Imperial (86 page)

In words which describe him no less than them, our sociologist (who is, once again, Paul S. Taylor)
¹⁵⁰
builds an exemplar:
Distinguishable on the streets: generally fairly well dressed, perhaps too loudly; she tended to use cosmetics excessively and wore a good deal of cheap jewelry . . . She preferred to be with her “boyfriends” unchaperoned,
causing
a great deal of distress in these Mexican homes
since
a young girl was frequently found to be an expectant mother, though unmarried.

NO BOASTING, PLEASE

Well, forget about them—everybody else does! Los Angeles has everything from meatpacking to moviemaking.
These industries, fostered by genial climate and contented population, have the further advantages of cheap and abundant water supply,
&
c.
In 1928, the Lockheed Aircraft Company will move into the abandoned Mission Glass Works in the orchards of Burbank, and build its first two wooden hangars. A decade later, the Vega Aircraft Company will take over the adjacent pottery works of the Empire China Company. But in 1925, Los Angeles is still horses in the streets, with and without buggies and automobiles; a two-dimensional horse prances atop a two-storeyed, balconied brickfront, labeled
HARNESS.
Los Angeles has sidewalks, wide streets, baths. (In Anaheim, which is not yet Los Angeles, the Tanaka Citrus Nursery advertises forty-three thousand trees.) Los Angeles is Henry Kruse of Germany, who came to California in 1903 with fifty cents,
and is now one of the well-to-do citizens of the El Monte community.
Los Angeles is not only
“earth’s biggest city”;
better yet, it’s the largest city on the west coast, the tenth-largest in America!
It is difficult to speak of what the Los Angeles of today is without “boasting.”
Over Imperial’s flat blankness, Los Angeles towers like the immense right-angled castle of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company Building.

KISSING COUSINS

How did Los Angeles regard Imperial in those days? Were they water-rivals yet? If so, their emnity bubbled under the surface, in an aquifer. At the end of May 1914, a hundred and forty
ardent boosters
from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce arrived in El Centro and were greeted by the mayor himself! Their button-down shirts were white and waxy, like male date flowers (the female is yellow and resembles a pussy willow). Scottish bagpipers marked the world-historic moment.
Los Angeles Boosters Delighted With City
, reported the newspaper. And I imagine that Imperial continued to be delighted with Los Angeles, whose growth necessarily decreased local farm acreage while increasing the number of hungry mouths (Judge Farr again:
The sleeper dreams of his rapidly ripening fruit and their early arrival in the markets to catch the top prices ahead of other competitors in less favorable regions.
) Why shouldn’t Imperial and Los Angeles have stayed happily married forever? In 1924, Los Angeles begins to transform Tenth Street into Olympic Boulevard in order to reach the Pacific Ocean to the west, and to the east,
by way of Telegraph Road and Whittier Boulevard, . . . San Diego and the Imperial Valley.

TÍPICO AMERICANO

Well, you see the grapes? inquired a very knowing lover of Los Angeles named Marjorie Sa’adah. We were in the old lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, first looking down into a fountain, then standing on the verge of a two-dimensional world which might for all its stylizations have been derived from some Imperial dream.—You see so much detail that you almost can’t tell, Marjorie said. But you see so much detail around
produce.
And these are all fake coats of arms, fake grandeur . . .

She took me to One Bunker Hill and gestured at the muted frescoes, murmuring: This was a different time.

Looking out at us from old Los Angeles, a painted girl leans over the gear of Progress.

Deco is so incredibly post-Industrial Revolution, Marjorie told me. Deco is saying: Machines won’t kill us; we’ll celebrate them.

I asked her to describe the
feeling
of Art Deco, and she replied: Deco takes the columns and flattens them against the windows. They recess the windows. Your eye keeps going up, going up.

