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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I’m a sports writer and author, and a longtime admirer of McLarnin’s ring reputation. But by the time I met him for an interview in 2004, not long before he died at 96, age had knocked about six inches off his height, and arthritis had turned his powerful fists into gnarled claws. Age did do him one favor: his “new” claim to fame was that he was the world’s oldest living boxing champ.

Despite an impressive career, McLarnin wasn’t exactly a household name. Which left me to wonder about this mysterious plaque. I’d walked this stretch of the boulevard, through L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood just north of downtown, countless times but I’d never noticed it.

I quickly discovered McLarnin was not alone—his was just one in a series of similar homages to former sports stars. The plaques are easy to miss. Measuring approximately 17 by 16 inches, about the size of a coffee table book, they don’t exactly pop out of the pavement. Many are blemished with graffiti or dirt. But now that I had noticed them, I set about trying to figure out their relevance to each other and Los Angeles.

My first thought was that the plaques must have some connection with Southern California. McLarnin didn’t fight here, but he spent most of his post-ring career in L.A. This was reinforced when I came upon other greats who made their reputations in Southern California, including Dodgers pitching ace Sandy Koufax, Lakers legend Elgin Baylor, and boxer Armando Muniz. Here also were Pasadena’s own Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his UCLA teammate, Kenny Washington, the Rams running back who grew up in L.A. and broke the NFL color barrier a year before Robinson integrated baseball.

Olympians seemed to dominate the plaques, which made sense at this local level. L.A.’s dedication to the Olympic Movement runs deep. The city has hosted the Summer Olympics twice, in 1932 and 1984, and is currently bidding for the 2024 Olympics.

Besides track star Jesse Owens—whose triumph at the 1936 Berlin games humiliated Adolf Hitler and his Aryan doctrine—there were plaques for divers Pat McCormick (four gold medals at the 1952 and 1956 Games) and Sammy Lee, the first Asian-American to win Olympic gold (1948, 1952); 1960 decathlete gold medalist Rafer Johnson; 1968 pole vault winner Bob Seagren; swimmer John Naber, a five-time Olympic medalist; Frank Lubin, who helped the U.S. win the first gold medal awarded in basketball in 1936; and sprinter Wyomia Tyus, who won back-to-back gold medals in the 100 meters (1964, 1968).

Bronze plaque on the Avenue of the Athletes in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

But I also noticed several outliers, like Babe Ruth and Joe Louis, icons both, but athletes with little connection to L.A. In search of an organizing principle, some rhyme or reason for this esoteric boulevard of bronze, I turned to Fred Claire, the former general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who immediately knew what I was talking about.

Claire told me that a local entrepreneur by the name of L. Andrew Castle dreamed up the entire endeavor, dubbing it, grandly, the Avenue of the Athletes. Castle originally came to Southern California to work with Charlie Chaplin at Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, one of the pioneering silent-movie studios on the West Coast.

Castle left motion pictures for photography and, beginning in 1944, taught the craft at what was then Loyola University-Marymount College. He served as a team photographer for the Dodgers after the ball club moved to L.A. from Brooklyn in 1958 and worked for the Tournament of Roses and their annual New Year’s Day parade in Pasadena.

Castle owned two camera shops, one in Echo Park and one in Hollywood, back when photographers used film, which had to be processed and developed in darkrooms. He couldn’t help but notice that the Walk of Fame along Hollywood Boulevard, which officially launched in 1960, was attracting tens of thousands of tourists to an area that had little actual connection to movie and TV stars beyond the name “Hollywood.”

Claire told me that Castle envisioned an Echo Park version of the Walk of Fame, but for athletes instead of celebrities. In the mid-1970s, Castle persuaded the city of L.A. to grant him the permits to launch the project. He rallied support from neighborhood merchants, the Echo Park Chamber of Commerce, and the Dodgers, who were now comfortably ensconced in their own stadium in nearby Chavez Ravine.

A selection committee was formed, and the first set of bronze plaques was laid in concrete in 1976. The committee met for organizational lunches at Barragan’s, a now-closed Mexican restaurant located a couple blocks from Castle’s camera store. But when Castle died in 1978, followed almost immediately by his wife, enthusiasm for the project faltered.

In October of 1985, four new bronze plaques were installed, honoring basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tennis star Billie Jean King, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda and, posthumously, Castle himself, bringing the total number of inductees to 32.

But that was the end of it. This bit of inconspicuous streetscape never found its footing, and is all but forgotten today. “Did the Avenue of the Athletes fulfill Andy Castle’s dream?” Claire asked. “No, but at least he had a dream.”

Today’s Walk of Fame, by contrast, includes more than 2,500 stars along a 15-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard (and several blocks of Vine Street). In a nation fascinated by fame and celebrity, we want to touch the legends and we want contact with their achievements—even if it’s with the soles of our sneakers.

That accounts for legions of imitators the Walk of Fame has spawned—including, of course, Castle’s Avenue of the Athletes—as well as the hundreds of halls of fame that have opened their doors across the nation. It’s worth noting that Walk of Fame stars, or their representatives, must now pony up $30,000 for the privilege of being included. Call it the price of fame.

