Elysian Park
Hilly, tree-covered public park with sweeping views and a hidden ravine holding a hard history.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Elysian Park in Los Angeles centers on Chavez Ravine, a ravine within the park's six hundred acres that once held three tight-knit Mexican-American neighborhoods, among the few places Latino Angelenos could own homes amid redlining elsewhere in the city. It follows the 1949 promise that residents would be relocated into new public housing, the political turn that stalled it, and the May 1959 morning sheriff's deputies carried Aurora Vargas from her home on Malvina Avenue in what newspapers called Black Friday. Listen for how the park's older story, its 1886 founding and the volunteers who planted over a hundred thousand trees, sits beneath that harder history.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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