A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  Everything was going according to plan. In June 2003, just a few months before the deadly encounter between Deputy Steve Sorensen and Donald Kueck in Llano, there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony in which leaders of the four federal agencies that oversee the banking industry posed for a picture brandishing a pair of gardening shears. Then they scissored a giant sheaf of regulations wrapped up in red tape. The photograph was widely circulated, symbolizing the efficiency with which regulators could cut through unnecessary rules. It seemed innocuous on its face—what’s wrong with cutting red tape?—but it also meant that the era of banking oversight was finished.

  That summer became a frenzy of subprime mortgage loans, and the mantra was NOTHING DOWN! Nowhere was it chanted more loudly than in the Antelope Valley, which was already entering a periodic boom cycle. Now McMansion developments erupted everywhere. As Mike Davis had written in City of Quartz, “The Antelope Valley is a virgin bride, engridded to accept the future hordes.”

  They had been coming for decades, and to accommodate each wave of arrivals, the grid of alphabet avenues bisected with numbered streets was perpetually spinning off bewildering subsets of letters and numbers. In the 1970s, several developments flowered along Avenue K, becoming home to Vietnam vets who were returning and getting jobs in the aerospace industry at the valley’s various plants or at Edwards Air Force Base. In the desert, they could buy into the American dream of affordable housing quite easily, enticed by low-interest, long-term mortgages on comfortable ranch houses where—in the ad parlance of the time—you could “live better electrically.” In 1986 the Antelope Valley’s county-sponsored area-wide general plan outlined ways to further facilitate home sales. “Review government procedures,” it said, “to determine ways in which they can be altered to reduce development permit processing time and reduce the cost of housing.” As the twentieth century closed out and the new one was ushered in by a moment of punctuation known forever as 9/11, Americans were urged by President George Bush to “go shopping”—and we did, buying up McMansions like houses on the Monopoly board as the banks unleashed an endless river of cash. Some of the new home buyers would be moving into Martha Stewart homes, replicas of her various East Coast mansions built by KB Homes, one of the primary developers in the West and progenitor of instant “neighborhoods” across Southern California. Stewart’s partnership with KB Homes was announced in 2005, just after the lifestyle queen had been released from prison, where she had done time for making false statements to federal authorities. But the idea had been in the works for some time.

  The first development of Martha Stewart homes was in the California desert town of Perris; the model called Katonah was based on the New York mansion where Stewart spent five months on supervised release after her time in jail, an inadvertent nod to the many ex-felons who live in lesser abodes across the Mojave. “Martha’s influence is seen in the many options available to home-buyers,” said the publicity material, “such as specialized flooring, bathroom and kitchen fixtures, lighting, paint colors, cabinetry selections, and other special touches such as distinctive mantels, shelving, molding and wainscoting. To provide additional design inspiration, model homes will contain furniture and decorative accents from Martha Stewart Living.” In the Antelope Valley city of Lancaster, the development offering designer shelter was called Terrane Vista. Consisting of ninety-two homes, it was erected on a sprawling parcel of sand at Thirty-Fifth Street East and Avenue A-8. The instant community would feature “the best of California living,” Stewart said, along with “distinctive designs that include stone-decorated fronts and kitchen islands.”

  The desert is a land of grand dreams and colossal failure. You may say that this is not unlike other regions, and to a degree you would be right. But things last forever in the desert; the sand and wind and heat may take their toll, but sooner or later what people dreamed up and loved and killed each other over presents itself or is uncovered, even if it diminishes slowly as it sinks into nature’s hourglass, losing its initial pride or grandeur. Just a few miles—or nineteen letters and 125 numbers—away from Terrane Vista are the crumbling ruins of Llano, in whose shadows Donald Kueck toiled away on his desert empire. He had eked out a living on the land, just like a group of communitarians who had fled the adobe jungle decades earlier and sunk roots in the sands of the Antelope Valley. In the end they could not get away from the tentacles of civilization. Strangely, it was that torqued-out version of their legacy that was putting the squeeze play on the latter-day pilgrims of the Mojave Desert, as tract housing marched across the region’s open spaces.

