Imperial (133 page)

Chapter 148

LOS ANGELES (1975)

Its water projects today reach out hundreds of miles across the Southwest, while its electrical power is drawn still further from projects scattered throughout six states.

—California Water Atlas, 1979

I don’t mean to say we’re perfect. We’ve got a lot to do in the way of extending the paving of motor boulevards.

—Sinclair Lewis, 1922

TÍPICO AMERICANO

The bartender at the Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles, who
looked as though he had not smiled since his father was hung,
continues to refrain from smiling, having gone off duty sometime since the 1850s. And downtown itself likewise decays.—After the fifties it went away, said Marjorie Sa’adah. By ’63, downtown was like
dead.
In the seventies it was like Skid Row.

Today Southern California has lost its booster spirit,
concludes the author of a book on water politics.
It has vanished along with the clear skies . . .

The blue-striped yellow halvah-flesh of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, whose turreted dome is an anachronism of ornateness, implies by its very singularity that not merely agricultural Imperial-ness has bled almost out of Los Angeles, but also the architectural grandiosity of old times. The cream-colored wedding cake of another old building confronts the wrecking ball, and for what? As early as 1966, a book entitled
Eden in Jeopardy: Man’s Prodigal Meddling with His Environment—The Southern California Experience
decries Los Angeles’s freeways, which resemble
gigantic watch springs of concrete.
By the end of the century, although the grid of Los Angeles does still give way to green, brown and blue mountainscape decorated by coastal clouds as we go south, the grid then begins again, like immense silicon chips studded with resistors overlaid upon the land; it’s all cubes, sometimes set within vegetated squares, sprawling south between the ocean and the first range of mountains to the east. It crawls and crawls, embellished by the ship-wakes like snow-white comet-trails in the blank blue Pacific.

The good news is that Los Angeles had protected her future. The “second barrel” of the Owens Valley Aqueduct was completed in 1969; it is simply needless to question the supply of water.

And let’s not accuse Los Angeles of utterly abandoning her past! In 1974 she still grew one-tenth of one percent of California’s cantaloupe acres, and slightly under half a percent of California’s carrot acres. The market value of her various agricultural productions continued to rise, although naturally she could no longer hope to keep pace with Imperial:

MARKET VALUE OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS SOLD

Source:
Census Bureau (1974).

Gross ag receipts of 1974, up two hundred thousand over 1973, were
largely offset by rising costs and decreases in dairy herds and beef cattle held in feedlots.
Los Angeles’s accomplishment therefore reminds me of Albert Speer’s: As the Allies bombed more and more of the Third Reich’s factories and railroads, he actually managed to increase output for a time. In greater Los Angeles, agriculture is on the verge of yielding almost completely to urban sprawl. The county’s cantaloupe and carrot productions are heroically doomed holding actions, like similar efforts in the Inland Empire.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, almost eighty-seven thousand jobs will drive away from Los Angeles; close to three hundred and forty-one thousand of them will reappear in the Inland Empire, thereby beating out San Diego and Orange County. The future of Los Angeles’s slums, like their nineteenth-century past, is violent crime. We head toward the riots of 1992. In 1993 a renowned observer of Los Angeles remarks that
on the East side we have the worst Latino gang war in history.

But Los Angeles is not at all in decline. Citywide, countywide, she grows—and grows. She builds, subdivides, booms as much as ever. Moreover, if we consider her from the standpoint of water distribution and consumption, Los Angeles’s success is breathtaking. The Metropolitan Water District now reaches deep into the Inland Empire; its tentacles embrace those of the San Diego County Water Authority;
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.

Chapter 149

EL CENTRO (1975)

Good Lord, George, you don’t suppose it’s any novelty to me to find out that we hustlers, that think we’re so all-fired successful, aren’t getting much out of it?

—Sinclair Lewis, 1922

B
y 1980, El Centro, now served by Imperial Airlines, covered five point one square miles of Imperial desert.
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.

Chapter 150

THE INLAND EMPIRE (1875-2004)

But, you know, I honestly don’t think that we’re going to work out psychohistory in time to prevent the Fall of the Empire.

—Isaac Asimov, 1993

A
s long and clear and verdant as the view used to be looking north on George Chaffey’s Euclid Avenue back at the end of the nineteenth century when the San Gabriel Mountains loomed crisply in the air, that was how visible the Inland Empire’s history now grew in hindsight, from pedestrians and horses on that three-lane boulevard to cars trapped against each other in the smog, the passengers worrying about getting to the airport on time.

Progress is the delicious Mexicali whore who’s just had a happy orgasm with her hand in your hair and your head between her legs; when it’s your turn, and the condom breaks, Progress, after asking if she can be your
novia,
volunteers to buy another condom from the lobby man, leaps from the bed, dresses in a flash, expels a few cleansing drops of urine from her hole, promises to return in one minute or less, gravely, almost sternly wags her finger, instructing you:
Confianza! Confianza!
and disappears forever. Where did Ontario go? Where’s Upland? I feel sad; all the same, how can I not love Progress?
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
Where did Progress go? Progress is here; autos are here;
WATER IS HERE
.

Here’s Progress for you:
Soon, the Inland Empire . . . had become the land of big-box warehouses.
Progress’s instrument: Freeways! Interstate 15 whizzes commodities from Mexico to Vegas; Interstates 10 and 15 move people and things around between the Empire and Los Angeles. At night, headlights resemble those glowing doughnuts of glass beads excavated from Riverside’s long dead Chinatown.

