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| Racing for Seats on Opening Day at Dodger Stadium, April 10, 1962 Photograph by John Malman/Los Angeles Times; framework.latimes.com |
It wasn’t the Dodgers’—or Los Angeles’s—first Major League Baseball game on the West Coast. But the match between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds on April 10, 1962, marked a new beginning for the transplanted New York team: the first game at their newly built Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine north of downtown Los Angeles.
52,564 spectators attended, kicking off a season that drew 2.7 million fans, the most in baseball history up to then. Still, despite the city’s excitement over the new stadium, that auspicious start was tainted by earlier events leading to an entire community’s dissolution.