When Walter O’Malley moved his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 with plans to construct a new ballpark next to downtown, he ignited a bitter argument over the future of a rapidly changing city. For the first time, City of Dreams tells the full story of the controversial building of Dodger Stadium—and how it helped create modern Los Angeles by transforming its downtown into a vibrant cultural and entertainment center.
In a vivid narrative, Jerald Podair tells how Los Angeles was convulsed between 1957 and 1962 over whether, where, and how to build Dodger Stadium. Competing civic visions clashed. Would Los Angeles be a decentralized, low-tax city of neighborhoods, as demanded by middle-class whites on its peripheries? Or would the baseball park be the first contribution to a revitalized downtown that would brand Los Angeles as a national and global city, as advocated by leaders in business, media, and entertainment?
O’Malley’s vision triumphed when he opened his privately constructed stadium on April 10, 1962—and over the past half century it has contributed substantially to the city’s civic and financial well-being. But in order to build the stadium, O’Malley negotiated with the city to acquire publicly owned land (from which the city had uprooted a Mexican American community), raising sharply contested questions about the relationship between private profit and “public purpose.” Indeed, the battle over Dodger Stadium crystallized issues with profound implications for all American cities, and for arguments over the meaning of equality itself.
Filled with colorful stories, City of Dreams will fascinate anyone who is interested in the history of the Dodgers, baseball, Los Angeles, and the modern American city.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the 2018 Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal, Society for American Baseball Research
- Finalist for the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, Pen American Center
"By 1956, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Walter O'Malley, was a frustrated man. The rival New York Yankees, from a 67,000-seat stadium in the Bronx, ruled Major League Baseball. The Boston Braves had just moved to Milwaukee and increased home attendance by 600% — dramatically boosting their revenue and their advantage in the quest for talent. Decrepit Ebbets Field, by contrast, had only 32,000 seats, making it one of the smallest ballparks in the majors. O'Malley knew he needed a new stadium to compete. How "O'Malley came by that new stadium is vividly recounted in Jerald Podair's City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles. It's the tale of how the fight to bring the Dodgers west transformed not only Major League Baseball but Southern California as well, determining what kind of city 20th-century Los Angeles would be. . . . Podair is right to see this as a critical moment in Los Angeles's history and is a sure-footed guide through the political fight."—-John Buntin, Wall Street Journal
"Careful research and straightforward prose make this an excellent introduction [to the history of Dodger Stadium]."—Publishers Weekly
"A thoughtful new book."—Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times
"City of Dreams . . . has a number of strengths. . . . [T]he research is deep [and] Podair . . . avoids taking sides."—Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Real Clear Books
"Like the city fathers stealing water from the Owens Valley in Chinatown, the Dodgers' move west has become American lore. . . . As with most based-on-true-events stories coming out of Los Angeles, this one bears little resemblance to historical fact, and Jerald Podair sets the record straight here. Podair is a historian at Lawrence University, uninterested in polemics or dramatics; his eye is on bigger things. With exhaustive documentation he takes us through every step of the Dodgers' move west. . . . If one wanted only to learn the real story of the Dodgers' move west, City of Dreams would be well worth reading. But the battle over Dodger Stadium also has lessons as a microcosm of American politics. . . . [It] was a battle for the soul of Los Angeles, and Podair shows how this conflict goes all the way back to Hamilton and Jefferson, and is part of the American DNA."—Marshall Goldberg, Weekly Standard
"Podair has written an exhaustive, thoroughly researched and fair-minded account."—Henry D. Fetter, History News Network
"The book brings to vivid life the inside story of the fight over Dodger Stadium while laying bare the intricacies of political life in a big city."—Kelsey Harrison, New York Labor History blog
"[An] excellent new book."—Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek
"City of Dreams offers an L.A. version of a larger dilemma facing American cities: how to reconcile private gain in Downtown centers with public good in the city as a whole."—Darryl Holter, Los Angeles Review of Books
"In City of Dreams, the historian Jerald Podair examines the struggle to bring the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball franchise to Los Angeles. . . . The substance of [the book] lies . . . in the analysis of social and political divisions around the stadium."—Robert Anasi, Times Literary Supplement
"A great history of urban politics and the balancing of conflicting interests that will permit professors and students to frame their own assessments of the deal and decide whether the project’s benefits outweighed the costs."—Mark S. Rosentraub, Journal of Urban Affairs
"When the Dodgers left Brooklyn, their troubles had just begun. Jerald Podair's account of the Los Angeles end of the story superbly chronicles the fierce collisions that ensued, pitting private power against the public good. The creation of Dodger Stadium also created modern Los Angeles, which makes this book an indispensable contribution to the history of modern urban America."—Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
"What is the price of a game? What is it worth to a city and its residents to boast a professional sports franchise? These questions need to be answered—but seldom are—before urban leaders make deals to build stadiums, often with staggering implications for their cities. City of Dreams is required reading for anyone who cares about how our sports obsession affects the urban landscape."—Randy Roberts, coauthor of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
"City of Dreams documents the steep social price Los Angeles paid when, fifty years ago, its power elite used the highly subsidized Dodger Stadium to launch the city into modernity. To what ends and to whose benefit? Podair asks. Hard questions, indeed, that other American cities with subsidized stadiums are asking too."—Kevin Starr, University of Southern California
"A brilliant reconstruction of the battle over Dodger Stadium, City of Dreams is a vivid and indispensable story about baseball and the making of modern urban America."—Gary Gerstle, author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present
"There's a real need for this book. There is no other go-to source on the story of Dodger Stadium in the history of Los Angeles, a subject that offers a fascinating look at midcentury L.A. Jerald Podair helps us understand a complex story of urban vision, sports, politics, and public-private tug of war, offering a corrective to much folklore, hyperbole, and misinformation."—William Deverell, coauthor of Water and Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Rivers, 1900–1941
