably the only great Major League Baseball stadium built between 1923 (when the original Yankee Stadium was completed) and 1992 (Camden Yards). It’s also right next to downtown Los Angeles — as musician Ry Cooder will sing to you or photographer Don Normark will show you, its builders destroyed what was left of the charmingly ramshackle Mexican-American neighborhood of Chavez Ravine1 in order to make way for America’s pastime.
Those builders cordoned the stadium off from downtown and other surrounding neighborhoods with 130 acres of parking lots. This was 1962, and the notion that someone might want to arrive at a baseball game by means other than a private automobile was apparently inconceivable. Also, downtown Los Angeles was by then already well into a decades-long decline. Hanging out there before or after the game wasn’t exactly something people who could afford Dodgers tickets were clamoring to do.