Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story

by Don Normark

Chronicle Books, 144 pp., $29.95

Every town has its dirty little secrets. Los Angeles has at least one the size of Dodger Stadium. That pocket of the L.A. hills used to be called Chávez Ravine, and until 1949 it was home to a thriving, quaint, unique community of mostly Hispanic descent and low income. One day in 1948, photographer Don Normark accidentally stumbled upon the neighborhood (ironically, while looking for a vantage point to shoot a postcard view of Los Angeles), and decided he’d found a sort of Shangri-La. In 1949, the city kicked everyone out of Chávez Ravine, ostensibly for a low-income housing project, but the plague of McCarthyism squashed that plan, and the area conveniently was made available to the soon-to-be-ex-Brooklyn Dodgers. Chávez Ravine, 1949, Normark’s photographic record of Chávez Ravine and its people, is brilliant, evocative, magical, sad, poignant, and recalls the luminary work of the great WPA photographers during the Depression. The photographs are accompanied by Normark’s eloquent chronicle and reminiscences of the former residents. “I knew those hills like a bird,” says Murphy Hernandez. A beautiful, bittersweet book from the dark shadows of the city of dreams.

This article appears in December 24 • 1999.

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