DEDICATION
To James “Bimmy” Wantz, who opened my ears to
the siren song of California so many years ago
And to Mitchell Kaplan, whose dedication to the
enterprise of bookdom is legend
EPIGRAPH
Like a man gone out of Egypt . . .
Before me the desert,
Perhaps the Promised Land, too.
—YEHUDA AMICHAI
The mysterious is the source
Of all true art and all science.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Map
1. HOW DREAMS MIGHT END
2. DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS
3. LUCK OF THE IRISH
4. IN MYSTERY IS THE SOURCE
5. WHOSE WATER IS IT ANYWAY?
6. A CIVIL SERVANT BORN
7. ROAD TRIP
8. DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY
9. REMOVE EVERY SPECTER
10. HAVE WATER OR QUIT GROWING
11. BRICK UPON BRICK
12. FIRST SPADE
13. BEST YEAR TO DATE
14. FAIR MONETARY RECOGNITION
15. FITS AND STARTS
16. FALLOUT
17. IF YOU DIG IT, THEY WILL COME
18. LAST MILE
19. CASCADE
20. IN THE SHADE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT
21. LET THE BOMBINGS BEGIN
22. FAILURE
23. FORGET IT, JAKE. IT’S CHINATOWN
24. CITY OF ANGELS
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Les Standiford
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks go to a number of individuals and institutions without whose help this undertaking would have not been possible:
Holli M. Lovich, Special Collections and Archives Coordinator for the Oviatt Library, California State University at Northridge, and Project Archivist for the Catherine Mulholland Collection
Dr. Paul Soifer, Consulting Historian, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
Fred Barker, Waterworks Engineer and unofficial department historian, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
Heather Todd, Archive Gatekeeper for the Eastern California Museum in Independence, California
Angela Tatum, Office of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Archive
The staff of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Adis Beesting, Education Librarian, Green Library, Florida International University
Marissa Ball, Emerging Technologies Librarian, Florida International University Libraries
Beatriz F. Fernandez, Reference Librarian, Green Library, Florida International University
Christine Mulholland, great-granddaughter of William Mulholland and niece of Catherine Mulholland. Her grandfather was William Perry Mulholland, William’s first-born son.
Harold “Hal” Eaton, great-grandson of Fred Eaton.
Douglas Wartzok, Provost and Executive Vice President, and the Sabbatical Leave Committee, Florida International University
I would also be remiss if I failed to thank those who have encouraged me in this work from the very outset: my steadfast agent, Kim Witherspoon, and my undaunted editors, William Strachan and Daniel Halpern.
Thanks are also due to Bill Beesting for his close reader’s eye, to Meg Grant and Greg Lecklitner for their untiring and ever-gracious Los Angeles hospitality, to my colleague James W. Hall for his unflagging encouragement and perspicacity, and of course to my ever-supportive wife, Kimberly, who has enabled the habit of an ink-stained wretch for more than thirty years now.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Often a writer is queried as to the source of an idea. Ordinarily it is an impossible question to answer. But in this case lies an exception. Whatever one’s opinion of upstart Los Angeles—and there are many—there is no arguing that it stands as a major population center of the world, along with the likes of Tokyo, Mexico City, Rome, New York, Cairo, Delhi, or Beijing. But for a moment try to comprehend that one individual could be given credit for the existence of any of those cities named. If such a concept is intriguing, then one might wish to read on.
When this writer first ventured to Southern California, it was from a dimly lit existence in southeastern Ohio. There were hills there on the fringes of Appalachia, but they overlooked for the most part only other hills. And at night, there was little to be seen from any ridge but an endless expanse of ruffled indigo.
Imagine then, a young man fresh from the sticks being driven along the spine of the Hollywood Hills as the sun sinks into the Pacific to the south and dusk sweeps across the San Fernando Valley to the north. At a turnout off a narrow road as winding as any to a coal miner’s shack, standing beside a gas-guzzling sedan, engine off and pinging beneath the hood in the dark, the young man stares out across an endless valley paved with a carpet of lights that stretch to infinity. A real-life fairyland from this vantage point, and don’t bother trying to tell him any different.
“What’s the name of this road we’re on?” the young man wants to know.
“Mulholland Drive,” his companion says. “What do you care?”
“Just so I know how to get back here,” the young man says, gaping at the view below. Whoever Mulholland was, he must have been important. It’s one of the most amazing roads in the world.
IN SOME RESPECTS, of course, it is a fool’s errand, trying to excavate grandeur out of the past. Every day, thousands of people drive along or across Mulholland Drive, the familiar portion of which traces the crest of the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, all the way from the 405 Freeway to Highway 101. It is a way to get somewhere or a place to enjoy and the name is just something to plug into Mapquest or a smartphone. Who should think about William Mulholland? Why would anyone care?
Catherine Mulholland, granddaughter of the man, grappled with the matter in significant ways. In an unpublished bit of autobiography she remembers often being asked, “Are you related to the highway?”
