When I met Albert Elias, he was losing his eyesight. He lived in a cozy apartment in Long Beach. He had white hair and a white beard and an Amazon Echo resting on the table beside his recliner that could play him big band music and read him the news. He was in poor health, his body betraying him, his hands folded over each other. The past was beautiful to Albert—you could tell by the way his voice fell into a song when he remembered—but the past was not sacred. When I asked him if he could still describe his childhood home, he paused and gave me a grin as if to say, well, no, it wasn't perfect.

Even in declining health, Albert would still get together with his buddies from the old neighborhood. Once a month, they would go eat breakfast at a diner called Mr. Pete's in Downey. They all had nicknames: Sluggo, Catos, Boodie, Dodo. Albert himself was Beto Calavera. Everybody called him Beto. The old friends would remember the good old days, and the not so good ones. The place they all came from had been demolished, house by house, more than 60 years earlier. But they kept it alive with those breakfasts full of gossip and nostalgia. They shared secrets and they shared pain. They shared a beautiful home once, and they also shared the scars of losing it.

Albert grew up in Palo Verde, one of the three communities whose destruction in the early 1950s led to the later construction of Dodger Stadium. This was the subject of the book I was writing, and the reason I had knocked on his door with a bag of cookies from the Ralph's supermarket bakery by my house. Albert was one of the last remaining Palo Verde old-timers.

Beto's mother, Refugio, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, but she crossed into El Paso, Texas when she was a little girl, and that's where she grew up. She came to Texas without her parents, which meant she had to take care of herself. Refugio worked as a nanny and a maid for a powerful white family when she was still not grown up yet herself. The little boy she took care of would grow up to be a general in the U.S. army, but that didn't do Refugio any good.

The story of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop is the story of Los Angeles. It’s a story that is far too big and messy to fit into a single book. Each family, each street, each community is a world unto itself. As Beto told me his own story, I realized that on some level, he understood this. The tale he told was too real to be published on someone else's terms.

Refugio was selling flowers. Albino, who may or may not have had a hat, said Hey—cuanto para los flores? Refugio named her price, whatever it was. (How can you expect anybody to remember that kind of detail anyway?) Plus, it's beside the point. Albino said he would take every single flower she had.

Beto's father, Albino, had come to Texas not from Mexico, but from New Mexico, where he was the oldest of eight brothers. He encountered Refugio at an El Paso church fair where she was volunteering. He was a few years older than she was. "He had a suit and shiny shoes and I don't know if he had a hat," Beto recalled. "But he was well dressed, he was always well dressed."

"Whooooooah. Whoooooah," he said. "That made points. And then my mom got the money and she handed him the flowers. And my dad says, 'They're yours.' Whoooooah. She melted. She melted on the spot. That was it. That's the end of the story."

When Beto told me this story, he paused right there. He had a tendency to pause for effect. Let's say, Beto explained, for the sake of the narrative, that Refugio had exactly 22 flowers on the table in front of her, and they cost a penny each. Refugio would have counted them out one by one for Albino. Albino would then have given her a quarter. She would have reached out to Albino from across the table, and tried to hand him his three pennies of change. No. Not would have. Did. She really did reach out with change. But Albino refused. "The change is for you, Albino told her."

In Beto's telling, everything about his life had this fable quality. Every incident carried the weight of myth. And of course this was not the end of the story for Refugio and Albino; it was the beginning. Two days after he met his future wife, Albino Elias took off for Los Angeles for reasons that he didn't want to talk about. But he wrote to Refugio, and wrote and wrote: long romantic love letters, imploring her to come west and marry him. If he could have stayed in El Paso, he told her, he would have stayed. But that was simply not an option.

Finally, Refugio recruited her brother to make the trip to California with her. She reached Los Angeles on a Friday afternoon. On Sunday, Albino and Refugio were married in a church in East LA.

Albino never told Refugio why he had to leave El Paso, at least as far as Beto is aware of. But many years later, he did tell his son: He had had an affair with a married woman there, and her husband was after him. If he wanted to stay alive, and to have any chance of enjoying that life, he had to get out of town as quickly as possible.

After they got married, Albino and Refugio rented a small room in Palo Verde. That's where they were living when they found the house where Beto would grow up. When Albino discovered the house, it was abandoned and run down. Kids used to play in it. Homeless people wandering through used to use it for a toilet. But it held more potential than the small room they were renting. Albino tracked down the owner of the house, a local attorney and landlord named Marshall Stimson. Stimson owned most of Palo Verde at the time—he considered himself a friend to the working man, and a sort of Santa Claus for Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans in LA. Albino and Stimson worked out a deal: if Albino fixed up the house, he could rent it for a reasonable price. So he did. And two months later, Albino and Refugio moved into 1801 Gabriel Avenue. The house had two bedrooms and the pipes were outside the walls. There was an old water well in the yard and an avocado tree. It would always be a work in progress.