NEW YORK (Bloomberg) ? While it may take a village to raise a child, a village full of children was razed to make way for Dodger Stadium.

The victims of this early 1950s hostile takeover are still steamed, as we see in a poignant PBS documentary called ?Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story.?

This powerful programme, written and directed by Jordan Mechner, paints an ugly picture of how politicians, real estate magnates, red-baiters and the owner of a famous baseball team managed to destroy a tight-knit, Mexican-American community in the early 1950s.

The programme airs tonight on PBS at 11 p.m. Bermuda time.

The sordid tale began in July 1950 when the city?s housing board informed the residents of Chavez Ravine, a small village of some 300 families near downtown Los Angeles, that urban renewal was coming their way.

In return for selling their hardscrabble houses and property to the federal government, the families were told, they would get fair-market value and first crack at buying into a planned paradise called Elysian Park Heights.

It all looked great on paper, says Frank Wilkinson, then a city housing official who was spearheading the project that would include new homes, playgrounds, a school, even a church.

?We were idealistic,? says Wilkinson, who would soon lose his ideals and his freedom.

Chavez Ravine was a nice place before it was slated for improvement.

The children would ?run up and down the hills,? recalls former resident Sally Anchando, and slide down the grassy slopes on sleds made from cardboard boxes.

These humble but happy lives were photographed by Don Normark, who stumbled across the neighbourhood in 1949 and took hundreds of black-and-whites, many of which are seen in the documentary.

They show kids playing, a slender young girl in her wedding dress, old women hanging clothes on a line, a child standing beside a doll nearly half her size, and a worker walking home along a hillside path, lunchbox in hand.

No wonder the Ravine was known as the ?poor man?s Shangri-La.? Later, it turned into a dealmaker?s heaven.

Wilkinson?s project ran into opposition from the real estate lobby, which denounced public housing as an example of ?creeping socialism? and demanded that he disclose any political affiliations. Wilkinson refused to cooperate and was later hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

After again refusing to answer questions that he considered inappropriate, Wilkinson was given a one-year jail sentence.

Meanwhile, residents of Chavez Ravine were forced from their homes with little or no compensation. Old footage shows people being carried out of their homes while children screamed. Then came the bulldozers, and Shangri-La bit the dust.

Norris Poulson, a pug of a man who was elected mayor in 1953 after campaigning to stop the ?un-American? project, helped the city buy the land from the federal government at a bargain price with the stipulation that it be used for a ?public purpose?.

No problem. As it happened, Brooklyn Dodgers baseball owner Walter O?Malley had agreed to move the team to Los Angeles if he could build a new stadium. Chavez Ravine would do nicely. The stadium finally opened on April 10, 1962.

The Dodgers organisation later tried to make peace with evicted residents, offering a real olive branch and a lukewarm apology from a team official who attributed the whole thing to a ?lack of understanding? rather than a ?lack of caring?.

The documentary, introduced by actress Susan Sarandon, unfolds with a sombre score by the great guitarist Ry Cooder.

Funnyman Cheech Marin does the narration, but there?s no mirth in this sad tale.