Stealing Home: New Book Looks at Families Evicted when Dodger Stadium Was Built

For baseball fans, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles is more than a place to watch a game. Nestled in a ravine with a view of the San Gabriel mountains beyond the outfield, it has come to represent something mythical since its opening in 1962: An escapist paradise for the pleasures of baseball. 

That’s the mythology. The reality is a different story — one author Eric Nusbaum tells in his debut book, Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between, published by Public Affairs.

Before there was Dodger Stadium, there was a thriving, working-class, Mexican American community. In his book, Nusbaum, a former editor at VICE, focuses on the people who were displaced to make way for the stadium, and the ugly, decades-long political struggle leading to their eviction.

He tells his story through a richly-reported portrayal of the last displaced family, the Arechiga family, whose patriarch and matriarch were born in Mexico and built their house in L.A. by hand. Across three generations, the family helped settle the neighborhood and achieved a version of the American Dream: They owned multiple properties, had kids who married and had kids of their own, and helped form a robust neighborhood with churches, a school and hard-fought city services like a bus line.

But Nusbaum’s book shows how one person’s version of the American Dream often comes at the expense of another’s. In the case of the Arechigas, land that was nearly empty when they arrived became prized real estate in the following decades as L.A.’s population soared and two freeways were built nearby.

First, the land was eyed for a public housing development, and most of the Arechigas’ neighbors were forced to leave under eminent domain laws that allowed property to be seized, with paltry compensation, so long as it was for a public good. Ultimately, the housing plans were scuttled amid an upswell of anti-communist sentiment, but with much of the land cleared, then-Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley spotted an opportunity.

With Americans rapidly moving to the suburbs in the 1950s, O’Malley wanted a new stadium that would be accessible by car and include ample parking. It was becoming increasingly clear that he wouldn’t get that in Brooklyn. His Dodgers played in Ebbetts Field, which is fondly remembered but was considered run-down at the time with a fatal flaw: Wedged into Brooklyn’s streets, it had virtually no parking. 

To O’Malley, the Arechigas’ neighborhood was a nearly-blank canvas for the stadium of his dreams; he just needed them and their handful of neighbors, who had resisted their removal for the public housing plan, to leave. To the Arechigas, it was home, and the book culminates in the drama of that standoff. Ultimately, O’Malley had money on his side — and the city’s political establishment, which was eager to lure a baseball team to cement L.A.’s status as a major metropolis.

Even though the Dodgers are a private organization, the city declared the construction of a stadium for them to be a public good, therefore justifying the eviction of the Arechigas and the other remaining holdouts in the neighborhood. It was a decision that presaged today’s common practice of cities’ building sports stadiums with public financing and giving tax subsidies to teams.

So it came to pass that in 1959, on live television, the Arechigas were forcibly removed from their longtime home, which was then bulldozed in front of them. Dodger Stadium met rave reviews when it opened three years later. It remains beloved, evocative of a mid-20th century ideal of the California good life.

Nusbaum’s reporting and research are impressively deep, and his empathic writing brings his subjects to life. Stealing Home is a baseball book, but it’s only glancingly about baseball. Really, it’s about how you can’t fight city hall, how one person’s American Dream often tramples another’s and how myth-making can be used to gloss over injustice and trauma.

Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between (Public Affairs) went on sale March 24.