Annual attendance figures that routinely exceed three million make it difficult to imagine that any challenges faced the completion of the 56,000-seat stadium northwest of downtown L.A. for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Jerald Podair's book City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles reveals that the challenges were many—so many, in fact, that the $23 million baseball stadium almost never got off the ground. Unlike nearly all stadiums at the time (and unlike most stadiums in the several decades since that time), Dodger Stadium was a largely, albeit not exclusively, private undertaking. Podair's account, which mostly chronicles the five-year period leading up to opening day on April 10, 1962, informs us that Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley assumed the financial risk by offering to fund the stadium out of pocket. O'Malley also hoped to protect his investment against loss by design, offering Disneyland-like features to keep fans entertained regardless of team performance.

Podair's well-researched, well-written book suggests that O'Malley's risks were more political than economic. O'Malley may have cast himself as a simple “businessman” who believed that tax revenues and a multiplier effect from the stadium would offset the loss of municipally owned land, yet Podair's 311-page account mostly exposes the political quagmire in Los Angeles that O'Malley did not forecast when he moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn in 1957. Stadiums are very public constructions, Podair reminds us, no matter the method of financing. In City of Dreams, the biggest games are played not in the ballpark but in city council chambers and courtrooms; the most important players are not Sandy Koufax or Maury Wills but council members such as Edward Roybal, John Holland, and Rosalind Wyman and (former) mayor Norris Poulson. O'Malley plays a leading role in the text, but readers learn just as much about public officials, the public process, and the political landscape of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Podair's sustained attention to the political process makes sense, for City of Dreams broadly ponders whether public benefit is derived from private enterprise and specifically questions whether the state should offer preferential treatment to particular individuals or projects.

To investigate these questions, Podair organizes the book into ten loosely chronological chapters along with a preface and an epilogue. He supplements newspaper articles, the O'Malley Archive, and the Roybal Papers with secondary material in urban, local, and baseball history to paint a wide-ranging picture of the circumstances surrounding Dodger Stadium's construction. Although Podair occasionally appears to uphold O'Malley as a civic champion needled by obstructionist politicians, his consistent portrayal of stadium opposition also demonstrates that sustained dissent can make a difference. City of Dreams permits readers to draw their own conclusions about the public “good.”

Readers know the outcome, of course: Dodger Stadium would rise and capitalism, even in California, would reign supreme. But interwoven into what may seem a narrative of inevitable “progress” favoring the city's business elite are the many stories that helped shape the stadium—and threatened to implode it. Some of these stories may be familiar to historians, but Podair culls them in ways that build drama while suggesting that the outcome was anything but inevitable: the support of the stadium project from the city's African American and Latin American communities (which may have stemmed from the Dodgers’ early efforts at racial integration); the role of a public relations firm that helped sway popular support toward Dodger Stadium; voices of opposition in mostly white, middle-class San Fernando Valley; the eviction of working-class Mexican families from Chavez Ravine—a site and action, Podair implies, whose complex history belies its typically one-sided historiographic portrayal. In general, Podair's stories demonstrate how folks from all sides of the political, racial, and class spectrum either opposed or supported the stadium for different reasons, indicating that dividing the issue along political lines would be fruitless—and probably inaccurate. It is clear that all was not clear in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles.

Whether Dodger Stadium expressed the city's place within the modern world is, however, less clear. The book's subtitle—Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles—presumes that questions of urban modernity would be central to the narrative. Although Podair notes the challenges of the term “modern” and claims in the preface that new buildings constituted a modern city in the eyes of metropolitan leaders, readers are still compelled to deduce whether modern Los Angeles refers mostly to downtown or to the entire city (or region), a shifting system of public finance, a pro-business climate, a “world-class” city whose downtown is sprinkled with civic monuments and cultural institutions, a built environment marked by innovative design and new materials, or some combination of these, and perhaps other, developments. Beyond summaries of neighborhood political leanings as represented by ballot box results, the book lacks much discussion of the city's geographical spread or its freeway system—characteristics that dominate perceptions of modern Los Angeles even, or especially, if they extend beyond the municipal boundaries. The physical, ethnic, and economic makeup of city neighborhoods themselves hardly appear, though Podair claims that the stadium opposition was principally aligned around a presumably antimodern vision of decentered communities favoring good schools, paved streets, and proper sanitation. While the Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine neighborhoods do receive adequate attention, Chinatown and Echo Park, which also exist between downtown and the stadium, are virtually invisible. Were these neighborhoods inconsequential to stadium construction? Did they not fit within a modernist vision of the city?

An extensive exploration of the wider cultural and geographical landscape of modern Los Angeles may have been beyond the scope of this book. Podair's principal focus regards the limits of public subsidies for a private venture, and his insightful placement of Dodger Stadium as an early fulcrum around which the privatization of the American urban landscape would turn raises pertinent questions with which scholars of twentieth-century urban history, economics, and politics must grapple. As we continue to puzzle over the seemingly unimpeded public concessions granted to owners for stadiums in the present, we should look to City of Dreams for a thoughtful analysis about where much of this began.