“And when I reply that it was named for my grandfather in 1925, the response ordinarily produces neither recognition nor much curiosity. In high school I sometimes longed for such indifference, because in the late 1930s, Mulholland Drive had become the foremost trysting, parking and necking spot in Los Angeles.”
It turns out that William Mulholland was in fact the highest-paid public official in California a century or so ago, but by today’s standards that doesn’t mean much—that grand annual salary wouldn’t cover the mortgage payment on most of the homes along the road bearing his name today. In 1974, Robert Towne wrote the script for Chinatown, an acclaimed film that derives substance from some of the things Mulholland was involved with, but he is called Hollis Mulwray in the film, his fictional character is minor and killed early on, and the filmmakers had to fudge most of the actual facts—including the time frame—for fear audiences would get lost in the forests of history.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, a number of factually based works were written regarding the fierce water politics in the West, including Marc Reisner’s notable Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1993). Mulholland and the Los Angeles Aqueduct get th
eir fair share of mention there and in other books, including William Kahrl’s exhaustive Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley (1983) and Abraham Hoffman’s Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley–Los Angeles Water Controversy (1981), which make the aqueduct project their primary focus.
However, as some—including Catherine Mulholland—have lamented, many of the water-issue books are dominated by political concerns and a seemingly unavoidable tendency to side with one group or another of the “good guys” du jour. “I estimate that of the voluminous literature which exists concerning the history of Owens Valley and water in Southern California,” Ms. Mulholland once stated, “that about fifty percent is reliable while the remainder, based largely on secondary and often dubious sources, could be consigned to the fiction department.”
Understandable, perhaps, for as the hard-bitten newspaper editor likes to observe, only trouble is interesting, and there is nothing like scandal to engage the attentions of an audience. Coupled with the temptation to judge the actions of those who lived a century ago through the lens of present-day political correctness, history often becomes subject to revision. It all became a bit too much for Ms. Mulholland, however, when she picked up an issue of the New York Times in 1991 to read an article citing Chinatown as a historical primer for understanding the practice of municipal predation upon water resources, resources to which, the Times writer maintained, the city had no right.
Galled that a crime melodrama, however artful, “had come to be regarded by the uninformed as a kind of documentary work on the history of Los Angeles” and dissatisfied by the paeans to Mulholland penned earlier in the century, she was moved to write William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (2000), a biography of her grandfather that is a meticulous birth-to-death record of a remarkable life.
While that publication was both well received and thorough, in its original form it was nearly twice as lengthy, and in the editing process certain more personal gems were unfortunately lost. In that first manuscript, Ms. Mulholland traces at some length her own history and growing fascination with her subject, including recollections of “the occasional encounters with those who simply had a friendly curiosity about my relationship to the engineer and who sometimes spoke of their admiration for ‘your grandfather, who did so much for Los Angeles.’”
But in time, the burden of her family’s name became increasingly apparent: “As I grew older . . . certain darker brushes not only disturbed—they paralyzed me as I had no sure defenses against them. They could come unexpectedly, as on a night in the 1940s, when I sat listening to Art Tatum’s virtuoso keyboard improvisations at the Streets of Paris in Hollywood. During intermission, I fell into talk with the man next to me at the piano bar. Although in his cups, he was knowledgeable about the music and so when in the course of a genial exchange, he asked me my name, I was not prepared for his reaction.
“‘You’re not related to that son of a bitch, are you?’ I tried to toss it off. ‘Which son of a bitch did you have in mind?’ But I already knew what was coming, and it did: “The one who stole the water.’”
There were other such encounters, including a moment when she took her place alongside a fellow student in an Old English Philology seminar at Cal-Berkeley, where she had relished the anonymity of being a Mulholland in a distant land. After the professor had called the roll, her classmate, who would eventually become known as the accomplished poet Jack Spicer, leaned over to whisper, “I’ve always wanted to meet one of you.” Spicer’s intonation left no doubt of his attitude, and the two would spend the rest of their graduate school days arguing their respective positions.
Ultimately, Ms. Mulholland says, a woman asked her how she thought her life had been affected by having been a granddaughter of William Mulholland, and she tossed off an answer: “I told her it would take a whole book to answer that.” The book that ensued was in fact more about her grandfather than herself, but given the nature of the man and his work, that was to be expected.
Yet for all that has been written and debated, it seems that a certain essential story remains to be laid out, one with a clear focus on a much larger than life individual taking on an engineering project that most thought impossible, contending with forces that make our own day-to-day struggles mundane. And has it been mentioned, as they like to ask in that story dome of Hollywood, that the stakes are quite high?
Justin Kaplan, the author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, once said that his approach to the form was to emulate “the imaginative world of the great 19th-century novels . . . Madame Bovary, David Copperfield and War and Peace . . . [which] render individual character in the round, depict its formation and peculiarities and tell a generously contexted story with memorable scenes, a beginning, a middle and an end.” I will claim no comparison to works such as those, but I will contend that in the character of William Mulholland and the real-life story that he lived is everything any novelist desires, and then some.
