by James Roman
It was too good to last. In hindsight, Pacific Electric’s business model had one fatal flaw. Huntington was willing to take losses to run an efficient railway as long as profits from land sales offset it, setting up a sort of Ponzi scheme from which he couldn’t escape. The railroad only worked if real estate sales supported it. When there was no more real estate to sell, the railroad would crumble.
And so it did. As Huntington’s massive acquisitions drove up real estate prices, the number of transactions diminished, apparently not a major concern. Although the Pacific Electric ran at a loss every year, Huntington’s company still managed to pocket a million-dollar profit. Eyeing that bottom line, the Southern Pacific applied pressure to buy the Pacific Electric; they claimed the electric railroad encroached on Southern’s already established businesses. In September 1911, Huntington’s Board of Directors agreed to The Great Merger. Huntington received millions in cash and bonds from the giant Southern Pacific Railroad plus a seat on its Board, while the railroad got stuck with the Ponzi scheme: electric trains that would never profit.
There was a bigger problem. LA was now so spread out that the Red Cars were incapable of providing service to all the undeveloped pockets between Huntington communities. If new trolleys could not service these areas without losing more money, then burgeoning communities would have to be reached by—cars!
Pacific Electric Railway map 1920
A political spin was inevitable. New York and Los Angeles had the two most sophisticated trolley lines in America. The liberals that ran New York saw such grave importance in public transportation that the City acquired the private trolley lines, then ripped up the streets and installed them as the City-run subways that are still in use today. In contrast, the conservatives that ran Los Angeles took the small-government approach: In a capitalist system, let market forces determine the railroad’s future. In 1926, the Southern Pacific, as owner of the Pacific Electric streetcars, offered to build a network like New York’s, moving the trolley tracks underground in downtown LA and elevated trains that would not interfere with automotive traffic in outlying areas. The catch: The public, not the railroad, would finance it. The plan was put to a referendum and, in the end, Los Angeles voters rejected the plan. They saw no reason to pay to replace what they already took for granted. They would rather spend their money on cars.
Red Cars stacked at Terminal Island, waiting to become scrap metal, c. 1956
To reduce its losses, the Southern Pacific began to convert its electric lines into bus routes, following the original right-of-way to Huntington’s disparate communities. But now, new surface streets for cars were inserted along the way to accommodate the growing population. Enter General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone Tires, investors that had no choice but to maintain Huntington’s routes to transport large numbers of people to the Main streets he’d already built. That’s why today’s major thoroughfares still resemble the Pacific Electric routes.
In his zeal to reap more profits, Huntington destroyed any hope for a central downtown Los Angeles. Since he didn’t own it, the historic pueblo was just another stop on the streetcar. Instead, Huntington created his own series of downtowns all along the trolley routes to compete with the pueblo. That’s one way to remember Henry Huntington, providing the punchline one century later to jokers who taunt there’s no there there.
Of course, that’s not the way Huntington would choose to be remembered. In 1913, he had an enormous change-of-heart. The U.S. government passed the Sixteenth Amendment; wealthy people like Henry Huntington and his Aunt Arabella were now required to pay income tax. So, recently divorced Huntington married Collis Huntington’s trophy wife, Aunt Arabella, to consolidate the family fortune and dodge some taxes. Both Henry and Arabella Huntington were in their sixties. The bride spent most of her time in the Manhattan mansion she inherited; the groom lived in his California estate. Together, they discovered the perfect antidote to paying taxes: They became inspired philanthropists operating from both Coasts. They collected rare books and European art for display in the West Coast estate.
Before their deaths, the Huntingtons transferred their California estate and priceless collections to a nonprofit educational trust, creating The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Displayed in Henry Huntington’s sumptuous estate, the collection and the gardens are open to the public today.
Henry Huntington’s date with death was a metaphorical irony. He died on May 23, 1927, just as word reached the U.S. that Charles Lindberg had successfully completed his famous flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The railroad man passed away as the aviation era literally soared.
IN THE MOVIES:
See the Red Cars simulated in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), L.A. Confidential (1997), Hollywoodland (2006), Gangster Squad (2013).