She led me into the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana (1876), from which Angelenos of 1925 could look down into a white courtyard of spider-leaved trees whose fountain echoed in that secret sunny water preserve amidst the trees and towers. When I went there with Marjorie in 2004, the cathedral had already been deconsecrated, its marble now marked with workmen’s footprints, and the old round sun-window streaked with amber as if smog were a honey or other colloid which could run down the panes and bake; but even then I felt as if I had entered one of the labels of Old Mission Brand oranges (headquarters: Los Angeles, Cal.).—Well, why not make believe? Angelenos do.—In 1927, the Mayan Theater opens with a Gershwin musical; and Lupe Velez, “the Wild Cat of Mexico,” flirts with the camera, playing the jealous sweetheart of Douglas Fairbanks. In 1928, Dolores Del Rio,
our greatest screen star,
accepts adoring worship at the Fiesta Mexicana. (She proudly refuses to become an American citizen.)

In time the orange groves of Los Angeles will remain only in the decorations of the Biltmore Hotel and a few street signs; but not yet in 1925. An old-timer recalls his much-loved city:
Looking north from downtown you could see the mountains probably 340 days a year . . . they didn’t appear any farther away than Elysian Park. When the orange trees were in blossom, and out of the east came a gentle breeze, all downtown filled with sweet fragrance . . .
His memoir tells of farms and stingrays. In his honor I pore over the label of California Eve Brand oranges, packed expressly for United Fruit Distributors (J. H. Grande, your broker): Darkhaired Eve in her darkbanded straw hat sits blackstockinged atop a white mission wall, plucking one perfect orange from the tree not of knowledge but of pleasure; she smiles at me as sunset gilds the mission tower behind her. Please don’t tell me Los Angeles was unlike this! Like Eve’s, her skirts have always remained clean.

Chapter 77

TAMERLANE’S WARRIORS GALLOP INTO THE SQUARE (1924-2003)

The city of Los Angeles is asking for a very modest supply, to wit, 1,500 second-feet. That is about the supply of the city of Chicago for domestic use. About 600,000,000 gallons a day. If we get that much in addition to the water we have already here, . . . why, we will be all right here for a population . . . I would say, of eight to ten millions of people.

—William Mulholland, 1925

I
n the novel which I originally meant to write about Imperial, I’d respect the burden ; that was certainly my intention. I had before me the death certificate of Owens Valley, which obligated me to write about how wicked Los Angeles was. In 1919, six years after Mulholland completed the first aqueduct
(his sole interest,
explains a biographer,
was in advancing the good and fulfilling his vision—to make desert-locked Los Angeles into a thriving metropolis),
it came time to slurp a little harder; surface water failed to fill the glass, oh, dear; so groundwater pumping commenced. That was when Owens Valley began to desertify. Almost a century later, in the museum in Lone Pine, not far off a sad dirt road called Citrus Street, I saw an old photo of a wide silver lake, silver trees and silver mountains, tall crops of this and that, with a gleam of water behind cowboys on horses: That’s how Owens Lake used to be. And south of Lone Pine, which is to say considerably south of Citrus Street, I gazed down upon a vast line of white light: Owens Lake, now known as Owens Dry Lake. It did not stink a trifle as much as the Salton Sea. Nor can I call it as desolate as the Mexicali Valley’s Laguna Salada. For one thing, balls of sagebrush encircled it. Moreover, tiny sprinklers sprayed driblets of dark blue water onto its dead white flats, thereby accomplishing what was gloriously known as
mitigation
of the phenomenon described by the part-time cowgirl who sold me a soda in Independence:
Everyone who works on it
(the lake)
gets sick. The first year or two, you have trouble breathing. And when that dust blows, if you hold out your hand you can hardly see it . . .
—The wind-ripples in the blue-green pools, the crust of salt, which was sometimes white, sometimes grey like epoxy curing, and whose deadness crossed the valley floor to touch the mountains; the greyish channels of dampness into the cracked white crust, it was the shadow of a lake, the lake of shadows. Shadows on the tiny white pebbles and the miniature ridges in sand and salt reminded me of nothing so much as hard-frozen Arctic snow.

Anything on the valley floor is DWP,
¹⁵¹
said the museum woman in Lone Pine—not entirely accurately, for the federal government holds quite a bit of land, too.—The towns are landlocked, she said. Every now and then, L.A. does a land release and then they compete . . .

By 1923, agents of Los Angeles were breaking open privately owned dams, and Mulholland was prowling the Colorado River in preparation for the All-American Canal. That was the year that Upton Sinclair got jailed for eighteen hours for reading aloud from the Bill of Rights, on private property, with written permission, because his purpose was to support a Wobbly strike in San Pedro Harbor. Los Angeles couldn’t have that; Los Angeles was wicked; everybody knew it.

