Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  To buy supplies, to eat an occasional restaurant meal and enjoy a little sociability, he had a Hobson’s choice of the dinky settlements of Chatsworth and Zelzah or the newer little town of Owensmouth; the latter offered more amenities, however spare, and he went there with some regularity. He bought stock in the Bank of Owensmouth, obtained his groceries and meat from Mr. Sexsmith, one of the town’s first grocers, sent his bean crops during the first World War to Vanomar Producers, the warehouse founded by Whitley and associates in Owensmouth, and ate an occasional chicken dinner at the Owensmouth Restaurant, run by Anna Gallow. He sometimes attended the high-stakes poker and gambling parties at the Alex Jeffrey and Brant ranches, and he went deer hunting with his good friend in Simi, David Strathearn.

  In 1914, when aqueduct water was diverted for use by San Fernando Valley farmers, the tedious dry farming gave way to bountiful crops of oranges, lemons, apricots, peaches, plums, pears, nectarines, and winter tomatoes. Acres of fruit and nut groves multiplied across the valley, as did the human population.

  Through a neighbor’s matchmaking, Perry met Addie Haas, a third-generation San Fernando Valley daughter; they were married in October 1921 at the Owensmouth Haas ranch. Catherine Mulholland described the charming wedding of her parents:

  The groom’s father, William Mulholland, enjoyed himself immensely, notwithstanding the fact that he’d absentmindedly put on a shirt with frayed cuffs which his dismayed daughters tried with manicure scissors to trim up. The unperturbed Chief waved them aside and became the life of the party. At one point, in high fettle, he complimented the bride’s mother on the pink and white wedding cake by declaring that its smell reminded him of a girl he used to spark in Detroit.

  The grooms’ sister, Rose, was to have sung at the wedding. But at the last minute she’d dyed her hair to cover some premature grey and turned it such a jet black that she refused to stand before the assemblage and perform, so that there was no vocalist at the wedding, an omission which Addie never forgot—nor quite forgave.

  The bridegroom was late, having lost his cufflinks; he and his ranching neighbor and friend, Anstr Davidson, had had to make a bone-crunching run over dirt roads to Van Nuys to find another pair, and on the way had hit a chuckhole that almost dislocated both their backs. But the guests declared it a grand occasion, and after the festivities and a honeymoon in the Hawaiian Islands, the newlyweds returned to the Mulholland ranch where they would live for the next forty years.

  In many respects, Perry Mulholland fulfilled the dreams of lineage of his immigrant father. He married a prominent Owensmouth lady, raised walnuts and oranges on what was now deemed ancestral Mulholland land, nurtured with water from Mulholland’s own aqueduct system. He sired three grandchildren for his sainted father, two girls and a boy, and later cared for Mulholland the aging patriarch in his final years.

  Denied the academic and professional life that he preferred, he served forth all of these things yet was never included in the personal and history-making affairs of his father. Mulholland instead preferred to keep daily company with Harvey Van Norman, and it was Van Norman, not the dutiful son, who shared the biggest part of Mulholland’s life. No doubt Perry would have enjoyed the momentous events that Van Norman shared with his father, such as the many train trips to Washington and the glamour of state dinners and social events with nationally prominent politicians, world-famous authors, and businessmen. Perry must have felt envious of the young Van Norman, who basked. in Mulholland’s limelight, while he spent most of his adulthood as an isolated rancher toiling in his father’s long shadow. No doubt by the time of his death in 1962, Perry Mulholland would wonder if it had all been worth it.

  When Perry Mulholland first set foot on the ranch in 1914, his daughter Catherine wrote, he could see the dust from a car or wagon twelve miles away. By the time of his death, there were so many roads paved and so much traffic that he could scarcely maneuver a tractor from one grove to another. Perry’s children would see homes that had held four generations bulldozed—the Mulholland ranch house itself was later replaced by a shopping mall and Kmart—and Perry’s precious orchards paved over in asphalt, all the culmination of unprecedented, gluttonous growth after the aqueduct water arrived. But during this period from 1914 to 1924, the San Fernando Valley prospered as a booming pastoral community with unblurred visions of a certain, bounteous future.