  Their kingdom was called Llano del Rio, and it was founded in 1914 by Job Harriman, attorney and one-time Socialist candidate for governor of California, vice president of the United States, and mayor of Los Angeles. A slender man born in rural Indiana in 1861, Harriman attended law school in Colorado Springs, a town that was originally one of hundreds of utopian colonies that had sprung up across the land, based on all manner of ideals and practices, from polygamy to making furniture. He came to California in 1886, well-versed in the popular ideas of utopian novelists such as Edward Bellamy (who posited a city in the year 2000 where material goods are delivered to every home via pneumatic tubes) and William Dean Howells, who coined a place called Altruria, whose colonists raised their own produce and sold it to surrounding city dwellers. For a time, Harriman managed a utopian colony in Santa Rosa and then moved to San Francisco, where he set up shop as a lawyer, basing his practice on the radical idea that workers were entitled to a fair wage and a safe workplace. By 1900, he was running for vice president on the Socialist Party ticket, with labor organizer Eugene Debs as the candidate for president. They won 6 percent of the vote.

  Today, it’s hard to imagine a self-proclaimed socialist gaining traction in any sphere; the word is stripped of history and devoid of all meaning except slander, used to demonize everybody from Barack Obama to fry cooks who would like a sprinkler system in the workplace. But in the early 1900s, the Socialist Party was a major political force; “it was a time when many people in the area [Los Angeles County] were poor and jobless,” a communard wrote of Harriman’s utopia. “Soup kitchens fed hundreds of penniless and starving people. Others were dissatisfied. Any effort that would lead to a more satisfying life would fill a need and have a strong appeal.”

  In 1910, nearly every trade worker in Los Angeles went on strike, from butchers and trolley car operators to brewers and printers who worked at the Los Angeles Times. By then, the well-known Harriman had moved to Los Angeles, was defending people involved in worker protests, and was running for mayor—losing the election after a volatile season during which a bomb went off in the LA Times building and twenty workers were killed. Harriman decided to hit the road; the desert was calling, and there he went, sounding this rousing charge: “We will build a city and make homes for many a homeless family. We will show the world a trick they do not know, which is how to live without war or interest on money or rent on land or profiteering in any manner.”

  He began to explore the city’s sere and empty backyard, and put together a team of partners to bring his Mojave venture to fruition. One day, a farmer from the Antelope Valley came to Harriman in his downtown Los Angeles office. He knew of the perfect place for a utopian community—a 10,000 square-mile parcel ninety miles northeast of Los Angeles, between Mescal and Big Rock Creek, yards away from the parcel of land where Donald Kueck would eke out his own dream in the twenty-first century. It was isolated and remote, yet still relatively close to the city. More importantly, it had water—or so it seemed at the time. It was owned by the nearly bankrupt Mescal Water and Land Company and probably could be had for a song.

  After surveying the property, Harriman and his partners bought 2,000 acres for $80,000. One of his partners was from the Texas town of Llano (which means “plain”), and thus the flatlands were named, with the appendage “del Rio” for the creek running through it.

  There was something about these desert flat
s that attracted visionaries. It had first been settled in the early 1890s and was called Almondale. After three years Almondale ran into water problems, and the colonists dispersed. The record does not tell us if the organizers of Llano knew about the site’s water problems, and even if they did, would they have gone elsewhere? The longing for a desert paradise is primal, perhaps imprinted on our DNA, and the existence of places that the late writer Marc Reisner called “hydraulic civilizations”—Las Vegas, Phoenix, Cairo—would certainly suggest that Harriman had dreamed with the best of them—Bugsy Siegel, the ancient Pharaohs—and in the scheme of time, can an empire truly be judged as lesser if it endures for years and not longer?

