by Joel Garreau
Piru is just below the Sespe National Condor Sanctuary in a valley in Ventura County. It is beyond the San Fernando Valley, as far north of Los Angeles as Orange County is south. The Nielsen family was living there because the mansion belonged to scions of the Newhall Land and Farming Company, another legendary and ancient California landholding family, for which the elder Nielsen was working at the time, developing a place called Valencia.
“We moved because of another job. I’m sure my son would be happy to chat with you, because he has more than a passing interest in this subject. He reminds me that when we built this, we destroyed all the places for the nesting owl. That’s why there’s an owl on Tower Two. That’s right. He keeps telling me you’ve got to worry about the raptors in this part of the country and you can’t develop it all. He wrote a story on the condor that appeared in Sports Illustrated.”
Wings. The condor, which has a greater wingspan than any creature in North America, is so threatened it no longer exists in the wild. John, who his father acknowledges has a thing about roots, writes about endangered wings.
This was how John ended up in Virginia one balmy spring afternoon; he had come to work in Washington. Sitting over a platter of cold cuts, he talked of the intense conflicts he had had over such communities as Irvine, at the same time that he was going out of his way to be fair. His particular desires and aspirations, he understood, hardly reflected the American statistical norm. He mentioned his brother Peter to make the case. “My brother lives in Irvine, you know, and he just loves it. He works for the National Bank of Canada. He’s younger than me. My role in the family—I’m one of those early rockets they launched right after Sputnik; in the old films they blew up. I’m the one that went with the monkey in it.”
The first time I talked to John Nielsen, he made an effort to give Irvine an even break.
“I’m trying to be real rational about it, because I have a great amount of respect for my father, if not for everybody in his business. Building a community from scratch is not that old a science.”
This day, he notes, “My father’s really proud of all these things, you know. He’s the kind of person who would not feel uncool saying, ‘Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.’ He’s a very intensely mainstream person. That’s why my father’s in the business. He likes to shake hands, and his idea of a good time is either let’s go to a zoning hearing or let’s drive around and see the new project.”
He acknowledges that he and his father have had a continuing dialogue about the soul of such places as Irvine.
“We don’t have big long talks. It’s not like we sit down and have an exchange and debate. It’s like, ‘John, we bought this house in Palm Springs and want you to come out any time. We want to give you the membership in the tennis club.’
“ ‘I don’t want it.’
“ ‘Why not?’
“ ‘I don’t know.’
“ ‘Why don’t you want to come out to Palm Springs and golf?’
“ ‘I don’t like to golf.’
“ ‘What do you mean, you don’t like to golf?’
“That kind of conversation. I said, Dad, let’s go listen to the blues. Let’s paint each other and run naked down the street.
“He’s a Horatio Alger. He really believes in that, and I think many more people agree with him than agree with me—BUT THEY’RE WRONG! I notice the principle of exclusion—extreme separations of wealth and a class system. They’re not what I was taught these places would be, which is mixed places, attempting to re-create the city environment. These are places that people go to so they don’t have to be around whatever they deem undesirable.
“There’s something that gnaws at you. I don’t know whose fault this is. But I think the idea of killing the birds that land in your lake because they foul the grass—you know, poison—I think there’s something bizarre about that. And they say, ‘Well what do you mean? Birds are a problem.’ ”
John is intensely interested in his family’s roots. “Hans Peter Nielsen and his brothers came from Denmark and settled in Lexington, Nebraska, and most of ’em moved as a group to Orange County in the late 1920s. H.P. came with his kids Harold and Arthur and Carl and everybody but Einar and Olga. And Harold is my grandfather. He opened Nielsen’s Menswear in Fullerton, which was this little island in a sea of orange trees. The clothing store stayed open till the early 1960s, when they introduced credit cards and he thought that was the end of society. My father and his brother lived in the same house essen tially their whole life. They had a giant train set in the back, in a second house my grandfather had built. It was a re-creation of Fullerton. It was very exact.