In 1924, ruined Owens Valley ranchers blew up the aqueduct by Alabama Gate. Los Angeles repaired the damage in two days. Three years later the ranchers tried again, but cunning Los Angeles had instigated a state audit of their savings banks. Meanwhile, Owens Valley dynamiters faced Water Department shotguns.
On August 4, 1927,
writes a Valley resident,
I observed a little cluster of excited men reading a small sign on the front door of the First National bank of Bishop . . . All the banks in the Valley were closed and assigned to receivers. The resistance in the struggle against the Great City came to an end. Soon the desolation . . . was all around us.
Los Angeles was the enemy, and I had every right to say so because I was born there.

Los Angeles is in fact the Bullocks Wilshire department store, whose facade, one guidebook remarks, is
at a scale that makes window-shopping possible for drivers.
The cool dark windowpanes will someday be fabulous reflection-treasuries of concrete honeycombs; but in their first year, 1929, they merely reflect beanfields. Los Angeles’s boomers and boosters remain Imperial’s even now. The approaching Depression will drag Imperial irretrievably behind Los Angeles, but at the beginning of 1929 it’s not entirely grotesque to compare John Bullock with W. F. Holt.
He made a success through his own efforts.
The Los Angeles emblematized by Bullocks Wilshire is an empire of opulence, optimism, even beauty. The architects, John and Donald Parkinson, could fairly be called artists. That turquoise-veined spire, those distorted rectangles of glossy black stone at the base of the edifice, aren’t those products of something which could without irony be called Civilization? Los Angeles is that cylindrical lamp like an ancient seal superimposed on the reflections swimming within its windows. Celtic-like swirls and spirals occupy other plaques of bronze, brass or copper at Bullocks Wilshire; they could almost represent an agricultural cornucopia: shapes of corn still in the husk, sprouting beans and grapevines, all heaped together in rectangular market-crates whose walls mark the edges of the plaques themselves. Los Angeles is this wonderful ten-storey tower of tan stone with its double vein of turquoise-verdigrised copper latticework shooting up into the clouds, complete with balconies, angular Art Deco figures, and Mr. Bullock’s chiseled prayer: Almighty Dollar, help me TO BVILD A BVSINESS THAT WILL NEVER KNOW COMPLETION. Isn’t Los Angeles just such a business?

I shamefacedly admit that over the years I came to love Los Angeles nearly as much as Imperial. But Bullocks Wilshire won’t do for my novel. Here’s a more befitting Los Angeles metaphor for you: Between Algodones and Mexicali one sees palm trees, brownish fields, smoke trees, men sheltering themselves in concrete cantinas, while on the horizon, across the border, shine beautifully threatening dunes, almost honey-colored, accompanied by white sand and shrubs; one wonders whether they might someday slide over everything like the old Colorado flood, obliterating Mexicali’s blocks of flatroofed little houses, each of which has its own fence. What can we do but build sand walls against sand, sand walls with tires on top of them? What can we do against Los Angeles?

TO BVILD A BVSINESS THAT WILL NEVER KNOW COMPLETION, that’s what Los Angeles aims to do, and of course it’s what Imperial desires—likewise the Inland Empire and San Diego. Should Los Angeles succeed, what will happen to Imperial North and South?

In a certain Hetzel photo, three men float down the wide, curving canal, whose banks are idyllically grassy; they’re operating a suction dredge which resembles a series of gallowses on a barge, with engines packed on; a curvy hose or pipe rests on the bank, spewing unwanted dark sludge onto the tan flatnesss of Imperial. Everything’s slow and wide open. There’s the Imperial Idea for you! A canal can be not only a means, but an end.
There is no escaping the stereotype of an ideal agrarian world.
The Los Angeles idea, not least in respect to canals, will be different. So my novel-in-progress pretended, ignoring the existence of Bullocks Wilshire.

In 2003, the Imperial Irrigation District voted three to two in favor of transferring water to Los Angeles and San Diego. As my novel tells the tale, the evil megalopolis had won.