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