If you’ve been around long enough and paying the slightest bit of attention, you’ve surely noticed that homo sapiens, like so many animal species, tend to live in groups. In your first year, you couldn’t have cared less about this, clueless little narcissist that you were. The child development people tell us that you were obsessed with your mother, for the most part, and that the feeling was mutual on her side, though she was probably obliged to give it a rest sometimes. The lady lived in a very different world than you did, after all, one with obligations, oftentimes to people other than yourself, which would’ve really pissed you off, if you’d only known.
Soon enough you grew more conscious of how there was a lot more to your social world than just her, which is, of course, when it all starts to fall apart. So long, womb! So long, infancy, with all its animal simplicity! Welcome to the real world, full of other humans like yourself, and good luck! Hang around in this life long enough, and pay enough attention, and you’ll discover the whole complicated morass of human relationships, at all its levels. There’s your immediate family for starters, then your extended family, and finally a social community with more levels than you can shake a stick at. Maybe at some point you got so confused or disappointed or just plain disgusted with how all this “society” nonsense worked that you dropped out, found a cave somewhere or some metaphorical version of one, and built a world as close to that of your simple infancy as you could manage. Does this mean you were nuts? In some ways, for sure, but not completely.
The point is that somewhere along the line, if you were paying much attention, you obtained a more complex understanding of how human groups tend to be organized around power and control. You need look no further than your own family to discover this, even if it’s just you and your mom. On a grander scale it’s the same, though much much more complicated. Like any animal culture, success and survival depend on some form of hierarchy, with somebody or a few somebodies running things from the top with everybody else layered somewhere underneath. There are exceptions to this, things like the perfect Marxist workers’ state/paradise, or other communal endeavors of similar ilk, which maybe have never existed, or at least not for long. If you passionately want to dispute this, stop reading immediately and move on to different reading material of some kind. Anything will suffice, you commie dreamer.
What’s important is that since time immemorial, a major challenge for those atop the heap of any group has been maintaining power and control over those animals heaped beneath them. We’re talking Alpha-level leadership here, which historically has tended to be male though this is not always the case. Think Lady MacBeth or Catherine the Great, for instance, though you likely have a fave of your own. You might also look into what’s up with bonobos. What you find may shock you, but it’s way past time that that happened.
Power and control gets complicated when it comes to larger societies. This issue has long been studied and become somewhat of an industry in academia, what with sociology and anthropology and above all political science contributing to what is now a mountain of theories and case histories and such about who succeeds at this game, despite the ever changing demands of a world that never holds still. There are no doubt lots of think tanks nowadays offering AI-generated claptrap about how to achieve power and maintain it, but frankly one of the best pieces of advice in these matters was offered a couple of thousand years ago, by a poet, no less. I speak, of course, of the Roman poet Juvenal, who coined the unforgettable term in some line or other, panem et circenses. Bread and circuses.
As in, if you want to control the masses, feed ‘em and entertain ‘em, before bothering with anything else, and you just might not need much else. In other words, meet their daily needs and distract them. Sure, it’s simplistic and crude, but aren’t those the kind of solutions we love best? And it is important to note that back in Juvenal’s day, circenses meant the three-ring kind of affair familiar to modern audiences, for sure, but it also had a broader meaning. We’re talking “sports.” Is Juvenal not starting to impress you as one smart cookie? The guy had this whole thing nailed! One look around our current marvelous best of all possible worlds will quickly show the dominance of sport in all cultures, in myriad forms, though remote Buddhist societies in the Himalayas might be the exception. Even they probably have something like yak racing, or meditation competitions.
But if the real value of sport for society’s winners is as a capable tool for distraction of the masses, no hammer delivers a more powerful distractive blow on the people’s collective consciousness than sports played at the professional level. The kind seen in big stadiums before huge crowds, with tsunamis of media coverage that can obliterate awareness of all else going on in the world. It is amazing and pathetic how many can’t get enough of this. If any of you commie dreamers are still reading, no doubt you’re thinking about your boy Karl’s thing about opiate of the masses, where he was talking about religion. Modern pro sports has definitely been offered up as a replacement for traditional worship of a deity, and the rabidity of legions of fans can rival religious fervor. Who can ever forget the conflict between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, forever after known as the “Football War?” Sure, it was about a lot more than soccer but the Beautiful Sport and national sports rivalry was a big part of the story. So Herr Marx scores some real points with his concept, following in Juvenal’s footsteps with these matters.