“I guess you can see it coming. My grandfather always seemed in a daze when I would drive home. His wife died in 1969. He lived in this house and he wasn’t leaving it. They would gradually widen the road and cut back the front yard. It was one of those L.A. homes that look terrific now. It was low, with a big patio and a shuffleboard court in the back and you have that weird green plastic stuff but it’s all been bleached white from a zillion years in the sun. You’d sit out there with a dart board. My grandfather drove me to work once and he hadn’t been to downtown Los Angeles for thirty years and he was just shocked. There were so many people everywhere.
“My father comes from that old Orange County world. He feels very much that he’s a local boy. He’s trusted. Although he has said to me, you know, ‘Sometimes I go to these Rotary meetings and I’ll talk to ’em—the older guys—and sometimes I feel like they look at me as if to ask, What happened? What happened to our world?’ ”
John’s world was one in which “we were always moving into brand-new houses.” The elder Nielsen was correct about where his son’s roots lay. “I lived in all these suburbs and for two years of my life I lived in a Victorian mansion surrounded by orange orchards. It is just so radically different. When I come back, I go there. I took a girlfriend out to see it. I go back to Piru and walk into Sanchez Liquor. He says, ‘Hey! That’s Nielsen!’ I haven’t been there in twenty years. He says, ‘It’s Nielsen! Yeah, I caught you shoplifting!’ He did! I stole a little red squirt gun. He told me to go tell my mother.”
Community.
“I remember the place. I remember the sign that says ‘If you ask for your beer in Spanish, you’ll get your change in pesos.’ It is the only part of Southern California that I know that has not changed.”
Roots.
“I think everybody has a little treasured place and if that goes then they’re not coming back.”
Home.
“My father would always bring my grandfather over, put him in the room, turn on the football game, and go in the computer room and work on the computer. I’d sit there with my grandfather.
“My grandfather would turn to me and say, ‘There he goes. Going to play with that machine again.’
“I’d say, ‘Well, that’s the way he is.’
“He’d say, ‘He was always like that, too.’
“So I’d sit there and talk to old Harold.”
The Nielsens, father and son, readily talked into my tape recorder separately for more than two years about the differences in their perspectives. More of a challenge was getting them together. Finally they agreed. They chose the locale: California. Then they chose the place: the dappled pastels of the coffee shop at the Irvine Hilton.
They chose to sit side by side. Sure enough, the conversation soon came around to the subject of that Victorian house in Piru.
What is it that that Victorian has? What does it have that Irvine doesn’t? I asked.
JOHN: This house was built to be a Utopia. The guy planted the yard with biblical fruits. It had square nails. It had curved windows. It was ridiculous.
That’s not a legitimate alternative to anything—to live in a Victorian mansion in an orange orchard in an abandoned part of a country. I’m not saying I disliked it, either.
I’ve always thought that that would be profoundly sad, more sad tha
n anything else, when I drive out there and all that stuff’s gone. I don’t care if they change the onion fields or the walnut trees—which they’ve done. But when I come and all of a sudden the Newhall Land and Farming Company has converted that whole thing to “Orchardsville”—that will be profoundly depressing. What for? I can’t tell you. If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.
TOM: I see it as almost irrelevant to what we’re trying to talk about. I wouldn’t feel that way at all if I went out there. If the Newhall Land and Farming Company had found a way to convert the land and provide a place for people to live, I mean that wouldn’t bother me. Yes, I’d view it as an improvement, if it ended up being a nice area that people were living in and enjoying and all that. They could even do parts of the San Fernando Valley there, as far as I’m concerned.
JOHN: Oh, Dad. [He looks up at his father in an almost pleading way.] You and Mom lived in the same house your whole lives, and I don’t know how many times I’ve moved. You feel that I’ve missed out on something that you had. What is it?
