A Tale of Two Cities

Editor’s note: Near the end of our Victory Lap, we happened upon two isolated land developments. Lynn had heard about them in the 1970s when he wrote a series of articles about high-pressure sales of lots in unlikely corners of the West. Think of this too-detailed report as a long follow-up story. We start here with a short version for those not sufficiently fascinated by a 40-year-old history of dreams, ripoffs and the absurd.

Notes from Lynn:

We looked at the jagged mountains and rows of palm trees before we strolled across the London Bridge (no tolls), its solid British masonry looming over Bridgewater Channel. We saw a rowboat tricked out as a Venetian gondola (rides for $6) and a banner that labeled a square barge as “Kon Tiki” ($15). We looked at a bogus Mississippi paddleboat, the Dixie Belle ($15). We admired the half-timbered, half-rented English Village, which included an empty pub and the shop for London Bridge Psychic ("What does your future hold?").

Margo had a solemn comment.

“This is the hucksterism,” she said, “that made America great.”

We had just motored across the Arizona desert to Lake Havasu City (population 56,000). Our vow to search for roadside attractions led us to walk in damp silence across the former London Bridge. It’s now an artificial span on an artificial canal in an artificial lake. The concrete core of the five-arch bridge has been artificially clad with blocks of stone, a granite costume for a fantasy of Old England amid the imported palm trees of a developer’s 50-year-old mirage.

We shivered in the cold reality of rain. It’s rare (3.5 inches per year) in the barren mountains and tumbleweed valleys of western Arizona. But that’s where an oil-and-chainsaw entrepreneur’s risky venture became the most successful lot-sales promotion of the 1960s. We forgot to sing “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” but later I looked up one of the lesser-known verses. It seemed to fit.

Build it up with silver and gold,
Silver and gold, silver and gold,
Build it up with silver and gold,
My fair lady-o.

Two days later we arrived in California Valley (population about 400, probably less): After saying goodbye to Arizona and spending the night in a bleak California town with the entrancing name of Buttonwillow, we had driven The Guppy westward on a curving road through the calm hills of the Temblor Range. We didn’t take the one less traveled by. It was the one least traveled by, and that has made all the difference. “No services for 75 miles,” says a blue warning sign on State Highway 58. No cars, either.

Soon we dropped into the flat, arid, inhospitable Carrizo Plains, site of what is undoubtedly – despite a lot of competition – the Golden State’s most fraudulent lot-sales promotion in the 1960s. We passed the Carissa Plains Elementary School (46 pupils, three teachers, eight grades and a variation of the name). It displayed a banner with a name unique among the Panthers, Cardinals, Giants and other school mascots. It could also describe California Valley’s long-gone developers or, to be more accurate, non-developers. It says: Home of the Polecats.

***
Editor's note: The (much) longer version begins here:

In very different ways, California Valley and Lake Havasu City are legendary among old-timers in the high-pressure sales of remote investment lots. Both promoters relied on flogging the dreams of their customers and ignoring the potential problems of harsh reality. The fast-buck memerizers of California Valley got out while the getting was good. The founder of Lake Havasu City did something rare in the annals of hucksterism. He did (nearly) everything he could to make his promises come true.

Three decades have passed since our mailboxes bulged with jiggery-pokery brochures that pitched the delights of investing in lots in dozens of faraway developments. I invented names for them: Caveat Emptor Country Club Estates, Lake of the Canards and El Rancho Gullible. The promoters varied from flim-flam men to subsidiaries of Boise Cascade and other big corporations. Most of them increased the revenue stream of big-city newspapers by buying full-page ads. The newspapers trusted the bamboozlers to be truthful.

In 1970, when I was a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, city editor Gale Cook assigned me to look into the promises and assumptions of the lot-sales developers. His boss, editor Ed Dooley, convinced publisher Charles L. Gould to fend off the outraged manager of his display advertising department. I posed as a prospective buyer at Brooktrails, Shelter Cove, Lake of the Woods and other remote subdivisions. I wrote a five-part report (“Boom in the Boondocks”). It told how promoters offered free flights to free lodgings in rural subdivision projects outfitted with streets, a country club, golf courses, swimming pools and promises of a “gated community” to keep out the riffraff. Other projects, often called “ranchos,” offered acreage for horses and homes without promising a water supply or a sewage system.