Which brings me to the Dodgers, who were a key part of my own innocent and very distracted childhood and a source of much of the joy contained therein. The Dodgers, legendary baseball team from pro baseball’s very beginnings. The Dodgers, whose home was in Brooklyn, NY, at a place called Ebbets Field in the Flatbush neighborhood. The Dodgers, perennial losers in the World Series to another NYC team, the Bronx bombers known as the Yankees, until they finally weren’t. The Dodgers, for over half a century known to New Yorkers as “Dem Bums,” sometimes proclaimed lovingly and sometimes bitterly, depending on the moment.
I was nine, in my first year of Little League baseball, when the Brooklyn Dodgers yanked up their very deep roots and moved to Los Angeles, the city to which we’d also moved after yanking up some roots of our own in Chicago just a few years before. At the time I did not know Brooklyn was one of the boroughs of New York City, but did any kid in California need to know that, for any reason? Did I need to know that Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner, was making one of the shrewdest business moves of the era, to the consternation and bitterness of generations of Brooklynites? For them it was the greatest of betrayals, but hey, business is business, and Walt, a man of vision when it came to making money, knew what he was doing.
He needed a vast new stadium, for one thing. Ebbets Field had been built in 1912, and seated around thirty thousand fans. O’Malley had run into too many obstacles finding new digs if the team stayed in New York. Being the smart guy that he was – and never forget that pro sports team owners are a rich and powerful lot, real top of the heap – he no doubt talked to the right people in the City of the Angels about this along with other things. Expansion of Major League Baseball to California with its huge marketing potential had become inevitable. The city was welcoming, but getting a stadium built would take time.
As it turns out, the team showed up in 1958 and played in the Los Angeles Coliseum for four years, before Dodger Stadium opened to start the season in 1962. The Coliseum was built for football and track events, starting in the 1920s, which included the summer Olympics in 1932. As any basic student of geometry could tell you, it was lousy for baseball. This led to a crazy but wonderful compromise, whereby they erected a grotesquely tall screen in left field, a mere 251 feet from home plate, which made for some very creative baseball, at times. As a nine year old, I barely grasped this. All I knew was that watching “our” Dodgers play there was nothing but wonderful.
Construction of a big new beautiful Dodger Stadium – all of it privately funded, most unusual when it comes to stadium building in modern times where public/private partnerships are the norm – started in 1959 in a place called Chavez Ravine. I had no idea where that was, and didn’t really care; as far as I knew the place had no history before work began on the new Dodger home. For me this was the whole story through all the years I lived in LA, during which our family attended any number of games, starting with the stadium’s first year of operation. All we knew was that it was a wonderful venue, soft powder blue, sitting high on a hill overlooking the city, a jewel set in a memorably huge single-level outdoor parking lot of sixteen thousand spaces terraced over the hillside. It had cantilevered construction, with no supports blocking anyone’s view of the game, and fifty six thousand seats making it the most capacious in baseball at the time. To nobody’s surprise, over the decades attendance levels have been set, then set again. In a city rife with major league distractions, the Dodgers added another that rivaled all the rest. Walter O’Malley had done his homework and it paid off, big time.
It is possible if not likely that this is the only story most Dodgers fans know to this day. Go to the team’s website and it’s what they tell you about the story of Dodger Stadium, along with raves about all the pennants and championships the team has won there over the years, as well as details about the current fabulous renovations to what is now the third oldest ballpark in the majors, all of them respectful of the original plans. It fails to mention that Chavez Ravine was once a city neighborhood where real people lived, all of whom had conveniently disappeared by the time Walter O’Malley got his 300 acres there, as part of the deal he’d made with the city. As kids we’d been taught that America was once a largely empty continent, just waiting for arriving Europeans to turn wilderness into a civilized paradise; this was kind of like that.
Over time, much has happened to correct that particular fantastic notion about the absence of native peoples, as our culture struggles to finally get the true story straight in all its ugly details. Something similar has happened with the story of Chavez Ravine, as the Latino population of the US has gradually found its voice over the past decades. Nowhere has this happened more prominently than in southern California. Many of those who lived the story as it played out in the 1950s are still around, along with many more who knew what was happening at the time. Some recorded it on film in all its brutality. This includes a powerful documentary that appeared on PBS in 2005; there have also been retrospectives in books and academic papers.