TOM: I had the continuity or the association with a group of people over sixteen or seventeen years. What did I get from that? I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t know.
JOHN: Well, there you go.
TOM: I know where my roots are. They’re right here in Fullerton. Absolutely it has changed. But I don’t go up there and say, “Oh isn’t it too bad there are no more orange trees.” I mean, I don’t think we regret that there are no more orange trees left, no. Happy to see a new university and happy to see lots of things that have happened. I’m accepting the fact that we’re going to have more people in this part of the world than we do today. If that involves the conversion of land in the Simi Valley to handle ’em adequately, that’s okay with me.
Is that okay with you? I ask John.
JOHN: No. It might have been ten or twenty years ago. But now the thing that heightens it is, you know, the Simi Valley’s all that’s left. I mean, that might not be literally true, but look at Orange County. It’s just plastered.
TOM: There’s land in Ventura County. There’s all kinds of land all over. All I’m saying is if we could come to some agreement I’m perfectly willing to say, “Okay, let’s preserve the area out along that river.” Maybe that’s important. But we want to develop this part. Now, John wouldn’t even let us do that. John says no to everything.
Is there anything like sacred ground in the late twentieth century? I ask.
TOM: Sure there is. There is lots of sacred ground and it’s being protected in lots of places by lots of people.
JOHN: You talk and talk and I think you’re right, you make it sound all so overwhelming, and this is the way it should be. But still it leaves me cold. You know much more than me and you’ve got it all figured out. And I still don’t want to live there.
The coffee shop of the Irvine Hilton is called Le Café, and it is a pleasant place. The flooring and the glass walls have been calculated so as to blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors, making it air-conditioned cool but vivid. The table at which the Nielsens sit has taupe benches, with accents of yellow, aqua, and pink. On the walls there is a sixteen-unit enamel-on-aluminum piece of modern art. It shows palms, water, high-rises. Next to it there is a little plaque. Irvine Landscape 1985, it is called.
The conversation with the Nielsens goes on through most of the afternoon. But it doesn’t go much of anywhere else. Both are calm. Both are rational. Each is polite to the other. Neither changes the other’s mind.
That outcome is probably telegraphed in the early part of their conversation. Maybe it is when I ask the elder Nielsen the same question I’ve asked so many other people in Orange County by then: What does community mean to you, as in “master-planned community”?
What he seems mostly is a little perplexed by the question.
Says Tom Nielsen, “It doesn’t mean—anything more than a marketing term.”
* For the complete list, see Chapter 11.
9
THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA
Soul
Until it has had a poet, a place is not a place.
—Wallace Stegner, CROSSING TO SAFETY
THE RESTAURANT looked like a California salad—twenty variations on the color green, with the occasional strip of purple. It was called, inevitably, Chardonnay’s.
From a window table, the middle-distance view was of raw, turned ground. It was not, however, as in the old days of Northern California’s San Ramon Valley, being readied for new walnut groves. Instead, it would soon be planted with a “town center”—a mall for the 585-acre Bishop Ranch Business Park, which already had more office space than downtown Milwaukee or Tampa or Memphis.
Despite the size of Bishop Ranch, Chardonnay’s was its first “gourmet” restaurant, taking reservations and offering cloth napkins. And indeed, it was a sufficiently pleasant lunch place that you almost forgot it was inside a new Marriott designed with all the stolid, Stalinist, blocky masses of a Works Progress Administration municipal building for an industrial city on the decline. The balcony rails looked like bars on a state prison.
That Marriott exterior really frosted Alex Mehran, the thirty-nine-year-old scion of Bishop Ranch, which is at the core of one of the biggest Edge Cities in the San Francisco Bay area, well into the mainland on I-680 in Contra Costa County.
Here he was, trying to bring some civilization into this place, said Mehran, something beyond just office space, and the design was changed; the execution was flawed—
“Oh yeah, it pissed me off. No question about it. We’ve spent millions of dollars out here attempting to create the highest quality environment. It was a big deal. I was very upset.”