Riverside County struggles to hold the line. In 1974 we find her, in defiance of Holtville’s world-famous Carrot Festival, doing substantially better than Imperial for carrots (twenty-two farms and more than seventy-nine hundred acres in comparison to Imperial’s fifteen farms and less than fifty-four hundred acres).
²⁵²
Even Imperial’s signature crop, cantaloupes (this year lumped together with Persian melons), must take Riverside into account in 1974: Her acreage is more than twenty-seven percent of Imperial’s, which in turn is seventeen percent of the state’s. The Inland Empire’s agricultural totals remain nearly as grand as Riverside’s palms and towers on Lemon Street.

But Progress does what she has been put on earth to do. Dairy farms become
world-class distribution sites.
Guess what befalls carrot and cantaloupe farms? It all happens by the end of the 1980s, in sight of the Mission Inn’s pale umbrellas and citruses.

In 1950 it cost two hundred and fifty dollars an acre to grow oranges. In 1980 it costs fourteen hundred and fifty dollars, in part because smog blights the trees.
Sign of Slow Growth Sends Stocks Lower.
Indeed, in 1975, smog caused five percent of California’s milk and beef price increases; you see,
about three times as much alfalfa can be reaped from a field in clean air as from a smoggy field near Riverside.
We now return to 1980’s woes: Urban spoilsports frown upon pesticides and smudging; housing developments raise everybody’s property values and therefore property taxes go up; finally and mysteriously, water is getting more expensive.

In 1913, the Inland Empire city of Corona, once named South Riverside in homage to the Empire’s flagship city, packs out the most oranges in Southern California. In 1982, the citrus plant closes; small houses pop up.

I remember a lovely young queen in a white robe and gold circlet in her hair; she held an orange aloft and a scepter of oranges below; orange groves filled the round world behind her; she gazed at me from the label of Queen Colony Fruit Exchange “Royal,” Corona, Riverside, California. Where did she go? She sold out at a fancy price.

Chapter 151

SUBDELINEATIONS: ORANGESCAPES (or, “It Could Be Called Ambrosia I Suppose”) (1873-2005)

Actually, the orange industry is not faced with overproduction; rather, it’s a case of underconsumption.

—J. A. Finley of the Orange Products Company, Ontario, San Bernardino County (1950)

I
n self-defensive necessity, the late-nineteenth-century citrus dreams of Riverside County
(buds all straight . . . Mediterranean Sweet ORANGES . . . Home Grown, Thrifty Deciduous Fruit Trees of Best Varieties . . .)
were counter-dreamed by San Diego, of course, which insisted in its 1901 city and county directory that Chula Vista was no less than the center of the lemon belt of America! Unimproved citrus land, San Diego informed us, went for fifty to three hundred dollars per acre with water; improved, it started at two hundred dollars and went up, up, up! Rest assured that Los Angeles dreamed, too. Will Wolfskill first planted citrus there back in 1857 (some say 1841); in 1873, by which time Wolfskill was making a thousand dollars an acre, Mrs. H. Shaw’s Los Angeles Nursery, two miles below town on San Pedro Street, hawked
my Orange Trees now bearing, . . . raised from seed that I myself brought from Nicaragua, Central America . . . My bearing Lime Trees . . . now a perfect sight to behold.
Thomas A. Garey’s Semi-Tropical Nurseries for their part offered THE LARGEST AND MOST COMPLETE STOCK . . .

All the same, California’s lemon-orange hopes, let alone Imperial’s, remained as speculative as the idea of irrigating desert and turning it into America’s Winter Garden.
The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”
In the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, Boston, New York and other market cities were already gobbling down barrel-packed oranges grown by our future arch-rival, Florida; barrels of Florida grapefruit followed before that decade’s end. So how could California cash in? The brother of Imperial’s Confident Man did his mite. (Of course I mean L. M. Holt.) He was the one who coined the following name for our prospective citrus belt:
Semi-Tropical California.
How much is in a name? For that matter, how much is in a package? Here comes this citrus dispatch from Riverside, just in from the early 1880s:
The Chinamen seemed to be especially expert in this line, as they packed all sizes in the same box and had them come out even at the top, showing the most desirable sizes.
So save the American workingman and run those Chinamen out! Meanwhile, Riverside dreams more dreams, each as grand as her first Citrus Fair in 1879: See the pyramids of cans and fruits stacked like miniature cannonballs on long white-clothed tables while hot white light bursts in between the drapes!

L. M. Holt buys up the newspaper. Now booming and boostering can go full swing!

In 1880, California grows three thousand acres of citrus. In 1893, there’s over forty thousand acres! I gaze down through the decades at the dark lushnesses of Riverside orange groves, straight lines of trees fanning out and in according to the whims of topography and perspective, making cleanly inhuman geometries of loveliness upon rolling desert acres, with perfectly empty mountains far below and beyond. This is what
the Inland Empire
means. But in Butte and Ventura and Tulare they have their empires. Why mention Orange County? All California would go orange if she could.

By 1899 our Southern California Agricultural Substation had already proved that oranges did better with deep-furrow irrigation than with wide shallow furrows. But since that only helped a little, let’s leave our gladness in the past tense. As late as 1902, with Wilber Clark already in Imperial and water in the ditches, California sent seven thousand one hundred and forty-one carloads of
deciduous fruits
to the Eastern States, among which I don’t find citrus listed.