We've come full circle -- sort of.
In 1950, when homeowners in Chavez Ravine near downtown Los Angeles got notices that their homes were to be razed, it was with the promise that mixed-income public housing would be built in their place. Those who lost their homes were promised first chance at the new units. Then politics entered. After several years of political turmoil and string-pulling by the city elite, the housing project was abandoned. Dodger Stadium was built instead.
Now comes developer Alan Casden, who wants to move the Dodgers downtown and put up housing (although certainly not a public housing project) in Chavez Ravine.
But there's a cautionary tale for politicians backing the project. Fifty years ago, the first battle of Chavez Ravine helped launch the career of Norris Poulson, who became mayor of Los Angeles in 1953. But it was also Chavez Ravine that helped end his career.
I heard the story of what happened from Poulson himself.
Poulson was living in a retirement community in Tustin when I tracked him down 30 years ago as part of the research I was doing for a book on the Los Angeles Times. He greeted me at the door with a weak handshake and a raspy voice that testified to his bout with throat cancer, and he seemed genuinely pleased to tell his story. At one point, he stopped the conversation and, with a twinkle in his eye, said he had to show me something.
Poulson disappeared and then came back with a wrinkled letter from then-Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler dated Dec. 26, 1952. "Dear Norrie," began the letter, written on Times letterhead. Chandler went on to describe a luncheon meeting of a group of L.A. power brokers who had decided that Poulson should be the one to challenge then-Mayor Fletcher Bowron. Bowron had been mayor since 1938 and had at different times during his tenure been supported by these same power brokers. But in the early 1950s, Bowron had run afoul of them based on his support for an ambitious program of public housing, including the development at Chavez Ravine. As the lunch group considered its options for someone to take on Bowron, someone suggested Poulson, then a Republican congressman. " 'Why did we not think of Norris in the first place?' was what went through all of our minds," Chandler wrote.
