Chaparral 2024-2025: Mike Eberts on Stealing Home by Eric Nusbaum

Book Review: Nusbaum, Eric. Stealing Home (New York: Public Affairs, 2020). Available at GCC Library

If it was baseball season and my Dad asked “How’d LA do?” there was one correct answer. Tell him if the Angels won or lost. The Dodgers weren’t LA.

This went far beyond team or regional rivalry. My Dad grew up on the flats of Echo Park, not the dusty, secluded hills of Palo Verde, La Loma or Bishop. But he had friends who lived there. In our household, the erasure of those neighborhoods--originally as part of an idealistic plan to build public housing, then as a bargaining chip to bring major league baseball to Los Angeles--was a sin not to be forgiven or forgotten. But across the city, even the neighborhood names would be forgotten and lumped together as Chavez Ravine.

In Stealing Home, Eric Nusbaum tells the whole sordid tale. He combines the documented precision of a historian with the scene-setting and characterization of a novelist. You don’t have to be an Angeleno or a baseball fan to find his storytelling—sometimes predictable, other times ironic—a compelling case study of mid-20th Century “urban renewal” gone wrong. If you identify as both an urban Angeleno and a Dodger fan (as does this reviewer), Nusbaum’s book is Cognitive Dissonance 101.

Frank Wilkinson is the most developed character in the book. A minister’s son, he turned away from religion and toward helping people improve their lives—whether they wanted the help or not. His single-minded pursuit of a Richard Neutra-designed Elysian Heights public housing development led the way to sweeping eminent domain foreclosures of homes in the three predominantly-Latino neighborhoods.

Then the political winds shifted. What looked like a go with federal financing from the 1949 Housing Act was quickly branded as Socialist Housing in the eyes of anti-communists, real estate interests and local power brokers. Wilkinson righteously fought for his utopian dream until fierce, well-connected opposition resulted in the destruction of the development—and ultimately himself. Frank needed an on-off switch.

Nusbaum also vividly tells the tale of Abrana and Manuel Arechiga, their family, and their home on Malvina Avenue. Over 37 years, they bought a lot, pitched a tent on it, replaced the tent with a house they built, adding rooms as their family expanded, and had fruit trees, vegetables, roving chickens and a brick oven in the yard. The neighborhood that grew up around them was similarly self-contained, partly because it was remote, despite being in the middle of a large, ambitious city.

That ambition included major league baseball. Because teams traveled by train, major league baseball stretched from the East Coast to St. Louis—and stopped. City business leaders—led by Norman Chandler of the Los Angeles Times—quickly determined the heretofore-ignored neighborhoods in the hills above Echo Park would be a fine place for a baseball stadium. It was near the city’s growing freeway system and contained ample acreage that had been mostly cleared for a moribund public housing project.

Local politicians Rosalind Wyman and Kenneth Hahn set out to woo Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley into moving his team to Los Angeles. O’Malley, a native New Yorker, was resistant at first, but eventually became deeply invested—economically and emotionally—in building not just a baseball stadium, but a midcentury modern citadel.

Nusbaum’s style is many tiny chapters that flip among the principals. Some neighborhood residents accept eminent domain payments and move out. Others stay. Wilkinson fights more dire (and personal) battles at the height of McCarthyism. The Archiegas dig in and wait. O’Malley takes obsessive interest in the details of his stadium.

In the end, municipal pride and rooting for your team are like other long and deep relationships. They’re complicated.

As for my Dad, his childhood home on Burlington Avenue on the flats of Echo Park was not taken by Dodger Stadium. It was taken by the Hollywood Freeway.