It’s not a complicated story. That part of the city was named after Julian Chavez, who bought 83 acres of hilly land in the 1820s. It was steep and rugged and not useful for development, but it was a haven for people who struggled with finding acceptance in the greater LA community. This included Jewish people in the early days, where they established the first Jewish cemetery in the city. By the 1940s and 50s, it was mostly an impoverished Mexican American neighborhood, where many dwellings were little more than shacks, but it was still home. In the early 50s the city decided to use federal funds to build a large public housing project there, and began taking houses by eminent domain. This meant evicting the tenants, many of whom resisted, though some were also promised housing in the new development.
Enter Walter O’Malley and the Dodgers. In a way that is emblematic of the era and the place, Norris Paulson, the newly-elected Mayor of LA, in 1953, declared public housing to be un-American and the city repurchased the site from the Federal Housing Authority, seeking a “public purpose” for its use. In 1958, in a state infamous for deciding public policy through referenda, voters passed a measure promoted by the Taxpayers Committee for Yes on Baseball, which led to the deal that resulted in the removal of everybody else who still lived in Chavez Ravine. They’d be replaced by a gem of a ballpark, though the long walk from your car to the stadium entrance was sometimes kind of a chore, but it was a wonderful venue for Major League baseball. Just look at that view!
Fast forward to Iffley Road, Jamaica Plain MA about thirty years later. We moved into our house down the hill from Franklin Park in 1984, soon to find that a large and distinctive feature of our new neighborhood was George Robert White Schoolboy Stadium, up at the edge of the park. And we’d thought there was just a zoo! Across the street on Walnut Ave, at the corner of Iffley, lay Stadium Manor Nursing Home. These places had clearly seen better days, though both were still in active use. In the case of White Stadium, one could say just barely, the general impression suggesting a place in serious decay just short of becoming a total ruin, which would also aptly describe the other structures found in that corner of the park. High profile games between ancient high school rivalries were still being played in White Stadium every Thanksgiving, like the English High vs Boston Latin School game, and teams practiced there throughout the fall. There would be the occasional track meet. Otherwise the defining aspect was forlorn, while retaining a bit of grandeur.
We knew nothing of the history, though the stadium’s general condition reflected the status of Franklin Park at the time, then known mostly for its zoo and golf course and not much else. Both of those were in pretty good shape and saw a lot of use. In the case of the golf course, we learned the local golfers had done much to make this happen, as for years their golf links, the former “Meadow” in Olmsted’s design, had become a dumping ground for people’s trash and abandoned cars and even the occasional dead body, according to legend. Measures to prevent people driving onto the course, mostly the strategic placement of lots of boulders, were key to turning things around. The Franklin Park Zoo was also just beginning a phase of resurgence, with better management and private funding. Sadly, White Stadium, which was owned and used by Boston Public Schools, along with the rest of the park, had remained largely unchanged for decades, ignored by City Hall and minimally maintained.
So what was the story there? It turns out we already sort of knew the answer from our housing search. The most affordable places in JP were on the east side, “the other side of the tracks” alongside the park, where the neighborhoods were mixed race and low-income. Those further east, surrounding the park in Roxbury and Dorchester, were densely Black and Latino and West Indian, folks who’d arrived in short order in the early fifties. It was the era of “white flight” in America’s cities, as the automobile achieved total dominance and the suburbs boomed. The once vibrant Jewish community that had thrived along Seaver St at the park’s northern edge for decades, was suddenly gone.
White Stadium, in what could be seen as very bad timing, had been constructed by the Curley administration in 1949. James Michael Curley was then serving his fourth term as Mayor, part of that while he was in jail (Curley’s career was long, complicated, and kind of amazing in a mixed bag sort of way, far too much to mention here). It came as no surprise that construction was completed at three times over budget, amidst complaints of corruption and malfeasance, such was the Curley way of doing things. He was much beloved by his constituents nonetheless. Curley had a mansion on the other side of JP facing the pond. that’s still there. It has shamrocks carved into all the shutters, as he was a poster child for Irish ascendancy in the 20th century.
By the 1960s, use of White Stadium for sports had already diminished to the minimal levels present today, though it is interesting that a major force in the community back then was the Black Panthers, who used it as a location for rallies. Some old-timers on Iffley Road tell us our house sold for $6000 in the late ‘60s, a dozen times less than we paid in 1984, which tells you something. One savior of the park in the 60s and 70s was Elma Lewis, who’d grown up nearby and promoted arts education for Black people in the neighborhood and city, with a school housed in a one-time Jewish temple. She also promoted arts performances on a stage set up in the Overlook shelter ruins next to the stadium, which at times could include friends of hers from the Black arts community. These included Duke Ellington and Odetta, names you might find familiar. A few years later, an “Uptown in the Park” concert at White Stadium offered Sly and the Family Stone, Tower of Power, and Richard Pryor on the same bill, for a ticket cost of around five bucks. One wonders how many, if any, Bostonians not from the immediate neighborhood dared to come to this event, though it indicates a high point in White Stadium’s history that even today remains somewhat obscure.