  9

  Eden

  Thou shalt be like a watered garden,

  and like a spring of water,

  whose waters fail not.

  ISA. 54:11

  MULHOLLAND AND CITY LEADERS were certain that the aqueduct would bring into Los Angeles eight times as much water as it needed and four times as much as Los Angeles could ever use, and any valley community might take all the water it needed—provided that it became part of the city. Soon the greater portion of the San Fernando Valley, almost 200,000 acres (275 square miles) was annexed to the city of Los Angeles. Irrigated acreage in the San Fernando Valley rose from 1,000 acres in 1913 to 75,000 acres in 1918, as the same river that kept the Owens Valley green now turned the San Fernando Valley into a garden.

  Lured by the promise of cheap land, good wages, and plenty of water, the San Fernando Valley population expanded rapidly. Enticed by Otis and Harriman’s advertising in national magazines and newspapers, thousands of people flocked to the valley. They arrived on E. H. Harriman’s Union Pacific Railroad, commuted on Sherman and Huntington’s trolley cars, and read Otis’s newspapers. Settling in the San Fernando Valley, a Harriman-Sherman-Huntington-Otis development, they drank Mulholland’s Owens River water.

  Otis, Chandler, Whitley, Sherman, Brant and the rest of the Board of Control presided over much of the valley’s metamorphosis. In one of the syndicate’s first meetings, Harrison Gray Otis announced the group’s intention. “We do not want to sell a town site. We want to build a town.” Between 1911 and 1915, the Board of Control created multiple new town sites from their vast holdings; true to their self-serving ways, the board named these new towns after their own. Marion, known today as Reseda, was named in honor of the daughter of Harrison Gray Otis and wife of Harry Chandler. The town of Van Nuys was named in honor of Harry Chandler’s old friend Isaac Van Nuys.

  The syndicate agreed, however, not to name the new towns after themselves, following the public clamor concerning their alleged aqueduct conspiracy. But eventually the town of Sherman Oaks materialized, named after the balding ex-school administrator who had become a trolley magnate. The first highway to intersect the valley was also dubbed Sherman Way; and a prominent street in Van Nuys was named Hazeltine, after one of Sherman’s daughters. However, Owensmouth, later renamed Canoga Park, was named for its proximity to the terminus of Mulholland’s aqueduct, The men in the syndicate were happily engaged in the “drama of city-building.”

  Harrison Gray Otis, with his huge belly, walrus like mustache, and goatee, provided much of the booster rhetoric concerning the syndicate’s elaborate plans and signed most of the checks. After incorporating as the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company in 1910, the five energetic capitalists intended to profit handsomely from their master work of three new towns complete with roads, schools, utilities and water services, and modern transportation. When the Board of Control had finished naming boulevards and town sites, the members began to carve out choice tracts for themselves, like feudal princes dividing a conquered territory. General Sherman allocated 1,000 acres at the site now known as Sherman Oaks; Otis took 550 acres that he later sold to author Edgar Rice Burroughs, who renamed it Tarzana; Brant appropriated 850 acres to build his stunning Brant Rancho; and Whitley and Chandler selected handsome tracts for themselves near Sherman Way and Van Nuys Boulevard.

  Catherine Mulholland described the land syndicate:

  They shared the belief derived from Calvinism that material success is outward evidence of divine election, so wealth was indeed a blessing … They spoke of vision, progress, and of upbuilding Southern California. They ador
ed the game of Profit and Loss, none more so than the man who was to be their field marshal in the new Valley campaign—Hobart Johnstone Whitley, the Great Developer.

  H. J. Whitley was the primary creator of the new San Fernando Valley. A six-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound, square-jawed, grizzly-looking man, Whitley was described as a “six cylinder working man of electric optimism.” Credited with the creation of Hollywood, then one of the prettiest suburbs in Los Angeles, Whitley was known for his extraordinary town-building in Oklahoma and other states in the Midwest. Once the Pacific Electric trolley car system was extended into the valley, Whitley planned subdivisions. With the arrival of the Red Cars, the valley was now within an hour’s ride on the trolley from downtown Los Angeles, and no longer an isolated wasteland.