The truth is that without William Mulholland there might never have become a place named Hollywood, or a film industry within that place, or a carpet of San Fernando Valley lights to stare out over from a road along the mountaintops at night, and that is just a small part of what he made possible. Before Mulholland, there was next to nothing in the basins that hold 10 million or so people today, and there seemed little chance that there ever would be anything much until he went to work.
How could that be? a person might wonder. How could one man have made such a place as Los Angeles possible? Those were the questions that sent this writer once again leapfrogging back to the past.
MAP
HOW DREAMS MIGHT END
SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 12, 1928, CARPENTER Ace Hopewell piloted his motorcycle up the twisting San Francisquito Canyon Road north of Saugus, about fifty miles north of Los Angeles. Through the scrub on his left, he had a moment’s view of the St. Francis Dam, a looming 700-foot-wide concrete monolith, then he was into a curve and all he had was the roadway in his headlamp. He came out of the curve into a straightaway where he ordinarily would have opened the throttle, but he felt a sudden shaking—perhaps something going wrong with his engine—and instead he slowed. He was living in a construction camp next to Los Angeles Water Bureau Power Plant #1, just a few minutes’ ride ahead, and there was no hurry. It was a typically cool but clear mountain night in Southern California—maybe it was a good time for a smoke.
Hopewell eased the bike off the roadway at a turnout and let his engine idle. The motor seemed steady and the shaking had stopped, but he thought he heard some crashing sounds in the distance. The spot, several miles up a wilderness road from where Magic Mountain now sprawls alongside I-5, would ordinarily be quiet enough, even on an evening in the twenty-first century. On that night in 1928, when virtually nothing existed in those reaches of the Santa Clarita Valley, his engine would have been all he heard.
Hopewell had scarcely gotten his cigarette going when a more menacing sound caught his attention. The rumble, low and rising up from the valley behind him, was a little like thunder, but that was a rare occurrence for these parts, and the crystalline sky concurred. More like a cascade of boulders down a mountainside, Hopewell thought—landslides were common in the area. He took another glance in the direction of the new St. Francis Dam that he’d passed a mile or so back, ground out his cigarette, and revved his engine. Eleven fifty-eight on a Monday night. Time to get on home, get some sleep, be ready for the next day’s work.
He had no idea how drastically his “work” was about to change.
ENGINEERS AT POWER PLANT #1 realized that something was wrong when their instruments registered a sizable “bump in the line,” as one put it. At the Edison Electric Powerhouse in Lancaster, operators were similarly concerned when their own lights began to flicker wildly.
Down at the St. Francis Reservoir, however, dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger’s concerns had been building for
several days. The dam had been completed two years before, in March 1926, and water diverted for storage there from the controversial Los Angeles Aqueduct—as “impossible” a building project as the Oversea Railway to Key West before it—had been piling up behind the walls ever since.
Only five days before, on March 7, legendary Los Angeles Water and Power director William Mulholland had finally ordered the impoundment to cease. There were now 12.5 billion gallons of water held back by the 195-foot-high dam, a goodly portion of a year’s supply for the City of Los Angeles, “sufficient,” as George Newhall, president of a San Fernando Valley farming company put it, “to cover sixty square miles of land with water one foot deep.” One could also think of it as a section of a river ten feet deep, one mile wide, and six miles long, Newhall said.
However one envisioned it, there was quite a mass of water being stanched by the St. Francis Dam, and that was just fine by William Mulholland. The long-time, pulled-up-by-his-own-bootstraps director of the water department was often referred to as the father of the city, credited with making the modern metropolis possible when he built the politically divisive 233-mile-long Los Angeles Aqueduct between 1907 and 1913.
The acquisition of the rights to the water that now flowed to the City of Angels from a distant river on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains began an engineering project that ranked with the building of the Panama Canal in scope and challenge. And the fact that Mulholland, who’d never so much as finished high school, let alone set foot in an engineering class, had designed and ramrodded the project to completion, on schedule and under budget, was considered nothing short of amazing.
As if the unprecedented—and sometimes deadly—challenges of the work were not enough, the very process of acquiring the rights to the water and the rights-of-way for the passage of the aqueduct itself divided California’s citizenry as nothing ever had before. The “Rape of the Owens Valley,” as the water’s acquisition was sometimes called by the project’s critics (that phrase was first used as a chapter heading in a 1933 history entitled Los Angeles by Morrow Mayo), not only strained relations between Northern and Southern California interests, but was enough to draw trust-busting environmental champion President Theodore Roosevelt into the fray on the city’s and “the Chief’s” behalf. But all that was, in Mulholland’s mind, ancient history. Recently, he had been concerned with building a series of reservoirs such as the St. Francis where more than enough water could be stored for his city should the aqueduct’s delivery be threatened by extreme drought, or damage wrought by earthquake or by acts of sabotage that had been directed at the project on many occasions.
Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles Page 1