Super-friendly salesmen, so gifted they could sell vacuum sweepings as cancer cures, would talk almost anyone to buy a lot as an “investment,” or a place to play golf, or a second home – but usually as a dream of real estate profit. At a project in the hardpan acres east of Madera, sales brochures stressed the investment opportunities of a setting ideally positioned halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Of course, the reverse is also true. No site in the San Joaquin Valley could be any further from the two big cities.

It wasn’t necessary to bribe the boards of supervisors in rural counties, according to Harold Berliner, then the district attorney in California’s Nevada County. “All it takes,” he told me, “is a good lunch with two martinis, a good steak and someone to tell them that they have Vision.” He later teamed up with a deputy state attorney general, Marshal Mayer, for a lawsuit that was settled by Boise Cascade for $70 million.

Leo McCarthy, then a San Francisco assemblyman, said the Examiner articles inspired him to sponsor reform legislation that he pushed through the state legislature. Signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1976, it gave teeth to the feckless California Department of Real Estate. It also put an end to the state’s lot-sales era of direct-mail pitches, full-page newspaper ads and free flights to Hornswoggle Acres. It put a compress on the headaches of rural counties once so eager to support developers with pointy shoes and Vision. Once the promoters packed up their alligator bags, they left multiple ownership of little lots by urban folks who eventually woke up to the rural problems they just bought.

A housing development out in the country is a house of cards. In most cases of projects based on dreams and promises, the fall of the cards often left buyers bereft, salesmen unpaid, contractors in court, developers bankrupt and the counties holding the bag. Undeveloped properties eventually reverted to the county for non-payment of taxes and assessments. Except for a few buyers who build houses and then expect county services and school pickups, the land itself is paralyzed; like Humpty Dumpty, it can’t be put back together again.

As I learned something about the history of land-sale campaigns, I interviewed a veteran of the hard-sell campaigns of the lot-sale swindlers. He recalled with amusement that no state or federal agencies bothered then to interfere with some of the famous land-sale promotions of the middle years of the 20th century. At the top of his list were Lake Hasavu City and California Valley. They vary in many ways, but the key difference comes as no surprise to students of the history of the West.

It’s not the silver and gold. It’s water.

* * *

California Valley:

The predatory polecats in 1960 put their pencils to the map and created 7,250 parcels from 18,400 acres in a big part of an old Spanish land grant, El Chicote Rancho. The unborn city’s total of 24,083 acres is four-fifths the size of San Francisco. With streets named Beverly Hills Trail and Cambria Road, most of them existing only on plats, the 2.5-acre “ranchos” were sold to thousands of suckers intrigued by the chance to invest in “the geographic center of this spectacular California growth area with unbounded future.”

At free breakfasts in big cities and barbecues at the lodge in California Valley, potential buyers watched slide shows, ingested get-rich tales of investments in Palm Springs and peered at charts showing the increasing value of most California real estate. Salesmen came to their homes with stories of the romantic history of a 50-mile valley where the Chumash People gathered for ceremonies at Painted Rock, where outlaws hid from sheriffs and where the vaqueros spun their lariats on the historic cattle ranch. Sight unseen, lots within sight of 13,000-acre Soda Lake were promoted for “lakeside views.” Doubters were told that the State Water Project, then in the planning phase, could pass through the valley en route to Los Angeles – and turn the desert into gardens. Nothing was volunteered about the ever-present danger of earthquakes from the San Andreas Fault (map at right), which runs past Carizzo Plains and abuts the aptly named Temblor Range. It attracts geologists from all over the world. “The area has long been regarded as a site of world-class examples of strike-slip faulting,” says Stanford’s J.R. Arrowsmith in his Ph.D dissertation, “The San Andreas Fault Zone in the Carrizo Plain.”

If all 7,250 ranchos were to be built out, California Valley would today hold at least 25,000 people, hundreds of their pet horses, a prodigious appetite for water, a multimillion-dollar sewage system and at least one Wal-Mart.