  Whitley’s bold plans for the valley boulevard known today as Sherman Way, was vividly described in Los Angeles’s Sunset magazine in 1914:

  They gave him carte blanche. He built the boulevard. He made it two hundred feet wide, with the trolley in the center and a driveway on either side, He laid an oil macadam pavement for general traffic and an asphalt concrete pavement for exclusive automobile traffic, built concrete curbs for sixteen miles of the twenty-two miles now built, He laid out a strip of parking along the trolley tracks, other fifty foot strips of parking on either side. Then he proceeded to embellish the highway.

  First he planted rosebushes five feet apart, four rows of them on the main boulevard, two rows on the connecting links, fifty miles of roses in all. Not the ordinary hedge variety but blooded stock, American beauties, La France, Cécile Brunner, tea roses, roses of all colors and hues, roses the size of soup plates and roses just right for a boutonniere. Behind the roses he planted rows of exotic flowering shrubs, oleanders red and white, ornamental shrubs that turn themselves into masses of flaming yellow, of royal purple and vivid crimson when the spirit and the season prompt them.

  Behind the bushes he set out a row of magnolias from the South, flowering acacias from Australia, alternating with stately fan palms from the Canaries. Next he jumped to India, to the shoulders of the Himalayas, planted a double row of the deodars made famous by Rudyard Kipling. Behind the silvery gray foliage of the deodars he found room for more ornamental shrubs, and at the outer edges of the broad parkings he supplied somber Monterey Pines as a fitting background. Then he rested.

  If there is anywhere a highway that exceeds Whitley’s twenty-two-mile boulevard in width, length and in the variety and character of its arboreal ornamentation it has succeeded effectively in hiding its light under a bushel basket.

  It was Whitley who faced the daily logistical problems of road building and utilities and staging the elaborate sales campaigns that were used to lure prospective home buyers to the desolate, arid valley. He hosted “two years of barbecues, Rose festivals, Poppy Days, car races, and ballyhoo” to sell the syndicate’s Owensmouth subdivision. The new San Fernando towns were ingeniously promoted and sold to Americans hungry for a better life in the promised land of southern California where all things were possible. The creative sales pitch used by Whitley and others were described by Kevin Starr in Material Dreams:

  The selling of these homes, all 300,000 plus of them, involved flamboyance, gross exaggeration occasionally and sometimes deliberate deception.… Perhaps the most fantastic of all subdivision concepts and sales pitches involved Girard in the western San Fernando Valley, a Potemkin village of false fronts held up by the rear braces so as to suggest the city would soon rise there.

  A platoon of salesmen, warmed earlier to the task by group calisthenics, met prospects arriving by bus. A numbered name tag affixed to his or her lapel, each prospective buyer was then led by a single salesman, drawn by lottery, through a rehearsed sequence of lunch followed by a walking tour of the subdivision. At the right moment the salesman brought the client to a specially placed closing booth, where a senior sales specialist cinched the sale.

  Through Whitley’s superb salesmanship, the Board of Control’s 1911 purchase of the 47,500 acre Porter ranch grew into one of the biggest subdivisions in the world. No one knows exactly how much profit the San Fernando land syndicate realized from their initial investment, but writer William Kahrl estimated that Harry Chandler was worth as much as $500 million when he died in 1944. H. J. Whitley, however, was not so lucky. After a series of disastrous investments he lost nearly everything.

  The land boom in the San Fernando Valley generated by the Board of Control following the delivery of aqueduct water has been compared to a Louisiana Purchase for the city of Los Angeles. “Because the oligarchy controlled or decisively influenced the governmental bodies which controlled the water, it grew rich and powerful beyond measure,” noted Kevin Starr. “It also helped that the most active land speculator owned the dominant newspaper. Thus one might make reference, almost, to a Southern California Raj—an orchestration of business, financial, political and government power, all of it controlled by one oligarchy.…”

  Mulholland always insisted that he was never involved in land speculation for profit, and had no ulterior motive in the aqueduct’s construction. When one reporter charged him with collusion in the land syndicate, Mulholland erupted in anger.