  In 1913, ads for Llano began to appear in socialist publications; soon, they proclaimed, the Mojave would be as “green as the map of Ireland.” Organizers were building a “unique and beautiful” agricultural and industrial community of 6,000 residents, “far removed from the hurly-burly of the artificial cities, in God’s open country, right on the land.” Billboards along the road to Llano trolled for residents, pitching life in utopia with hyperactive rhetoric that in an odd way foreshadowed the latter-day wave of breathless pitches for homes that could be acquired for less than a song.

  In the case of Llano, anyone could become a master builder for hardly anything down—$500, a good deal even at that time, or so it seemed on paper. The remainder of the fee, $1,500, could be worked off at the colony at the rate of $4 per day. In the beginning, people flocked to Llano, eager to build a new society, plowing, digging, planting, laying pipe, hauling timber, making bricks, constructing barns and stables, milking cows, publishing a magazine, building a fish hatchery, chicken coops, a machine shop, a steam laundry, and finally, establishing a school, all the while living in tents as they awaited materials for housing that could not be constructed quickly enough to accommodate the influx of residents. The new housing—sixteen-by-twenty-four two-room adobes—would itself be temporary, pending the design of the new city, which would be cooked up by the community after consultation with a master architect.

  For this position, Harriman once again rattled the status quo, hiring the feminist and self-trained architect Alice Constance Austin, a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolf Schindler, and a visionary whose lesser-known creations were in some ways more influential than those of her male peers. To this day they are hallmarks of the American style of modern living, incorporated into countless tract homes across the land—and fueling their very existence. At Llano, she would be able to meld her ideas and create the dream home, and also plan the new city. “The Socialist City should be beautiful,” she wrote after meeting with colonists. “It should be constructed on a definite plan, each feature having a vital relation to and complementing each other feature, thus illustrating in a concrete way the solidarity of the community; it should emphasize the fundamental principle of equal opportunity for all; and it should be the last word in the application of scientific discovery to the problems of everyday life, putting every labor-saving device at the service of every citizen.” Several decades later, corporations such as General Electric said the same thing in a Madison Avenue kind of way: “Live better electrically, with GE”—a selling point of the tract homes that later erupted across the Antelope Valley and the rest of America.

  In the beginning, colonists were plagued with problems. Because of a lumber shortage, there were families living in tents with bedsprings, “on the cold damp ground and the wind blowing a gale of rain and snow,” as one resident recounted. “My wife had a sick child on each arm.” Another family reported that a child was down with typhoid because of the brutal conditions.

  But not all was troubling in paradise. Colonists persevered through that first Mojave winter, and there was great promise for its future. Pilgrims continued to arrive, along with a variety of eccentrics, including a water witch who dowsed the sands for springs, a turnip-obsessed farmer who was convinced that the future lay in mass production of the unsung root, and Wesley and Oliver Zornes, brothers who constructed a “flivver aeroplane” with a Model T motor and tried to fly it from Crystallaire, a then -unnamed spot that later became an ultralight airport, down the road a piece from the airstrip with the tower from which residents later witnessed Donald Kueck ransacking Deputy Sorensen’s vehicle. At old Llano, Harriman continued to stoke interest, sounding the trumpet again in The Gateway to Freedom. As always, his tune was filled with socialist rhetoric, but he also called for a return to the primal: “In the turmoil of life the modern city is a battlefield where the fierceness of competition crushes, maims, and kills. . . . For the masses failure is inevitable. In the heart of nearly every man is the instinctive desire to get on the land.”

  Articles suggested that Llano was “a spot of destiny” that would soon be the “metropolis of the Antelope Valley.” The community’s own publications, Western Comrade and Llano Colonist, echoed the call in almost biblical terms. “Once this rich plain is touched by water and the plow,” one of them proclaimed, “a veritable gold mine of virgin strength is tapped.” These recruiting ads sometimes featured a litany of demographics and stats, covering everything from people to bees: according to the December 1915 issue of the Comrade, there were seven hundred colonists, two hundred pupils, over two hundred hogs, seventy-five work horses, two large tractors, three trucks, a number of cars, 2,000 egg-making birds, several hundred hares, 11,000 grape cuttings, thousands of fruit and shade trees, and several hundred colonies of bees with “several tons of honey on hand.” Among those who joined the parade was a man from the Imperial Valley who drove his herd of cattle hundreds of miles to Llano and dozens of farmers from Texas, who were later surprised to learn they had bought shares in a commune.

