The Expression of the City’s Transformation

SACRAMENTO —  Los Angeles. Forever seeking to know itself, to fix its position as a regional, national and international city--and forever having its signs and symbols, the Los Angeles Dodgers, for example, shift in structure and content, pushing the City of Angels, once again, in search of its identity.

Since ancient times, cities have known themselves, in part, through sport. For Athens and other Greek cities, the Games bespoke the most compelling ambitions of the community toward celebration, contest, the inextricability of victory from defeat. Most important, the Games served the desire of the community to find unity, self-knowledge and imaginative release in the spectacle of athletic struggle.

When society grew cruel, as in the case of late 1st-century Rome, the games grew cruel as well. Rome knew what it had become--and found its morbid release--in the spectacle of gladiators hacking themselves to death, herds of wild animals slaughtered in mock hunts, naval engagements on a flooded Coliseum floor and, worse, innocent men and women for the offense of their religion being ripped and mangled to death by ravenous lions.

Two thousand years later, baseball, in many ways, is the most representative urban American sport. And Los Angeles is the most paradigmatic of future American cities. Then there are the Dodgers, now up for sale. Once again, as always, Los Angeles has had its certainties challenged. Once again, Los Angeles must ask the question: What does the future hold?

In 1958, the move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles from Brooklyn unequivocally told the city what it had become: A big-time American city linked to the urbanism of the East. Already, metro-Los Angeles was a baseball town, with its two minor-league teams outdrawing many major-league franchises. But the arrival of the Dodgers put Los Angeles in the major leagues, in more ways than baseball. Through the 1950s, after all, there was growing in Los Angeles an awareness--in civic reform, to include the reorganization of the Los Angeles Police Department; in the vast housing tracts, subdivided in the 1920s, being filled in; in the rise of UCLA; in the developing campaign for a Music Center; in the increasing attention of the national media--that a new city was in the making.

No one, in their history and personnel, epitomized this evolution more dramatically than the Dodgers. Brooklyn, like Los Angeles, was a suburb that had, in the late 19th century, boomed almost overnight into metropolitan status. If Manhattan was San Francisco, Brooklyn was L.A.: emergent, brash, tired of second-tier status. Even the trauma of the removal of Latino families from Chavez Ravine to make room for Dodger Stadium was a representative drama. All Los Angeles, after all, had been seized from Mexico in 1846; and the sense of displacement felt by the evicted families remains an element in the Mexican imagination as it contemplates the lost Mexico north of the Rio Grande.

In and of themselves, the O’Malleys embodied the urban translation that was underway in Los Angeles. Alive with the savvy and cunning of Irish American urbanism, Walter O’Malley brought to Los Angeles, in both the Dodgers and himself, the mood and ambience of American city life in all its adept flamboyance. He beguiled his way into the city as if a man doing L.A. a big favor, which was precisely the case.

Peter O’Malley, by contrast, represents Los Angeles come of age, in its own place and on its own terms. What the father helped import into Los Angeles through baseball--the sense of L.A. as a major-league city--the son experienced as an achieved reality. Peter O’Malley is the model of the Los Angeles oligarch of the present generation: reserved, precise, understated, more impeccable in manner and style, if the truth be known, than his counterparts in Chicago or New York, equally patrician but more democratically engaged than his counterparts in San Francisco. The continued rise of the Dodgers since 1970, under Peter O’Malley’s presidency, coincides with, and expresses, the rise of Los Angeles to international stature.

Some may rail against the oligarchy, but the citizens of Los Angeles, one suspects, fear the loss of a local oligarchy linking ownership to a human face. In the Los Angeles of not too long ago, the citizens of the city knew the people in charge of the corporations, banks and law firms downtown, and the movie studios on the Westside and in the Valley. Joseph F. Sartori of Security Trust, Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Alphonzo E. Bell as in Bel-Air, Henry Robinson, Asa V. Call, the Chandlers of The Times. You might not always have liked who owned the major enterprises, but you knew who they were.

Corporate ownership, by contrast, tends toward anonymity, which is not promotive of urbanism. The leading contenders to buy the Dodgers include huge entertainment companies. Should one of them purchase the team, the historic balance in Los Angeles between entertainment and non-entertainment enterprises would be upset. The maturity of Los Angeles significantly rests on the assumption that it is not just a one-industry company town, as important and mega-influential as the entertainment business is. Los Angeles is also a place where a full diversity of economic enterprises, including manufacturing, has and should continue to flourish. A company town, remember, tends to get run by the company, which involves a loss of civic soul.

The end of the O’Malley ownership also represents the departure of the last connection of major-league baseball to the ethos and mood of its origins. Here is a sport that began in Hoboken and flourished, in the case of the Dodgers, in the principal city on the East Coast of middle and lower-middle America, Brooklyn. The Los Angeles Dodgers kept mid-America reconciled to Los Angeles. In his humor and his humanity, his talents and fallibilities, Tommy Lasorda is Everyman, every American, and, in so many ways, the visible emblem of the fact that ordinary people not only can get by in L.A. but learn to love the place. How ironic that Los Angeles, the quintessential 21st-century metropolis, should be the last city to lose family ownership and management, and a direct personal connection to the people, through baseball.

In a worse-case scenario, the Dodgers will be acquired by a mega-buck entertainment conglomerate that will turn Dodger Stadium into a coliseum, in which over-priced athletes, loyal to no city but to themselves, vie with each other in a contest whose meaning is to be measured in endorsements and dollars alone. Dodger Stadium could become a cineplex, hosting not a game based upon the well- being of a people in a city, played by the boys of summer, but just another mode of soulless preening by mega-buck performers. Ebbets Field has become Dodger Stadium. The Los Angeles of 1958 has become the premiere American city. The city has a vested interested in hoping that its stadium not become Thunderdome.*