  “Arable lands which should be selling at about $100 an acre have been seized by a few capitalists who have forced prices to $1,000 an acre,” Mulholland countered, segregating his “duty as an engineer” from the scheme of land speculators. “Instead of being developed as agricultural lands, the property has been subdivided into town lots and small rich men’s country estates’ at prohibitive values. The men who bought up this property have looked forward to the time when the aqueduct would be completed and the plans for distribution of the water through this territory would enhance land values.” Mulholland’s verbal attacks were directed at the Board of Control, and were part of his continuing efforts to separate himself from them at all cost. Indeed, he felt it was critical to distance himself from the land syndicate and he did so by refusing to purchase tracts from or near the men under attack.

  Others in Mulholland’s circle bought land in the valley as well. Harvey Van Norman bought hundreds of acres near the Mulholland parcel, and kept it a secret. Other men who worked on the aqueduct bought adjoining land in Chatsworth, including J. B. Lippincott, Ezra Scattergood (Bureau of Los Angeles Aqueduct Power), Phil Wintz (Haiwee Dam engineer), Roderick McKay (an aqueduct engineer whose daughter became the only woman rancher in the area), and Eva H. Shoemaker, Mulholland’s only female secretary. Despite his financial interest in the San Fernando Valley land he owned, the facts confirm that Mulholland was sympathetic to the agricultural interests in the valley as opposed to the interests of the land developers.

  DESPITE HIS DENIALS of profiteering and his pontifications on the qualities of the working man, Mulholland was now a wealthy man himself, and by the time of his death had accumulated an estate valued at over $700,000, enormous by 1930s standards. The thrifty lifestyle that he and his family maintained, combined with shrewd real estate investments, contributed to the large fortune. Aside from employing a full time car and driver, Mulholland lived a middle class life in a modest four bedroom house; he wore store bought clothes and ate average meals. His public benefactor image was further enhanced by his sedate lifestyle, and good, quiet, Christian living.

  The bulk of Mulholland’s estate was derived from the San Fernando Valley lands he had acquired from 1912 to 1919 at prices between $50 and $150 an acre. The 640 acre ranch that Perry Mulholland cultivated for his father was later valued at $511,315, a huge return on his investment. Mulholland never earned the tens of millions of dollars realized by some members of the Board of Control, and Mulholland was not guilty of profiteering on that scale. He did, however, own land in the San Fernando Valley that he bought for bargain prices based on its limited dry farming yield before the aqueduct water arrived.

  “He is unquestionably honest,” said the comptroller of the Department of Water and Power, in defense of Mulholland�
��s character. “Although he is a wealthy man, he has never been avaricious, but rather has made his money by investing wisely in well selected real estate. He is a careful liver, has no extravagant habits, and has never made excessive charges for his services.”

  Mulholland could also boast a remarkable salary. His $10,000 salary as chief engineer for the Department of Water and Power was the highest paid to any civil servant in Los Angeles, and since 1886, he had drawn a higher salary than the mayor, district attorney, or chief of police. Later in his career he earned as much as $15,000 a year as chief of the water system.

  Mulholland’s financial management showed common sense and frugality, but he did have one extravagant quirk; he was known for giving expensive, unexpected gifts to friends and associates, generally bought impulsively, paid for in cash, and delivered in surprise by a third party. He also lavished expensive gifts on his family. Friends and associates said that in his personal life, Mulholland seemed rather careless with money, failing to deposit his paychecks or leave money for the family to purchase groceries.

  In addition to his salary, Mulholland engaged in lucrative consulting contracts with other cities, serving as an expert in the development of public water projects for San Francisco, Oakland, and Seattle. He also consulted for corporations such as the Western Union Oil Company, where his reports about oil formations resulted in the discovery of productive oil fields that created fortunes in San Luis Obispo County. He did this consulting work throughout his career, as early as 1899, and collected ever-larger fees. During the aqueduct’s construction, however, he turned down the work because of the demands on his time.