national register nomination for boulevard park historic

for a return to the residential hotel as a potential solution to homelessness and a viable
housing form in the modern city. 28
In Chapter 5 of Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight,
Avila describes the shift of the Brooklyn Dodgers from the trolley-bound East Coast to
29
the freeway off-ramps of Los Angeles.
Avila suggests that “the very act of building a ballpark at the city center with public and
private monies reinforced the masculine underpinnings of civic culture in postwar Los
Angeles.”
The transition of the Dodgers from urban,
organic Ebbets Field to the freeway-centric, suburban Dodger Stadium paralleled the shift
of American development from densely populated downtowns to residential suburbs
outside the city center. Dodger Stadium’s displacement of a working-class and immigrant
Latino neighborhood represented the forces of urban redevelopment and white
hegemony. Avila compares the presence of African American players on the field to the
Indians of Disneyland’s Frontierland, allowed only within a strictly controlled private
context.
30
This focus on what was perceived as an explicitly male activity served to
reinforce traditional gender roles, as it also reinforced racial roles.
Avila considers urban renewal as “another episode in the history of the postwar
American city, in which the destruction of familiar urban spaces begot a new cultural
order, one that delivered an illusion of community similar to that effected by the creation
28
Groth, Living Downtown, p. 293-302
29
Avila, Eric, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.
London: University of California Press, 2004.
30
Avila, p. 182
23