As a kid growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s, I would walk to Dodger Stadium with my brother or kids in the neighborhood. For three dollars, we could purchase an upper deck seat and for an additional three dollars, we could get a Coke and hot dog. We would arrive before the game and have the players sign our balls, which I still have today. We often ran into food service workers we knew: Some had been employed at my grandmother’s restaurant, the Nayarit, which she opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1951, and some at Barragan’s, another neighborhood anchor opened by a former Nayarit employee, Ramon Barragan.

As I write in my recent book, A Place at the Nayarit, these workers took second jobs in food service at Dodger Stadium, staffing the approximately 81 home games of the six-month season. Some worked the fast food stands—they’d often sneak my brother and me free snacks. Others were in more exclusive areas they would never have had access to without their jobs: the private members-only Stadium Club, which housed its own bar and restaurant, and the Club level, which housed the press box and where one was likely to bump into former Dodgers and celebrities.

Once workers had gained access to these exclusive spaces, they extended the entrée to many of their friends, giving them complimentary tickets or letting a friend slip in the door when the manager was on a break. My brother, David Porras, remembered going to the Stadium Club with friends as a young boy in the 1970s, thanks to a Nayarit connection. He drank complimentary Shirley Temples packed with extra maraschino cherries and marveled at the 9-foot 3-inch taxidermied polar bear, which former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley had killed on a hunting trip in northern Norway and which towered over the room on a specially built pedestal. (David still knows who can get us into the Stadium Club without passes.) Access to these spaces gave ethnic Mexican workers and their friends real and imaginative mobility, and at the center of it all, was our love for Los Doyers.

But loving the Dodgers can also be complicated if you’re Latinx.

Dodger Stadium sits where there was once a close-knit residential community called Chavez Ravine. Working class and racially mixed, but predominantly Mexican and Mexican American, the neighborhood was located in Elysian Park just over the eastern border of Echo Park. Broadcasters calling games at Dodger Stadium still use the name to harken back to these days, but they never mention the site’s dark history (a history that begins even before Chavez Ravine existed: L.A. is on Tongva-Gabrielino land).

Beginning in 1951, the city used eminent domain to seize land in Chavez Ravine for a public housing project. The city’s urban renewal authority forced residents to vacate their homes and abandon the neighborhood. They told homeowners that they had bought them out at market rate, but few could find equivalent properties for the low prices they had been paid. Renters were promised that they would be given first rights to the public housing that would be built over their razed community.

Yet after the residents were displaced, the project languished. As the Cold War intensified, public housing was deemed too much of a “socialist experiment” to build. In 1959, to bring Major League Baseball to Los Angeles, the city sold the land to O’Malley, owner of what was then the Brooklyn Dodgers, at a fraction of its worth. Ground broke for the construction of Dodger Stadium that year. This led to the most well-known of the Chavez Ravine evictions: that of the Arechiga family, which included an adult daughter, Aurora Vargas, being forcibly carried away by deputies. The emotional scene was followed by the entrance of bulldozers that razed their home.

When I was growing up in Echo Park, I didn’t know this history. I don’t think most people know it today. I learned it once I got to UCLA, in a geography class with Gerry Hale. He was not even a Chicano, but a white man who engaged in a one-man boycott of Dodger Stadium, having made a personal commitment to never go to ballgames because of what had happened on the land on which Dodger Stadium sits.

If that’s the only part of the history you know, and especially if you’re Latinx, you might hate the Dodgers. But in fact, one-in-two Dodger fans at any given game is Latinx. After learning about Chavez Ravine, I remember feeling conflicted. Here was yet another chapter in the history of Latinx disenfranchisement, but I also knew how connected I felt to the team.

Some people trace the turning point of the Latinx community to Fernando Valenzuela and his magic left arm that led the Dodgers to so many victories. But my love for the Dodgers, and that of the people I grew up with, preceded Valenzuela (though don’t get me wrong, I had a button with his picture on it that I wore to every game in grade school). Throughout my formative years of fandom, I remember admiring Pedro Guerrero, Manny Mota, Pedro and Ramón Martínez, Ismael Valdéz, Raúl Mondesí, and Adrián Beltré. Plus, we had Jaime Jarrín, Hall of Fame broadcast announcer for the Dodgers, who called the games for us in Spanish, serving as a bridge and ambassador between the Latinx community and the Dodgers.