Laments about the sorry state of such a onetime grand facility have been made over the years, and how it needed to be revived and put to better use. The wildest plan came in the early 70s, back when the Boston Patriots were seeking new digs to suit their ambitious growth strategy. The idea of expanding White Stadium’s capacity from ten thousand to – get this – 50000 seats(!) and making Franklin Park the home of their NFL franchise was briefly floated, then discarded. Did our neighborhood dodge a bullet there, in not becoming another Chavez Ravine? Might Tom Brady have made Franklin Park a household name? Would Iffley Road have become a parking lot, instead of remaining the delightful place we’ve lived for the past 40 years?
But history and politics have a funny way of not letting certain things go. The big story of White Stadium in recent times is that pro sports may yet come to the rescue, to the great surprise of almost everybody. Keep in mind, however, that history has marched a long ways since the 70s. We’re now deep in the era of Title IX and the rise of women’s sports. We’re also in the age where America has taken notice of the World’s Most Popular Sport, something that was not a thing until this century. We’re talking soccer mania, of course, and the rise of a professional league and soccer moms becoming a fixture in US suburbia. Last but not least, we’ve reached the time where women are making serious inroads into politics everywhere, including right here in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts and its largest city, where we recently elected our first female mayor, MIchelle Wu.
Enter Boston Unity Soccer Partners. Led by the usual high-powered business people, they’ve proposed making White Stadium the new home for their national-level women’s professional team. Is this the Patriots story all over again, 50 years later? As you might have guessed, this time it’s an all-women enterprise from top to bottom, and even better, a key part of the deal is sharing White Stadium with the Boston Public Schools, making it a world-class sports facility for a beleaguered urban school district desperately in need of some good news. The team and the city would split the costs of the renovation, which is a formidable challenge, as the pictures suggest. To the neighborhood’s great relief, capacity will remain about the same, and our house will not become some spaces in a parking lot. The team is working with the city to transport rabid fans to the game on public transit and shuttle buses and even city rideshare bicycles on game days. In so many ways this is not LA in the 60s but Boston fifty years after that.
As you might have guessed, there has been local opposition from many quarters, through months of community meetings, with occasional protest demonstrations. Even now it’s not quite a done deal, but it’s getting close. For some, it all looks like just more shenanigans being played by the usual political and economic interests, which so often can be the rule with big-time sports in America, especially when it comes to new stadiums. The LA story followed the usual historical script; this story is radically different. Maybe this reflects the current time and place, Boston in 2024. In so many ways it’s an unlikely story, kind of an outlier in the long and checkered history of panem et circenses in America, where the corporate and political patriarchy has long held powerful sway. Just look at the big networks in your local TV listings or take a run up and down the radio dial on any weekend, where it’s all ballgames (and ballgame analysis and ballgame talk shows and now gambling) all day long, the game being played depending on the season.
The universe of distractions in this day and age, starting with people’s addiction to their phones and the internet, is a far grander and darker topic of the day than what is covered here. And maybe you love sports in all its aspects, and it has brought you many great moments in your lifetime. Distraction has its place when it comes to getting by in a troubling world, and maybe Juvenal had some of this in mind a couple of thousand years ago. There can also be too much of a good thing, and too many trying to ignore the world around them just leads to more trouble of a more sinister kind.
The current beantown version certainly resembles the story of LA and the Dodgers. History is not repeating itself but there’s clearly a rhyme at work, as Mark Twain might describe it. But it’s also very different. This time it’s about women and soccer, and community process versus money and power, that traditionally has crushed anything that opposes it. If you question that, just ask the former occupants of Chavez Ravine. The local story also happens to be about social and cultural progress, how times have changed in at least a few good ways. And the new team, BOS Nation Football Club, may yet move in and fall flat on its financial face after a few years. They’re taking a lot of chances with a very bold and radical plan. I for one wish them good luck. I can’t say as much for a few of our neighbors right now, and one can’t blame them for feeling pushed around a bit. Our streets might become bedlam on game days. But if they knew the story of Dodger Stadium, maybe they’d feel some civic pride over how this is not that and be a bit less resentful, even if they’re not soccer fans.