The Secret History Of Dodger Stadium’s Mysterious Concrete Murals

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I had been going to Dodger Stadium with my dad for about 30 years before he pointed them out to me. “See that?” he asked, gesturing toward two rectangular panels of concrete on a far wall of the main seating structure. They looked almost like friezes, carved with inscrutable designs. My dad had been wondering about them for decades.

Turns out the pieces he’d spotted are just the beginning. Eventually I’d locate more custom bas-relief sculptures around the park—about a dozen in total. Smaller ones visible from the field-level entrances. Massive, multi-story pieces that wrap around certain outside corners of the building. They’re subtle: abstract scenes unadorned with color, camouflaged into the rest of their concrete environments, in some cases obscured by trees and bushes. 

Once you notice them, they pull you in. I began looking at two of the most visible ones every time I walked by, wondering what the shapes are supposed to be. Could one be Sandy Koufax on the mound? Could another be Jackie Robinson stealing home? 

“It was kind of hidden in plain sight,” Nick Canchola, curator and operator of a niche “internet radio station” called Moods Radio, told me. Canchola was visiting Dodger Stadium in August when one of the sculptures caught his eye—a rather large and well-preserved one, but tucked into the farthest reaches of the park, on the top deck, wedged near an escalator and a bathroom. “When I first walked by, I was like, ‘This looks oddly symbolic or religious.’ It just has this weird amount of presence.” 

Canchola posted an appreciation on the Moods Radio Instagram page—“Under different circumstances,” he wrote, “this artwork could hold its weight in any professional gallery space”—that is the only critical appraisal of the pieces I can find online or in newspaper archives. 

Dodger Stadium is one of the most documented locations in L.A.—a masterpiece of midcentury design from architects Emil Praeger and Edward Fickett, but also an ongoing totem of past cruelty to former residents of Chavez Ravine, who were kicked out by the city along the strained path to the park’s creation. It would be reasonable to assume that there would be no stones left to turn about its construction and opening in 1962 or its ongoing historical import as the third-oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball, following Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. 

And yet when I tried to figure out who made Dodger Stadium’s sculpture art, I found nothing—no artist signature on the work, and no obvious answers online as to where it came from. Emails to the official team historian went unanswered, and I was eventually told by someone with knowledge of the Dodgers, which has been owned by Mark Walter’s Guggenheim group since 2012, that the team simply didn’t have the information I had been seeking.

Still, there had to be information somewhere, so I started at the beginning, reading about the construction of the stadium from 1959 to 1962 in old newspapers and archives. It was on the archival website for Walter O’Malley—the owner of the team from 1950 until his death in 1979, who stewarded the move from Brooklyn and the construction of the stadium—where I found a Karl Hubenthal comic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that depicted various sights of Opening Day in 1962. Hubenthal praised the “veritable rainbow” of the seat colors and joked about the first of what would be many traffic jams trying to get in. And then, in the final panel, he noted “the sheet metal abstraction by sculptor George Nocito—depicting crowds converging on the stadium.” 

That sheet metal sculpture is long gone, but this clue broke it all open. A few feverish searches later, I figured it out: George Nocito was part of a team with another artist, Bert Schwartz, and the two had collaborated to make the Dodger Stadium pieces, which served as the grandest project of their careers. 

Nocito and Schwartz built a good number of concrete murals in the midcentury era, briefly appearing in the New York Times in 1957, when they were highlighted as purveyors of cast masonry sand sculpture—an uncommon practice of designing molds that are then filled on-site with concrete. But the stadium commission was far beyond their usual scope of single pieces in building lobbies. According to a resume in the archives at the University of Delaware, where Nocito became art department chairman in 1969, the pair originally made 18 relief sculptures (constituting over 6,000 square feet of concrete) and five fountains, in addition to the sheet metal pieces. 

“I’ve never seen this stuff before,” a woman named Dasha Layne told me over the phone from her home in Dedham, Mass. Layne is Nocito’s daughter; I found her through her mother’s 2021 obituary. She was going through a box she had stored in the basement—clippings and keepsakes related to her father, who died in 1980. “It’s all little pieces of paper that are cut up, so it’s going to be kind of a puzzle to figure out.” 

Layne, now a teacher, doesn’t know much about this project partially because she’s a lifelong East Coaster who’s never even been to Dodger Stadium—and partially because she’s still the daughter of an artist at heart. “My husband and I aren’t sports people,” she said. “We just don’t care. ‘The Patriots won the Super Bowl? Great. Now there’s going to be a ton of traffic.’” But she was also only 12 when her father died of a brain tumor at the age of 53—an illness she said her mother always suspected had something to do with the chemicals he worked with as an artist. What Layne remembers is that he had moved away from art and was selling real estate toward the end of his life. “He was sick for a long time too,” she said. 