Instead, the developers disappeared. A San Luis Obispo County report says they went bankrupt. Buyers complained to the county without effect, then became discouraged and left their sad little ranchos to the tax collector. The county’s Board of Supervisors waited until 1980 before adopting a land use plan that noted many a problem for home buyers, including “remoteness, poor access, inadequate roads, poor soils (alkaline), lack of water and poor sewage drainage.”

Half a century later: The 400 inhabitants occupy scattered houses with deep wells and/or potable water delivered by truck. A Community Services District maintains a fire and rescue station, a one-day-a-week county library and boxes for mail. No gas stations, no medical services, no sheriff’s substation. Trees are few. Summer temperatures rise above 100 degrees. Annual rainfall is about 7 inches in a good year. Three streets are paved. Other roads of packed dirt generate dust in the summer, mud in the winter. A motel/restaurant, no doubt constructed for the buyers of a half-century ago, appeared to be shut down when we drove by. Abandoned lots are leased for grazing. Some residents want to install fields of solar cells; others insist on solitude.

The alkaline water of Soda Lake, which is dry in the late summer and fall, is undrinkable by man or beast.

The California Aqueduct’s planners wisely bypassed Carrizo Plains and the San Andreas Fault.
Travelers to California Valley and the Carrizo Plains are urged to take their own water.

That’s the news, mostly gleaned from the Internet. We took a quick look and headed to Paso Robles and our road to home. I thought at first of California Valley as a civic tragicomedy for gullible buyers, but the greed of unscrupulous polecats didn’t really change anything. That can’t be said about the desert city with a bridge from London.

Lake Havasu City:

As we began our windy walk across London Bridge the Seventh, a D.A.R. plaque told us the transplanted span symbolizes a British-American friendship that “establishes a bond between two very different municipalities.”

Very different? True enough.

Population in Lake Havasu City is counted as 56,000, plus 10,00 to 20,000 visitors and snowbirds. It’s 12 million or so for the London metropolitan area. London was founded about 2,000 years ago. Lake Havasu City, only 46 years old, wasn’t incorporated until 1988.

Even the lingo is different. Just as G.B. Shaw said a common language separates the English and Americans, so the Londoners can’t always understand the talk of the Old West. “Blag,” “blarney” or “ballocks,” for example, don’t translate well into “hornswoggle,” “slumguzzle” or “whopper-thumper.”

Next to the plaque and flagpole we saw Robert P. McCulloch and C.V. Wood Jr. dressed in what appeared to be greenish bronze. The life-size statues are beaming with the pleased expressions that Londoners would call “over-the-moon,” as in the cow’s famous jump. The resort city’s founder and planner are inspecting bronze blueprints of the bridge they built for their town or, more accurately, the town built by their bridge.

Bob McCulloch (at right) grew up in Milwaukee, an heir of streetcar and power plant mogul Stephen Foster Briggs. He often said he was more proud of his victories in hydroplane boat races than his degree from Stanford in 1932, the depth of the Depression. Over the next few years the energetic entrepreneur-inventor formed companies for racing cars, aviation, oil exploration and small gasoline engines for lightweight chainsaws and outboard motors.

Looking for a test site in 1958 for his outboard motors, he flew over Lake Havasu – a big but half-forgotten reservoir on the lower Colorado River. It had drowned about 40 miles of ancient Indian encampments, abandoned hamlets, fishing camps, old mines, boat landings and groves of cottonwoods. The concrete-arch Parker Dam was finished in 1942. Its powerhouses pump water into the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct, a gift by the federal Bureau of Reclamation to the real estate industry in 12 cities in thirsty Southern California. (Court decisions later allocated half the surplus river flow to the real estate industry and cotton fields of Arizona.) On the map (at left, from google), the reservoir looks like a pregnant rattlesnake. A flat peninsula pushes like a big boot into the wide bulge in the middle of Lake Havasu (an Indian name, it means blue-green water).

Bob landed there at an abandoned Army Air Corps airfield. He bought 3,500 acres of sagebrush and blowing sand on the peninsula at Pittsburg Point.

Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood Jr., a fun-loving chili chef known as “Woody” or “C.V.”, went to work for Walt Disney as general manager and master planner of the first Disneyland. It opened in 1954, but a year later he lost his job for taking too much credit for the success of the first theme park. Walt solved that by erasing Woody’s name from the annals of the Magic Kingdom. The engineer/planner then designed other theme parks. Six Flags in Texas was a big success. Three busts followed – Pleasure Island (Boston), Magic Mountain (Denver) and Freedomland (New York City). His team was absorbed in 1961 by McCulloch, who was already determined to add “planned communities” to his portfolio of oil and chainsaws.

In 1964, he bought a lot more land from the federal government – 26 square miles of barren desert for less than $75 per acre. With Wood, he designed the streets, parcels and utilities for Lake Havasu City.

In a desert land promotion, it was no accident that “lake” became part of the name. But McCulloch didn’t just rely on watery prose and promises of a future of jobs and industry. By 1966, he had installed his chainsaw factory and three more plants in the infant city, swelling its population by 400 wage earners. They lived in air-conditioned trailers in the 100-unit park built by McCulloch on the peninsula. He also bought Holly Development and its force of real estate salesmen, who would later be called “Hello Hollies.”

Persuasive advertisements in the nation’s newspapers and magazines induced readers to sign up for free visits, meals and lodging included, in the Lockheed Electras acquired by McCulloch as his own airline. “Fly before you buy” was the sensible slogan that he used to counter competitors who, like California Valley, preferred to sweet-talk buyers into buying a lot sight unseen.

McCulloch’s fleet would eventually grow to 11 airplanes slow enough for the Hello Hollies to persuade passengers about the investment opportunities that awaited them as they circled the lake – and circled again, and again. In 1978, when the aviation campaign ended, 137,000 prospective buyers in 2,702 flights had, in Old West lingo, seen the elephant. In 40 white Jeepsters, a battalion of 50 salesmen (and some saleswomen) would haul dazed travelers to examine a wasteland converted into a dreamscape by the power of relentless rhetoric. The buyers would stay at a newly finished hotel with a waterfall roof. In an oasis of newly transplanted palm trees, many would sign the papers proffered by the smiling salesmen.
But something else was needed.

The Grand Gimmick

Both are dead, and so it’s unclear whether Bob or Woody should get credit for suggesting the unthinkable. Could they acquire London Bridge No. 7, now sinking inch by inch into the sandy bottom of the River Thames, and ship the pieces to the desert as a roadside attraction? Lake Havasu City, a community otherwise focused on speedboats and fishing, had grown to 4,000 inhabitants in 1968. Houses were replacing the trailers now being called “mobile homes,” but McCulloch had a long way to go before he could reach his goal of 90,000 population and a reputation rivaling that of Palm Springs. A grand plan evolved.

McCulloch bid $2,460,000, a sum gratefully accepted by the Greater London Council. Three years and another $7 million would go by as the granite blocks were numbered, shipped through the Panama Canal to Long Beach and trucked 300 miles to a hole in between the peninsula and what would now become the mainland. Wood had proposed a canal, the Bridgewater Channel, to separate the boot-shaped Pittsburg Point peninsula from the shoreline. A bridge, of course, is supposed to be a bridge to somewhere. On a concrete base across the canal, the blocks of granite were attached to give the impression that John Rennie’s 1831 five-arch span had been rebuilt intact. Who knew? On the walkway are elegant brass lampposts molded from cannons captured from the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Wood, the theme park veteran, arranged for an “English Village” with a British phone booth in imperial red. (That's Lynn with the bridge, at right. The coots are American.) Hotels, condos and a marina surround the bridge.

The Lord Mayor of London showed up at the official dedication at 1971. You might think that the scene was so absurd that Bob and Woody would have been laughed out of town, but you would be wrong. By 1980, the population had almost quadrupled to 15,909. It was 24,363 in 1990, 41,938 in 2000 and, as of 2009, an estimated 56,603.

And those figures don’t include the retirees who escape the northern snows and park their RVs and boats in McCulloch’s city. Thousands of collegians show up to frolic in the lake for spring break. And in the summer, tens of thousands of tourists show up to look at London Bridge No. 7, many of them disappointed that it’s not the Tower Bridge.