Alas, no one emerged to carry Andrew Castle’s torch in Echo Park. Even so, the very reason that Castle thought up the concept—to boost foot traffic in a downtrodden area—happened eventually and somewhat organically, spurred by a housing boom that has brought with it vegan bistros, craft brew pubs, artisanal coffee shops, and the requisite anti-gentrification outcry.

The plaque that honors Andrew Castle still rests outside the former location of his shop on Sunset Boulevard, diagonally across from Jimmy McLarnin. Castle’s marker features a boxy camera of the sort that photojournalists used in the 1950s and 1960s—it resembles an old Rollieflex—which is entirely appropriate given that his contributions to photography may well outlast his quirky, quixotic mission.

Up the street from the Avenue of the Athletes, inside Dodger Stadium, the team has established an annual award in Castle’s name for the best photo of the season by a local professional photographer. The winning pictures are displayed outside the press box.

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L.A. is a great hockey town. Add a cold sport to a warm-weather city, and you’ve got a nice change of pace. In a place better known for its laid-back attitude and with no professional football team, the roughness of hockey binds its fans together. Plus, people who live in L.A. have come here from all over the country and the world. The ones from up north may have come for the sunshine, but they haven’t given up their love of frosty activities. So you find a lot of true hockey fans in L.A.—and some of them are even natives, like me.

I became a hockey fan in first grade. The year before, when I was in kindergarten, I’d gone to a classmate’s ice-skating birthday party at the Culver City Ice Arena. I fell a lot, but that sensation of gliding on ice was something I’d never experienced before, given that the weather in the winter is usually around 60 degrees. I remember watching some older kids on hockey skates going incredibly fast and wondering if I could be as good as them some day.

The next time I had a day off from school, my mother asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, “Can I go ice skating?” My mother took me back to the arena and found an instructor to give me a private lesson. I instantly fell in love with skating—even thought it took me a while to learn how to skate backward—and I have skated pretty much every week since then. My first instructor was a guy from Minnesota who had played hockey all his life. And, a year later, after I learned to skate better, I transitioned into hockey.

I love arriving at the rink for practice in my shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops, and putting on all of the gear. This takes some time because I put on 13 pieces of equipment, including shin pads, long stockings, elbow pads, a chest-and-shoulder protector, a neck guard, and a helmet. Then, I hit the ice and take some fast laps to warm up. When practice officially gets underway, we start with some agility skating drills: skating to one line and skating back, skating backward, and falling and popping up. After that, the coaches throw out the pucks, and we run many of the same drills. Then, we work on drills that simulate different parts of game situations. Depending on how we played the previous week, these can include defense, getting open on offense, passing, and shooting. If we’ve had a good practice, the coaches will let us scrimmage at the end. If the coaches deem the practice to have been futile, it will end with laps. Either way, when I get off the ice after 90 minutes, I am drenched in sweat and feel as if I just ran a marathon.

About six times a year (or more, if there are playoff games), I head to Staples Center to see the Kings in action. We usually get four tickets. My dad (the second-biggest hockey fan in the family) and I always go. If my mom and sister don’t want to go, I invite other friends from school who like sports or hockey teammates. The games are very energetic and jam-packed with enthusiastic fans. The difference, however, is that hockey fans are a little more vulgar than your average basketball or baseball fan. For example, hockey fans welcome an opposing team into Staples Center by yelling, “[fill in name of team] sucks!”, and repeat this refrain constantly throughout the game. Hockey fans greet the opposing team’s goalie by chanting his name in a taunting manner whenever a goal is scored against him.

The Kings’ mascot, Bailey—a 6-foot-tall lion—is not the most hospitable of creatures. Bailey has been known to slam his body against the glass to try to get the opposing players to slip up. He also flashes pictures of things that have nothing to do with the game as a distraction. When the Kings played the New Jersey Devils, he put the cast of The Jersey Shore on display; when the opposing goalie’s last name was “Elliott,” he showed the alien from E.T. When the Anaheim Ducks meet the Kings at Staples Center, Bailey will appear as a duck hunter from Duck Dynasty. And the fans love his attempts to trip up the other team. Rowdy behavior rarely spills outside of the arena, though. Everyone involved knows this is just part of the fan experience.

My best L.A. hockey experience was watching the Los Angeles Kings win the Stanley Cup in 2012. The Kings had barely made the playoffs. I was so worried about their chances against the heavily favored Devils that I went to game three at Staples Center instead of game four to avoid the possibility of enduring Devil celebrations. I watched the final game at home on TV with my dad, my mom, and my sister. When the Kings won their first Stanley Cup ever, we all did a round of high-fiving. Everyone else drifted away as I kept watching the players skate around with the Cup over their heads and do post-game interviews. I couldn’t peel myself away. Part of being a hockey fan in L.A. is prevailing against the odds, and I wanted to savor it.

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