  With so many people showing up, it was time to enact a few laws—to the dismay of some colonists. Like many a desert dweller, they harbored a healthy dislike of the man and his attendant restrictions on freedom. Early that year, there were complaints that horses were trampling the alfalfa fields because someone kept leaving the gates open, kids were throwing stones through hotel windows, dogs and chickens were polluting the water supply, and people were drinking and swearing. Fines were levied for the various infractions, thus adding more people to the never-ending desert parade of those who cannot abide fetters.

  Yet Llano was booming, and on May Day 1915, the community celebrated its first birthday. The day was chosen for its connection to the labor movement. Ever since the eight-hour work day became law on May 1,1884, and the deadly Haymarket riots at a workers’ rally in Chicago followed on the same day two years later, the first day of May had been considered a labor holiday. Socialist circles across the land held celebrations, and Llano was no exception: a Maypole was raised and festooned with ribbon, and visitors and residents danced around it, as the new gardens and orchards and grain and alfalfa fields were sprouting under the turquoise sky.

  Soon after the celebration, things were going well enough that it was time for an official “Declaration of Principles,” lest anarchy reign in the utopia where it was fostered. Colonists came up with eleven principles, covering everything from collective ownership to responses for greed and selfishness. All in all, it was a provocative desert blend of anarchism, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and Edward Bellamy.

  With the declaration in place, it was time for the next phase: the dream house and the dream city. What would these things look like? What kind of dwelling would best nurture the individual as well as the community? How would residents and visitors travel through Llano? Would there be trains? Parks? Stand under the sky ceiling in the ruins at Llano, and imagine this: A handsome woman is meeting with commune residents in a crowded room. Perhaps it is still under construction and not impervious to the desert winds. Some of the residents have been living in tents for quite some time, others in temporary adobes. Alice Constance Austin listens to the desires and concerns of the communitarians and shows them drawings and models. One day, after meeting like this every week for t
wo years, she unveils the master plan, along with architect Leonard A. Cooke, who had designed the temporary adobes.

  There would be 10,000 people on 640 acres—“the square mile area common to many ideal communities planned for the United States,” noted Dolores Hayden in Seven American Utopias. There would be a green belt around the town, a civic center with “eight rectangular halls, like factories,” as Austin had described them, “with sides almost wholly of glass,” leading to a glass-domed assembly hall. Each family in the colony would have one car, housed in communal garages, and the road around the city would double “as a drag strip with stands for spectators on both sides.” With NASCAR around the corner, and a car racing oval soon to be constructed at nearby Willow Springs, this was far-sighted indeed.

  The housing itself, Austin wrote, would be “equal, with more or less equal access to community facilities (no house is more than half a mile from the community center).” For instance, there would be single-family houses that were part of a continuous street facade. But there were also choices for individuals, including alternative facade treatments for the homes—prefiguring Martha Stewart homes by decades. In addition, there was a variety of selections for the interiors.

  Each home would have two bedrooms and a bath, living room, closet, patio, and pergola or sun parlor. It would feature built-in furniture, crafted by the colony’s workshops, along with window frames “delicately carved in low relief on wood or stone,” in Austin’s words, “or painted in subdued designs”—all of which would serve as a new art industry at Llano. There would be sleeping porches in each house, to take advantage of the climate and stunning mountain views, awnings in case of rain, roll-away beds, plants on the roof parapets, “wide, easy stairs” with window seats at each landing, heated tile floors, and French windows designed to eliminate the need for high-maintenance drapes. On May 1, 1916, the second anniversary of Llano, Austin presented her model house and renderings of the civic center and school to colonists, and a great esprit de corps pervaded the community.