McCulloch and Wood took their billion-dollar road show in the 1970s to three other scrub-bush and chaparral sites, each with a “Fly Before You Buy” campaign modeled after the sales pitch at Lake Havasu City. As of this year, Pueblo West (near Pueblo, Colorado) had grown to 4,500 population, and Spring Creek (near Elko, Nevada), is listed at 10,500. The landmark gimmick also helped Fountain Hills (30 miles from Phoenix, Arizona), where Woody designed what is billed as “the world’s highest fountain.” Every 15 minutes, like Old Faithful, it spouts 560 feet upward. Population: 23,000, and growing.

Reality check:

We picked up a copy of the News-Herald, “serving Lake Havasu City and the Lower Colorado River Area.” In a letter to the editor, longtime resident John Dixon writes:

Who among us Havasuvians can claim any form of community pride or any type of Americana exercised here since the old man on the hill died? And with him the dream of a peaceful, clean and profitable society that would be Palm Springs and the shining new light on the mighty Colorado.

That would be Mr. McCulloch. He wasn't that old.

I am enduring the latter part of my third decade in Havasu and I raised my three kids here. But I’ve got some bad news for you – we are dying with that dream… I’ve worked downtown as a bouncer. Have you been downtown between midnight and 2:30 a.m. lately? It’s like playing dawn of the drunks with absolute zombies wandering, staggering, fighting and weeping. I don’t have time to talk to you about the synthetic heroin trade that transfers from back door to back door.

The writer yearns for the “the university we just talk about” and for medical buildings with a national health and cancer treatment research center. He says we might try “to get our children to rejuvenate the truth of the old man’s dream.” In the meantime, it’s time to clean up the lake and the town from “its alcohol-fueled, jail-filling, played-out resort-dreaming legacy…”

Other problems face the inheritors of the not-so-old man’s dream. For a time, says Havasu Magazine, recreational boaters turned Copper Canyon’s bay into “an infamous gathering spot, where hundreds of boats crowded in.” Wall-to-wall boats. No escape. Drunken skippers. Lethal dives from the cliffs. When the boat police shunted people away, social boaters coalesced at the sandbar north of the city.

The canal created by C.V. Wood has become so packed with boats in swimming weather, says the magazine, that it’s only a matter of time before somebody is poisoned by odorless but deadly carbon monoxide fumes.

As for another form of pollution, McCulloch and Wood must have put aside any thoughts of a sewer system away from the waterfront. The city’s aquifer began in the 1990s to seep contamination into the lake. On a July day in 1994 with a high of 128 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest in the 40 years of records, coliform readings compelled authorities to ban swimming. It got the attention of a citizenship not normally in favor of tax assessments. A $463 million bond issue was approved in 2001 by a 3-1 margin. As of this year, with treatment plants in place, 14,000 septic tanks had been “decommissioned” with 7,000 more to go.

Arizona’s traditional opposition to governmental oversight left Lake Havasu City with a jumble of bad zoning, confusing street patterns and a downtown that is small and hard to find. But gated communities are as abundant as golf courses (four) in a city where McCulloch and Woods neglected to set aside space for playgrounds or parks. (Sara Park and Rotary Park came along later.) We looked at real estate prices: $153,000 for a new home with three bedrooms, two baths, a three-car garage, a boat garage and other amenities; $76,000 for a five-bedroom home tagged as “immaculate”; $69,000 for a lot on Trimaran Drive; $25,000 for a mobile home with a fishing boat and golf cart; $499,000 for a large home with a pool and lake views, and so forth.

When we walked through the English Village, many restaurants and shops were empty. The economic downturn has been particularly hard on resort businesses, we were told. Of concern to many boosters is the role of the Houston-based company that gobbled up the McCulloch holdings after the founder’s land development business went sour in the mid-1970s. The details are confusing, but we know only that the developer was only 65 when found dead on Feb. 25, 1977. The authorities said he took 100 sleeping pills, 10 to 50 codeine tablets and an unspecified amount of alcohol. The Los Angeles County coroner somehow ruled it an accident.

C.V. Wood died of cancer in 1992.

The absentee owner is Charles Hurwitz, a corporate raider who forced out McCulloch’s son and Wood in 1979. He is notorious in Northern California for his failed but scary campaigns to harvest the old-growth redwoods owned by the Pacific Lumber Co. he acquired, bankrupted and then sold. His corporation, Maxxam, still has a grip on Lake Havasu City, but nobody knows what the future holds for the old man’s dream. (But we could visit the London Bridge Psychic, at left, for some insight.)