Schwartz died of a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 52, and his family also suspects that he was sickened by chemicals in art materials. “He had a fantastic loft on 12th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, where he did all this work,” Bert’s son Russell told me. “I think it killed him, because he was using a lot of plastic aluminum.” 

I tracked Russell down through an obituary for his father that ran in the Miami Herald—the only one I could find in any newspaper archive. Russell, a film marketing executive in L.A., also didn’t know too much about the Dodger Stadium project, but he did see it being made with his own eyes: In 1962, he skipped a week of high school to help his dad with the journey from New York. “We drove cross-country in this shitty little Ford Falcon station wagon,” he said. By his recollection, his father stayed working at the stadium for months. 

It’s difficult to say how much of Schwartz and Nocito’s work remains. Nocito’s typewritten notes offer rich detail about what their intentions for various pieces were, but some of what’s referred to is gone. Four bronze fountains are missing, and the “active” aluminum fountain that was in the parking lot outside the top-deck entrance—a 50-foot-high depiction of the Dodgers’ flying baseball logo that changed colors—was knocked over in a storm not long after it went up, according to Walter O’Malley’s website. Russell Schwartz remembers that too. “As soon as it was built, it went crashing down,” he said, laughing. 

On a recent day when the Dodgers were out of town, I went wandering around the empty stadium to find the concrete reliefs that remain, and soon stumbled on the clearest evidence of what might have happened to some of the art. Using one of the original photos to match the location, you can see that two of the most substantial sculptures on the reserve level were either removed or covered to make way for an expansion of the building. Two smaller pieces from the same area remain, now relegated to wrap around a door leading to what appears to be some kind of storage area.

Hoping for more information, I reached out to the O’Malley estate—which represents Walter’s son Peter, who inherited co-ownership of the Dodgers with his sister Terry before selling in 1997. The estate declined to provide anyone for an interview, with a representative saying they “don’t know anything to add.” The Dodgers, meanwhile, also declined interview requests, with a spokesperson initially noting only that they “are looking forward to exploring these discoveries further.”

As to the fate of what remains, it’s possible that the pieces are—and have been—legally protected. According to the California Art Preservation Act, property owners are required to allow an artist or their estate 90 days to remove a fine-art piece before it’s altered or destroyed. (The artist Kent Twitchell was awarded $1.1 million in 2008 partially on the basis of this law after his downtown mural of Ed Ruscha was painted over.) 

But Layne, Nocito’s only child, said she feels the team can do what they want with the art they paid her father to make. “It’s not like something that’s yours to keep,” she said, describing the possible attitude of her dad. “Once you send it off, you’re never gonna get it back.”

As for Russell, he didn’t even know that some of the pieces were still extant at the stadium until I told him. But now that he’s aware, he suggested some kind of recognition for the artwork. “A plaque would be great, because that’s something for the grandkids too,” he said.

The team’s plans remain opaque, but they have expressed some interest in preserving what’s survived. After I followed up about the art’s possible legal protection, they sent a more robust statement: “We love these original features to Dodger Stadium and while we have had little information on the artist and origin of the commission, we have protected the engravings in all of the renovations that have been done since 2012 and repaired the concrete frames around them to ensure their longevity.”

Some of the sculptures do show signs of wear, and from looking at one of the photos Layne dug up from her basement, I realized that the two pieces that started my interest in this are actually already damaged. The engravings used to have additional slabs of carefully designed concrete, building out more intricate pieces of art. When my dad and I were trying to figure out what they were supposed to be, we were staring at works that were already 50 percent destroyed. 

Nocito’s notes describe the pieces as depicting a variety of sports—not just baseball but also basketball, football, horse racing and even bullfighting. Regardless, I still find most of the engravings to be somewhat inscrutable. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it allows you to pause, look, and search for new meaning on your way to get a beer or hot dog. 

In Long Island, there’s a Nocito/Schwartz piece at the Merrick Jewish Centre that holds similar mysteries—which is the way Josh Dorsch, the synagogue’s rabbi, likes it. The 14-by-12-foot concrete mural was rediscovered in 2022 during renovations, having been previously covered by a mirror for many years. “It was literally like buried treasure,” Dorsch told me on a video call. Now that the sculpture is visible again, he explained, people are routinely drawn to it, hoping to figure out what its shapes and scenes could be. “Most of them ask me what I think I see in the piece,” Dorsch said, “and I say, ‘Well, what do you see?’”