Chavez Ravine was a cluster of three close-knit, predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods — Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop — set in the hills just north of downtown Los Angeles. Settled and largely self-built over generations, the communities had their own homes and gardens, churches, a school, grocery stores and a strong sense of belonging that residents later likened to a village, even as the city chronically neglected services on the hill.
In 1949 the new federal Housing Act made Chavez Ravine a target. The Los Angeles City Housing Authority, with planning official Frank Wilkinson among its leading advocates, designated the area for Elysian Park Heights, an ambitious public-housing development of thousands of units designed by the noted modernist architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. Beginning around 1950 the city used eminent domain to acquire the land, sending residents letters that pressed them to sell and held out the promise that they would have priority for the modern apartments to be built there. Many sold under pressure; some refused and stayed.
Then Cold War politics destroyed the plan. Public housing was attacked as ‘creeping socialism’; Wilkinson was driven from his post and publicly interrogated about his political associations, and the 1953 election of Mayor Norris Poulson turned the city decisively against the project. Elysian Park Heights was cancelled — but by then much of the community was already gone or going, and the half-cleared land sat in limbo. In a deal that became infamous as a bait-and-switch, the city steered the publicly assembled site to Walter O’Malley’s Dodgers as the location for a new baseball stadium.
The reckoning came on 8–9 May 1959, in what the press dubbed the ‘Battle of Chavez Ravine,’ when sheriff’s deputies carried the last holdouts — including Aurora Vargas of the Arechiga family — bodily from their homes while news cameras rolled and bulldozers waited. Dodger Stadium opened in 1962 atop the leveled neighborhoods. Today the ballpark and its vast parking lots cover the site, while the lost communities are kept alive through oral-history projects, Ry Cooder’s 2005 concept album ‘Chávez Ravine,’ stage works, documentaries and the testimony of former residents and their descendants.
Tyneham was a small farming and estate village tucked into a valley running down to Worbarrow Bay on Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck — a place so old it appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ‘Tigeham.’ For centuries it was a quiet community of stone cottages, a Tudor-era manor house, a church with Saxon origins and a one-room schoolhouse, the whole of it owned and shaped by the Bond family of Tyneham House. On the eve of the Second World War it held roughly 225 people across about 100 dwellings, its rhythms set by farming, fishing off Worbarrow and the church bell.
In late 1943 that world ended. With Allied forces preparing for the Normandy invasion and the existing Lulworth gunnery ranges proving too small for a new generation of tanks, the War Office issued a requisition notice on 16 November 1943 for Tyneham and some 7,500 surrounding acres of heath, downland and farmland, to be used for live-firing and armoured training. Residents were given roughly 28 days’ notice to leave, and the last families departed just before Christmas 1943. As they went, a villager pinned a now-famous note to the door of the parish church: ‘Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.’
They never did. The understanding of return was bound up in the wartime, temporary nature of the seizure, but once the war ended the Ministry of Defence found the coastal ranges too valuable to relinquish. In 1948 a compulsory purchase order made the requisition permanent, and the Bond family and former residents were barred for good. Campaigns to reopen the valley to settlement persisted for decades, but the strategic case for armoured gunnery on the relatively empty Purbeck coast always prevailed, and the broader Lulworth Ranges remain in active military use to this day.
Today Tyneham is one of England’s best-known ‘ghost villages’ — a roofless, ivy-laced shell of cottages preserved inside the active Lulworth military ranges, opened to the public on most weekends and holiday periods when firing is not scheduled. The church and the schoolhouse survive intact and have been restored as small museums, the school slates and desks laid out as if the children had just stepped out. Peter Wellman, the last surviving person born in the village, died in 2025 at the age of 100, having revisited Tyneham the year before. Tyneham stands as a monument both to wartime sacrifice and to a promise the state did not keep — a temporary measure that quietly became permanent.
Seneca Village was Manhattan’s most substantial community of free Black property owners — a settlement that rose between roughly West 82nd and 89th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, on rocky uptown land then far from the dense city below. It began in 1825 when Andrew Williams, a twenty-five-year-old Black shoeshiner, bought three lots from the landowners John and Elizabeth Whitehead, and within days other free African Americans began purchasing adjoining parcels. Over the next three decades it grew into a stable neighborhood of homes, churches, a school, and cemeteries, anchoring a population of around 225 people by the mid-1850s.
The village mattered far beyond its size. In a city where most Black New Yorkers rented crowded downtown rooms, Seneca Village gave African Americans something rare — land of their own, and with it a measure of political power. Under New York’s 1821 constitution, Black men could vote only if they owned at least $250 in property and met a longer residency requirement than white men; owning lots in Seneca Village pushed a number of residents over that bar. By 1855 the settlement was home to roughly two-thirds African American residents alongside Irish and some German immigrant neighbors, three churches, and a school.
That independence ended when the City of New York set out to build a great public park. The state legislature authorized the acquisition of the land in 1853, and the City used the power of eminent domain to condemn every property within the future Central Park — including the legally owned homes and churches of Seneca Village. Landowners were paid for their property, though many residents argued the awards were far below true value, and the press of the day routinely dismissed the community as a squatter camp to soften the public to its removal. By the autumn of 1857 the residents had been forced out and the buildings demolished.
Seneca Village then vanished from public memory for more than a century, paved over by lawns and pathways and absent from the popular story of Central Park’s creation. It was rediscovered by historians and, in 2011, by archaeologists, whose excavation recovered the everyday artifacts of a settled, churchgoing, middle-class community — and forced a long-overdue revision of who had been displaced to make the park.