Artist and Lecturer

In 1948, 20 year-old photographer Don Normark walked up a hill in Los Angeles looking for a good view. Instead, he found Chavez Ravine, site of three ramshackle Mexican-American neighborhoods. He spent much of the next year photographing this uniquely intact rural community. In 1950 the residents received letters telling them that they must sell their homes to the Government and leave the ravine to make room for a low-0cost housing project. During the following years of McCarthy era politics the old home sat empty. In September 1961 the last of the houses were demolished and construction began on Dodger stadium. Normark's intimate portraits of this displaced community, coupled with conversations with many of the residents in 1997 when Normark sought out and found them scattered through Los Angeles, resulted in the book, Chavez Ravine 1949, a Los Angeles Story.