Dodger Stadium

Dodger Stadium is the third-oldest major league baseball park in America — a 56,000-seat mid-century modern masterpiece in Chavez Ravine that has been home to the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1962 and is widely considered the most beautiful baseball stadium in the country. The stadium's setting — nestled in a ravine with the San Gabriel Mountains visible beyond the outfield and the downtown skyline glowing through the smog to the south — provides a backdrop that no other ballpark can match.

The stadium was designed by Emil Praeger in a distinctive mid-century style — cantilevered concrete decks, no columns obstructing views, and a colour scheme of pastel seats (originally matched to the sections: field level in orange, loge in blue, reserved in yellow) that gives the interior a Southern California brightness. The playing field, consistently rated the best in baseball, uses a hybrid grass that stays green year-round in the California climate, and the sunset games — when the light turns golden and the mountains glow pink behind centre field — are the aesthetic peak of American sports.

Chavez Ravine, the site of the stadium, has a painful history — a Mexican-American community of 300 families was forcibly evicted in the 1950s to make way for the stadium, a displacement that remains one of the most controversial episodes in LA's urban history. The Dodgers' arrival from Brooklyn in 1958 was itself controversial (Brooklyn never forgave Walter O'Malley), and the stadium that rose from the cleared ravine carries the weight of both celebrations and displacements. Dodger Dogs (the stadium's signature hot dog, sold over 30 million annually) and the seventh-inning stretch remain democratic traditions in a city that needs them.