Remembering The Lost Communities Buried Under Dodger Stadium Center Field
What would you call this? Dodger-fication?
Friday, May 8, 1959. It was a typically clear Los Angeles day, that would come to be known by the residents of Palo Verde — or what was left of them, anyway — as Black Friday, the day they were displaced to build Dodger Stadium.
It was on that day that a group of sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home of the Arechiga family, one of the neighborhood’s few remaining families. The city had finally come to evict the stragglers. The officers walked up the stairs of the Arechiga home, then kicked the door in and forced their way into the living room. They brought along movers to quickly break apart and bring out the family’s furniture, piece by piece.
Children wailed. The elderly were escorted out. One woman was dragged, kicking and screaming by her arms and legs out the door and down the stairs by four deputies.
Avrana Arechiga, the 66-year-old matriarch of the family, threw rocks at the sheriff’s deputies as they went about the business of dispossessing her family. “Why don’t they play ball in [Mayor Norris] Poulson’s backyard—not in ours?'” she shouted in Spanish, according to a newspaper report.