Alexander R. Mehran is to be taken seriously about what he views as a quality environment and civilization, for he is an urbane man. Of Persian descent, he was educated at Harvard in government, and then went on to England’s Cambridge for law.
“I thought I was going to be a public international lawyer,” he said. “Government, yeah. That’s what I really wanted to do. As a kid, I always wanted to figure out what can you do to influence the most people to make their lives better.”
He ended up at Morgan Guaranty Trust for three years, and he still looks the part. His impeccably tailored double-breasted suit is of a fabric so luxuriantly black as to match his angular jaw, where even the most glistening shave cannot eradicate the shadow of his beard.
But in 1977, he returned to what had been the residential development business of his father, Masud. There Alex became the foremost Edge City builder in Northern California.
Mehran is very much part of the San Francisco scene. He commutes seventy miles round trip across the Bay Bridge to San Ramon each day so that he and his family can live at that pinnacle of San Francisco culture and wealth, Presidio Heights. He is a trustee of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, which oversee the Asian Art, De Young, and Legion of Honor museums near the Golden Gate. His wife, Lucinda, is an heiress, the daughter of Tom Watson, who made IBM what it is today. Mehran’s fingernails are manicured; his manner is both charming and disarming.
In short, if America were looking to put someone in charge of building its new urban prototypes, it presumably could do a lot worse than to hand the task over to Alex Mehran.
That is, at any rate, what we’ve done.
For out on the floor of the San Ramon Valley, over which Mount Diablo looms with a Fuji-like presence, four Edge Cities have erupted, and Alex Mehran’s is the most premeditated. In 1987, his Bishop Ranch won the Urban Land Institute award as “a model of foresight, planning, and partnership between public and private interests.” A previous winner was Disney World.
Indeed, no twig, no blade of grass is out of place. The Mexicans with leaf blowers are everywhere. Mehran has spent a fortune on landscaping.
“Big money,” he agrees. “Huge money. Our crews that look after the stuff go through intensive training. How to prune and how to deal with an irrigation system that’s ve
ry conservative in the use of water. It’s very state of the art.”
Chevron USA’s largest office facility in the world is at Bishop Ranch. Ten of the top fifty of the Fortune 500 are here. Toyota is here. The seventy-five-hundred-employee administrative headquarters of Pacific Bell at Bishop Ranch is so large, it features a fourteen-acre lake. There are master plans. There are enforceable covenants. There is a three-pad heliport.
Mehran is very pleased with Bishop Ranch 8, his latest development; he is eager to show it off to a visitor. Out front, thirty-eight jets of water dance, in a Rockettes-straight line. They are surrounded by miniature pansies this October day.
Bishop Ranch 8 is three, identical, 200,000-square-foot, five-story buildings. Each has black granite accent stripes. Each has curtains of smoke-gray reflective glass. Each is crowned by triple barrel-vault skylights. Each has a five-story atrium at its core.
The catwalks at each level, inside, are railed by smoke-gray transparent glass. Each walkway has a half-moon balcony. The edges of the balconies are equipped with an irrigation system from Sweden to allow ivy to cascade in proper Hanging Gardens fashion toward the sculpture and trees below.
The central sculptures in each building are made of metal and moving water. In the first building, silvery brushed sheets have been rolled into a curve. That curve matches exactly the one made by the sheet of silvery water ejected from the front of the sculpture, completing a half circle. Neat trick. In Bishop Ranch’s brochures, such sculptures are referred to as “quality statements.”
The indoor trees are not in tubs. They appear to grow right out of the floor.
“Why trees?” I ask Mehran.
“Quality of life. What I’m really trying to say more than anything else is, this is nice. When I drive you up and take you into the building, what I hope you’ll say is ‘This is nice. I could work here.’ We have a lot of significant art that’s around. Those are all important elements of this place.”