Reisner is right, of course, that the map of contemporary Los Angeles - with the San Fernando Valley extending L.A.’s reach nearly 30 miles west of City Hall - looks the way it does because of an effort, beginning in 1915, to stretch the city limits as close to the new aqueduct as possible.īut many others have made that point - and have noted, as Reisner does, that ‘Los Angeles employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed’ from the Owens Valley. On a photograph of a young Mulholland: ‘The face is supremely Irish: belligerence in repose, a seductive churlish charm.’
On the ‘cherubic’ Chandler: ‘a rugged individualist and a ferocious competitor, and if there was money involved he would rarely pass up a dare.’ On Otis: ‘He was a large blubbery man with an intransigent scowl, an Otto van Bismarck mustache and a goatee, and a chronic inability to communicate in tones quieter than a yell.’ Reisner brings them to life in a way few had before him, with prose as memorably critical as anything written by our old friends Louis Adamic and Morrow Mayo.
The villains of the Owens Valley episode are familiar to followers of our series: Harrison Gray Otis, from 1882 to 1917 the publisher of this newspaper Harry Chandler, his successor and son-in-law and the owner of a giant real estate empire with its roots in the Valley and of course William Mulholland, the ruthless, brilliant czar of the Department of Water and Power and the most powerful bureaucrat in Los Angeles history. (The book has arguably been as important to debates over water policy as Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ had been to those about pesticides a generation earlier.)īut in a long and pointed chapter on the history of Los Angeles, Reisner details the raid our city fathers made on the Owens River a century ago to capture its water and send it coursing down a massive new aqueduct to the western edge of the San Fernando Valley, a project finally completed in 1913. Published in 1986 and turned into a four-part PBS documentary series in 1997, ‘Cadillac Desert’ focuses in the main on the great, often disastrous efforts the United States has taken to support massive irrigation projects in the driest sections of the West.
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