Prospectors for irony may find that the remarkable past success of Lake Havasu City’s developers could have negative consequences in the future for the growing community in the isolated valley of the lower Colorado River. McCulloch’s dream led to a teeming resort, millions of dollars in profits – and unexpected concerns about air and water pollution, dense crowds of speedboats, allegations of too many midnight drunks and an understandable uncertainty about investment by the faraway corporation that founded the city.

A greater irony is visible in California Valley. The rapacity of developers (and many a buyer) left the 24,083 acres of former ranch land available to the kit fox, the giant kangaroo rat, rare leopard lizards and a list of plants crowded out of the San Joaquin Valley. The acreage butts up against the Carrizo Plains National Monument’s 250,000 acres of habitats critical to the survival of California condors and a home to the pronghorn antelope, Tule elk, sandhill cranes and mountain plovers. And nowhere in the valley is there a bridge from London.
One last verse from “London Bridge Is Falling Down”:

Silver and gold will be stolen away,
Stolen away, stolen away.
Silver and gold will be stolen away,
My fair lady-o.

Notable: If you've come this far, you should know that this footnote has nothing whatever to do with the Trail of the Guppy. You won't be tested on this part.

Perhaps it's just as well that McCulloch didn't buy London Bridge the Sixth, which was demolished in 1831. Otherwise the Lake Havasu tour guides would be obliged to tell the tourists about the royal decorations in the 16th century, a time when Merrie England wasn't all that merrie. Pikes at the bridge's Southern Gateway featured the shriveled heads of Thomas More and John Fisher (both were sainted 400 years later). Next came paranoid Henry VIII’s once-closest adviser, Thomas Cromwell, and the alleged lovers of the obese king’s fifth wife, the doomed teenager Catherine Howard. The tradition had begun more than two centuries before when the head of Scots hero William Wallace, now known better as Braveheart, went on display in 1305. Later came the heads of rebel leader Wat Tyler and Gunpowder Guy Fawkes. At one point (in 1598) a German visitor counted 38 severed heads as outdoor advertisements to warn renaissance Londoners of the royal penalty for dissension. (Missing were the promoters of California Valley, but that came much later.)

According to the London Bridge Museum’s website, at least three bridges were built and unbuilt across the River Thames in the 900 years after the Romans floated pontoons for a crossing in the first century A.D. (The numbering of the bridges is mine because the authorities, as you might expect of Londoners, disagree about details.) In the ninth century, London Bridge the Fourth was built of timber. In the first years of the new millennium, it was fortified and blocked by King Canute and his army of Danes, but King Ethelred the Unready was, surprisingly, ready. In 1014 (accounts vary as to the date), he assembled a force of Norsemen and Saxons to put roofs on barges to fend off Danish arrows and boulders from the bridge. Then they tied ropes to the pilings and pulled away. Everybody knows what happened. That’s the number one explanation as to the origin of the nursery rhyme.

London Bridge is broken down,
Broken down, broken down.
London Bridge is broken down,
My fair Lady Lee.

London Bridge the Fifth, also a timber structure, was replaced in 1209 by a stone span of 19 arches. By my count, it was London Bridge the Sixth. Destroyed by storms and fires but rebuilt several times, the medieval span lasted more than 600 years. It was festooned by a church and about 200 businesses, many of them connected by rooms over the narrow, congested roadbed. Its image still survives as the London Bridge, but it didn’t fall down. Instead, it was so decrepit that a new bridge was commissioned, constructed and opened in 1831.

The seventh London Bridge, not nearly as scenic, would last only 136 years on the Thames. Burdened with 10,000 vehicles and 50,000 pedestrians each day, it began to sink – one inch every eight years. By 1924, the east end was about 4 inches lower than the west end. By then, the Thames was crossed by 17 tunnels and 23 bridges, including the Tower Bridge of 1894.
The London Bridge No. 7 wasn’t falling down. It was sinking down. By 1968, it was on its way to Arizona. The Guinness Book of Records would list it as “the largest antique ever sold.”