THE HUNTINGTON
Henry and Arabella Huntington deeded their residence and private collection (more than seven million items) to the public trust in 1919. The Huntington estate, situated about 12 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, is a place of jaw-dropping splendor that is open to the public.
The Huntingtons’ priceless art collection is displayed in five buildings spread across 120 landscaped acres. Among the treasures: Thomas Gainsborough’s famous Blue Boy painting (in the European Art building). There are tapestries and decorative arts, as well as new American art (including a Warhol soup can).
The Library building contains many treasures: rare publications from William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln; there’s even a Gutenberg Bible.
Visitors are invited to spend the afternoon and dine in the café or tea room. Reservations are recommended.
You’ll need a car or a bus, though. The Red Car doesn’t stop there anymore.
For visiting hours and tour information, visit: huntington.org
ABBOT KINNEY AND VENICE BEACH
Abbot Kinney was an heir to a fortune. The family firm manufactured cigarettes in New York City for the American Tobacco Company. Sent on a search to locate exotic tobaccos, young Abbot Kinney traveled the world.
He also suffered from asthma. When his travels finally brought 30-year-old Kinney to Los Angeles, he awoke the next morning completely free from asthmatic symptoms. Kinney knew he had found his new home.
The following years were a boom time for real estate speculation in Los Angeles, now that trains and streetcars increased everyone’s mobility. Investing a share of his tobacco inheritance, Kinney bought a one-anda-half-mile stretch of soggy marshland along the Pacific Coast in 1891 that most speculators dismissed as worthless. To provide stable ground for construction, engineers told Kinney that canals must be dredged to reclaim the land. Kinney’s imagination was swept away with a grand vision of the canals he’d seen in Venice, Italy. He’d build a residential theme park, a real community networked by canals and linked to the ocean nearby, revitalized with each high tide. Gondoliers could transport residents through his unique, seaside resort. Kinney’s workmen spent three years digging trenches 40-feet wide to create the grid of canals that would define the new community of Venice, California.
Kinney also saw this as an opportunity to infuse Los Angeles with culture. Recreating Italian artistry, he had colonnades constructed along the commercial streets, complete with a hotel modeled after the Doge’s Palace. Kinney was proudest of his 3,500-seat theater, where the most sophisticated entertainers performed, from actress Sarah Bernhardt to the entire Chicago Symphony.
From left: Abbot Kinney, c. 1900; crowds stroll from the streetcar to the ocean on Windward Avenue, c. 1905
On opening day, July 4, 1905, 40,000 people reportedly attended the festivities (that’s almost half the population of Los Angeles at the time). Visitors were predictably dazzled by the sparkling canals that were traversed by actual gondolas from Italy. They were especially drawn to the enormous amusement pier that featured rides, games and side-show attractions. Prior to the opening, Pacific Electric la
id new streetcar tracks to provide direct service from downtown to Venice in 40 minutes for just 25 cents. The route to Venice Beach became the most popular destination on the entire streetcar network, frequently surpassing its own records on the balmiest beach days. No other LA beach could rival Venice as a popular attraction.
Fashionably dressed men and women on a gondola on a Venice canal, 1908
It didn’t last long. Kinney’s high-brow aspirations failed fast. Angelenos wanted a day at the beach, not a night at the opera. Though Kinney presented some of the world’s finest entertainers, the first summer lost $16,000 dollars (that’s nearly half-a-million dollars today). To make Venice solvent, Kinney gave up his lofty ambitions; he spent even more of his rapidly depleting fortune to construct more rides and freak show exhibits. Privately, Kinney was appalled, but the public loved the tawdry new attractions; Venice became known as the “Coney Island of the Pacific.”
Meanwhile, ocean silt clogged the water’s circulation; the stagnant canals began to stink. In 1912, the State Board of Health declared the canals to be a health menace, putting Kinney on the defensive for the rest of his life. In 1917, the first polluted canals were filled in and paved. Streetcar rails were replaced by a bus route. Kinney died in 1920, saddened that his cultural ambitions failed. Four weeks later, a fire destroyed the amusement pier. Though it was rebuilt, Venice was never the same. It sparkled for a few years on Kinney’s dime, but ultimately, it was destined to thrive as a beach town, not a temple of culture.