Señor Jarrín will retire this year. I was honored to interview him recently for my book about Nayarit restaurant. The Nayarit was a place where immigrants such as Señor Jarrín knew they could speak Spanish, bump into friends, and feel at home. Remember, we’re talking about 1950s, ’60s segregated L.A., right on the heels of Mendez v. Westminster. Edward Roybal had only recently been elected as city councilman for East Los Angeles—the first Latino elected in L.A. since the U.S. takeover in 1848. When Señor Jarrín traveled to other ballparks to announce Dodgers away games, they would stick him wherever—sometimes next to a pole, making it difficult to see the game and make the calls. He knew what it took to make space for others. Señor Jarrín was a “place-maker” at Dodger Stadium, letting Latinx L.A. know that this was their team, helping people feel at home in the stadium.

Nowhere else in L.A. do I feel more like an Angeleno, Chicana, or part of the collective human experience than at Dodger Stadium. It’s love for Los Doyers, but also my fellow fans. During a postseason game last year, my seatmate was an L.A.-born Chicano living in the Bay, who drove down to be there. His cousins joined him, just as they had been going together as they were kids, similar to the way my family descends together upon Dodger stadium with the same feel, love, and spirit as if we were going to a family carne asasda. His family and mine linked arms as the mariachi—playing from the bleachers, surrounded by some of the most loyal Dodgers fans—started playing “Volver, Volver,” and belted out the unofficial Mexican anthem.

Places are made not just by the people who tear down neighborhoods to build stadiums but the people who work in and around the stadium: who play baseball, who come to them for a sense of community, and who follow what goes on from their radios. History is complicated that way—a rich palimpsest with layers of joy, layers of sorrow, layers of connection, layers of estrangement.

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There wasn’t much to “downtown” in April 1962: just City Hall, the L.A. Times building, some offices and stores, and the decaying Victorian homes, down-at-the-heels apartment buildings, and shabby rooming houses of Bunker Hill. The civic and business leaders who supported team owner Walter O’Malley’s Dodger Stadium project, from then-mayor Norris Poulson to Times owner Norman Chandler and Union Oil chief Reese Taylor, envisioned a different downtown, one that would match those in the two cities they most admired and envied: New York and San Francisco.

They believed that the construction of Dodger Stadium would begin the process of building that downtown. Starting in the late 1950s, they also laid plans to obliterate the eyesore and embarrassment they saw in the Bunker Hill neighborhood through an ambitious redevelopment project that would stretch across three decades.

By 1961, down the hill from Chavez Ravine, the process of razing and demolishing the structures on Bunker Hill had begun, and an older Los Angeles was passing from view. Thanks to a brilliant and long-underappreciated filmmaker, we can bear witness to its last days.

Kent Mackenzie began shooting what became The Exiles in the late 1950s on the streets of Bunker Hill. The neighborhood was home to an extremely diverse working-class population. Residents included a substantial number of Native Americans, many of whom had moved to Los Angeles after World War II as part of the federal government’s termination policy, which sought to end tribal affiliations and encourage assimilation.

Mackenzie’s movie follows a group of Native American men and women over the course of a typical night and morning on and around Bunker Hill. The director filmed in documentary style, his camera peering over his subjects’ shoulders as if he were a member of the group. Part narrative, part nonfiction, The Exiles featured Bunker Hill residents who reenacted scenes from their own lives, with interview voice-overs serving to frame their stories.

Bunker Hill buildings are razed for redevelopment. Courtesy of Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons.

Mackenzie’s camera eye captured loneliness, alienation, and episodic violence against a crumbling downtown landscape. A neglected mother-to-be peers into darkened store windows and walks past the Angels Flight funicular railway on a deserted Hill Street. A hair-trigger altercation breaks out in a Main Street bar. A car filled with revved-up nightriders speeds through the 3rd Street Tunnel. In the flim’s climactic scene, the protagonists gather after midnight on “Hill X” in Chavez Ravine for a session of Native American drumming and dancing. That space will soon become the parking lot of the new Dodger Stadium, the fading past intersecting with the beckoning future of the city.

The year after The Exiles premiered, Dodger Stadium opened, and its effect on downtown was palpable. By the end of the 1960s the Music Center had debuted, and Bunker Hill, which Raymond Chandler once described as “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town,” was on its way to becoming the high-rent retail, residential, dining, and entertainment hub we know today. In 1969, Bunker Hill Towers, the neighborhood’s first upscale housing development, opened its doors, followed over the next half century by MOCA, Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, the Colburn School, California Plaza, and even a new version of Angels Flight. The “exiles” of Mackenzie’s film, along with the old Bunker Hill, had vanished. So had the film itself. Unable to secure a distributor, Mackenzie watched The Exiles fade into obscurity before his death in 1980.

