Chávez Ravine

Chavez Ravine is a shallow L-shaped canyon located in Los Angeles, California, United States, partially in the Elysian Park neighborhood. It sits in large promontory of hills north of downtown Los Angeles and was known in the 1860s as the "Stone Quarry Hills" which had other smaller ravines such as Sulphur Ravine, Cemetery Ravine, Solano Canyon, and Reservoir Ravine. It is next to Dodger Stadium, a baseball venue that opened in 1962. The name Chavez Ravine can be used to mean either the actual ravine itself in a narrow sense or sometimes in a broader sense the entire promontory and surrounding ravines, and is also used to refer to the stadium. Dodger Stadium was constructed by knocking down the ridge which separated the nearby Sulfur and Cemetery Ravines and filling those two ravines in. Palo Verde Elementary School was buried in the process. Chavez Ravine was named for Julian Chavez, a Los Angeles councilman in the 19th century. Chavez originally purchased the land in the Elysian Park area, which eventually grew to about 315 acres, in 1844. Nearby "Cemetery Ravine" was named after old Calvary, the first cemetery of Los Angeles.

Chavez Ravine was named for Julian Chavez, the first recorded land owner. He was born in New Mexico and moved to Los Angeles in the early 1830s. He quickly became a local leader. In 1844, Chavez purchased 83 acres of the long, narrow valley northwest of the city. There are no records of what Chavez did on his land, however during the 1850s and 1880s there were smallpox epidemics, Chavez Canyon, was the location of a "pest house" which cared for Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans suffering from the disease. The land was very rugged which prevented much development of the area. However the area did provide an important watershed and part was used by the Los Angeles Water Company for a canal bringing water from what is now Griffith Park and storing in a reservoir (today called Buena Vista Reservoir) in Reservoir Ravine. Some of Chavez Canyon and the surrounding hills became Elysian Park in 1886. That same year the two brick manufacturers moved into Chavez Ravine and began blasting operations in the hillsides.

By the early 1900s, in the hills above and around the ravine, a semi-rural Mexican-American community had grown up. Eventually, three distinct neighborhoods formed: Bishop, La Loma, and Palo Verde, mostly on the ridges between the neighboring ravines. In 1913 a progressive lawyer named Marshall Stimson subsidized the movement of around 250 Mexican-Americans to these communities from the floodplain of the nearby Los Angeles River. There was a local grocery store, a local church, and Palo Verde Elementary. There was a nearby brick factory which caused local problems from the smoke and dust released. In 1926 the residents of Chavez Ravine organized to shut the company down. On August 20, 1926, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance prohibiting the blasting and zoned the area around Chavez Ravine for residential use.

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