Today, the remaining canals near the ocean compose an expensive and precious community with large, modern houses on tiny lots. Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the neighborhood’s main shopping street, commemorates its founder, and a gigantic mural of Kinney celebrates his memory on North Venice Boulevard. The Venice Canal Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
Mack Sennett’s bathing beauties promote Venice Beach, including film stars Carole Lombard and Gloria Swanson, 1920s. Beginning in 1915, Sennett invited women who came to be known as the “Sennett Bathing Beauties” to appear in bathing costumes, provocative for the times, in comedy shorts, in promotional photos, and to appear at events like beauty contests on Venice Beach.
A Pacific Electric car rolls along the shore line of the blue Pacific
CHAPTER 8.
TROUBLED WATERS
MULHOLLAND BUILDS AN AQUEDUCT
1905—1941
Thanks to the climate, the railroad and all those orange groves, suddenly LA was a boomtown! Its population doubled between 1890 and 1900 as boosters crisscrossed America, successfully luring new residents. Did anyone think about the increasing demands on the local reservoirs?
Luckily, Water Superintendent William Mulholland was a man of vision. He and former mayor Fred Eaton had a solution to LA’s rapidly depleting water supply. Former friends for 25 years, they would become bitter rivals while collaborating on a project that brought much-needed water to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century.
Los Angeles was built near a troublesome river named for the Queen of the Angels. The product of melted snow from the Sierra Nevada, it dried to a trickle in summer months, and overflowed with such rage at other times that the first settlers were forced to relocate the pueblo to higher ground in 1818.
By 1905, LA was one of America’s fastest-growing cities, but its water supply was hopelessly unreliable. With Henry Huntington building new communities in any direction, and farmlands converting to commercial or residential use, Mulholland realized that LA’s water supply must increase exponentially. At the suggestion of former Mayor Fred Eaton, (borrowing a famous idea from New York of 50 years earlier), he proposed to the city fathers: Build a giant aqueduct. Divert water from another river with greater abundance.
The three fathers of the LA Aqueduct: Joseph B. Lippincott, Fred Eaton and William Mulholland, 1906
That greater abundance was found in the Owens Valley, 250 miles away. What Mulholland didn’t know (and Eaton didn’t tell him) was that the federal government had notified all Owens Valley residents that their land was being reclaimed, and the river diverted. They would soon be paid for their riparian rights, which made the ranchers eager to cooperate. Now here came Eaton, creating a conflict by delivering Water Superintendent Mulholland to the same spot, presenting it as the solution to LA’s water shortage, secretly setting up Mulholland as a pawn among LA’s robber barons. For ten days, Mulholland charted the river and the terrain for a massive aqueduct.
He did the math. The Owens River flowed at a rate of at least 400-cubic-feet of water per second—enough water to support a city of two million. LA was not yet a city of 200,000. The best surprise was the physics: LA sits at sea level; Owens Valley is in the Sierra Nevada foothills, more than 4,000 feet above. Despite the rugged terrain between the two points, the water would run downhill. Diverting water from the Owens River wouldn’t even require a pump.
Idealistic Mulholland envisioned a dam that would collect a bountiful, citizen-owned water supply, generating energy from its power plant to support commercial and residential growth. Not motivated by profit, Mulholland’s everlasting reward would be the construction of the waterway that saved his city from drought. For Eaton, this was just a ruthless opportunity to exploit the Owens Valley for financial gain. When Mulholland assured Eaton that his Board of Water Commissioners would work with the City Council to finance a great aqueduct, Eaton raced back to Owens Valley on his own. He hoodwinked the ranchers into selling their riparian rights to him, which they believed they were selling to the federal government.