Dodger Stadium, of course, fared much better. Acclaimed for its sleek, linear architecture, modern conveniences, family-friendly atmosphere, and—at least under its initial owners, the O’Malley family—reasonable ticket prices, it served as a form of civic glue for an often-fractured city. Dodger Stadium also marks the spot where modern Los Angeles began. A modern city possesses a downtown with civic, cultural, and recreational institutions commensurate with its status on the national and global stage. While downtown’s pressing issues today include crime, homelessness, and affordability, it bears no resemblance to the barren, work-’til-5-then-get-out zone that existed when excavation for Dodger Stadium began in 1959. And today, few Angelenos, even those who decry the city’s forced removal of Chavez Ravine residents, can imagine Los Angeles without Dodger Stadium.

Unlike Dodger Stadium, it took The Exiles years to be appreciated, but its time finally arrived. Restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2008, and offered the publicity and distribution it had initially been denied, The Exiles became a critical success. The restoration garnered numerous admiring reviews, a showing on Turner Classic Movies, and a spot on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry honoring “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” American films.

The city that The Exiles captured, however, is gone. And it is likely that despite the love it evokes from the people of Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium will one day be gone as well. Even with its new conveniences and features, it cannot match the recently opened SoFi Stadium’s futuristic amenities and multi-platform media reach. That stadium will be the symbol of yet another “new” Los Angeles.

So a 60th birthday season is a moment to salute and admire Dodger Stadium while we still can—and remember the Los Angeles of The Exiles that it replaced. In L.A., forever is just a word.

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These prices remained the same until 1976. As late as 1997, the last full year Walter’s son Peter O’Malley owned the team before selling it to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Group, a box seat cost $12, and you could sit in the pavilions for $6.

In case you’re wondering, $3.50 in 1962 is the equivalent of $28 today. Good luck trying to buy a box seat at Dodger Stadium in 2017 for 28 bucks. If you want to see the Dodgers play the Giants this season from that seat location, you could be paying as much as $600 for the privilege. Present-day Dodger Stadium’s slogan might well be: “Welcome, fans. Bring money.”

But it was not always this way. The O’Malleys’ low ticket price strategy was part of a larger business plan, centered on getting as many repeat customers into their ballpark as possible. Like Disneyland, the theme park showplace that Dodgers executives visited and studied, Dodger Stadium would feature affordable prices that would attract families, and especially women and children. Once they were through the turnstiles and “in the building,” these families would spend money on concessions—lots and lots of Dodger Dogs—as well as all manner of Dodger logo branded souvenirs to be worn, waved, and displayed.

Most important of all was the atmosphere inside the stadium. Beautiful views of downtown and the mountains. Organ music. Friendly and efficient park employees. Cleanliness. Safety. Fan greetings on the scoreboards. Promotions. Autograph and picture days. Not to mention Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Steve Garvey, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser, and eight National League pennants in the stadium’s first quarter century of operation.

Dodger Stadium was privately owned, which meant the O’Malleys bore all risks but reaped all rewards—which also let them play the long game. If say, a six-year-old could visit the stadium with his family and have an experience that would make him want to come back again, the seeds would be planted for a lifetime of patronage and profit. “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” runs the famous Jesuit aphorism, and under O’Malley ownership from 1962 to 1997, the Dodger Stadium experience epitomized it.

This business model also served to make the stadium one of Los Angeles’ most inclusive and diverse public venues, since its affordable ticket prices drew fans from across racial, ethnic, and class lines. Club box and dugout level seating, which were class-exclusionary, represented only 3 to 4 percent of available ticketing options at Dodger Stadium in the 1960s. So if any institution in Los Angeles could be termed “democratic,” in the sense of offering the greatest good for the greatest number, it was Dodger Stadium during that time.

No one would call Dodger Stadium democratic today. It is not designed for repeat visitors, unless they are hedge fund managers or employees fortunate enough to get their hands on the company season tickets. The team, owned by Guggenheim, a financial services consortium, has gone upscale. It has spent more on players and stadium renovations, while also charging fans much more for tickets and parking. If you’re planning to come as a family, make sure your monthly rent or mortgage payment is covered first. Even a family of four that bought the cheapest tickets in the ballpark, along with four hot dogs and four drinks, would spend $134. The same family would spend approximately $120 for the same combination at a movie theater, where parking is often free.

The Dodger Stadium that tied a transient, race-and-class stratified city together is gone. Now, the chances that the fan in the seat next to you will be from the same social class and racial background are higher than ever.

In a 21st-century Los Angeles rife with income stagnation, racial separation, and social alienation, we need Dodger Stadium to return to its roots. The emphasis, as it was when the O’Malleys owned the team, needs to be on families and on children. Let kids under 14 in for half price. And give families a special discount. The money lost on the front end would be a fraction of what lifelong Dodger fans would spend over the years at their favorite stadium. A democratized Dodger Stadium would not solve all of the city’s problems, but every small, good thing counts in a time like this.

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