Behind closed doors, Eaton announced to Mulholland and the Water Board that he planned to control all hydroelectric power generated by LA’s new aqueduct. The use of his property would be leased to the city. Mulholland was stunned by the betrayal and abandonment of the public trust. Eaton’s scheme to hold the city’s water supply hostage jeopardized their project’s construction. They wrangled for two furious days over Eaton’s exorbitant demand of $1 million. Eventually, the City of Los Angeles accepted most of Eaton’s demands for a sale, not a lease. He got $450,000 (that’s more than $11 million dollars today); he also got to keep 12,000 acres, and he was rewarded with a $100,000 commission for assembling all these properties on behalf of the city.
Eaton’s land grab thwarted Mulholland’s plans for the massive dam LA needed at that site. He could have provided a water supply that withstood LA’s lengthiest droughts while still providing Owens Valley with enough water to cultivate thousands of acres of farmland. Now, a smaller dam would be built elsewhere, guaranteeing insufficient water for both LA and the Owens Valley. Though prickly in private, Mulholland and Eaton were forced to unite publicly if they were to sell the project to the voters and the press. They were forcibly cordial.
Mulholland had another reason to be furious. In this early stage, the aqueduct hadn’t been disclosed to the public yet. Eaton’s sparring with the Water Board breached the secrecy surrounding the aqueduct plan. Now, land speculators could drive up the project’s cost.
Too late. Moses H. Sherman from the Water Board whispered the inside story to some of LA’s wealthiest boosters, including Los Angeles Times publishers Harry Chandler and Harrison Gray Otis; E. T. Earl; publisher of the Herald; Henry Huntington of the Pacific Electric Railway; and E. H. Harriman of the Southern Pacific Railroad, among others. They formed a syndicate that bought up vast acres of parched, almost-worthless land in the San Fernando Valley for as little as $5 an acre in some places. The newspapermen intentionally suppressed the news that they were buying the land where the aqueduct would terminate. It wasn’t until the City scheduled a bond election to raise the $25 million dollars needed to build the aqueduct that voters finally learned of the project. With barely 60 days to scrutinize the plan, they voted overwhelmingly in its favor, believing what they read in the newspapers: that they could not survive without the aqueduct bringing water in abundance to Los Angeles.
From left: mule teams of up
to 52 animals pulled the pipes over the mountains and through the desert, 1912; workmen posing in front of a new section of the aqueduct pipeline, 1912
Meanwhile, Mulholland performed something of an engineering miracle, guiding 5,000 laborers through five years of desert heat to accomplish one of the most difficult civic projects undertaken by an American city. Fifty-seven camps housed men and supplies along the route. They built a railroad 120-miles long to carry tons of machinery. More than 500 miles of roads and trails were opened to reach the line of the aqueduct. Teams of 52 mules hauled steel pipes to the construction site. When completed, the aqueduct included 142 separate tunnels through the mountains. It was the fourth-largest engineering project in U.S. history (to that date) and the longest aqueduct in the western hemisphere.
The aqueduct was dedicated in a ceremony on November 15, 1913 at its open-ended terminus in the San Fernando Valley. At the climax of the flowery orations, it was Mulholland’s turn to speak. Apparently disgusted by the robber barons who populated his audience, he delivered one of the shortest speeches in U.S. history: “There it is. Take it!”
Mulholland speaks to the crowd at the opening ceremonies, 1913
And did they ever! The San Fernando Valley syndicate saw their irrigated property values soar. It is estimated that the syndicate made a profit of more than $100 million dollars. (That’s well over $2 billion dollars today.) As Mulholland predicted, the population exploded. Huntington added more streetcar routes.
There was one major flaw that the city fathers overlooked while their friends bought up the San Fernando Valley. The voters passed a bond issue to bring water to Los Angeles, not that uninhabited, unincorporated acreage 20 miles away. In stepped President Theodore Roosevelt, who attempted to block the profits of the syndicate by prohibiting the sale of Owens Valley water outside the Los Angeles city limits. To solve the oversight, the City of Los Angeles sidestepped the U.S. president. It annexed more than 100,000 acres of the San Fernando Valley. The newly incorporated territory nearly doubled the city’s size to be in compliance, bringing Los Angeles to the aqueduct.