By Tessa Strain
Read my non-Valley writing:
http://tessastrain.tumblr.com
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On Joining the Party Uninvited: A Little Valley History
Let’s talk beginnings.
The Valley didn’t come out of nowhere, and I don’t mean that geologically speaking. It was (and here is a concession I am always reluctant to make) not always part of Los Angeles. In fact, prior to 1915, it was a sparsely inhabited desert with next to no land value (I know, I really invited the snark with that one, huh?). So what happened in 1915 that changed all this?
I’ll let the fictional Noah Cross field this one: “The future, Mr. Gitts (sic)! The future!”
Why, you may ask, am I quoting Chinatown on a blog about the Valley? For this reason: Chinatown isn’t really a movie about Chinatown; it’s a movie about the Valley (although that’s a gross oversimplification if ever there was one; rent it and see what I mean). Of course, if you recognized the quotation then you have obviously seen the movie, and none of this is news to you. But for those who haven’t, here is why all this matters.
Chinatown is the story of how the Valley came to be a part of Los Angeles, couched in the seedy, sexy wrapping of the noir genre. Screenwriter Robert Towne, in his infinite cleverness, remembered that old chestnut about the truth being stranger than fiction. In other words, the super-juicy, earthshaking conspiracy at the heart of the movie did actually exist, only it was in 1915, a time when the detectives weren’t as hard-boiled and the femmes weren’t as fatale (point to Towne: the thirties look much better on screen). So what exactly happened? I prefer to call it by its more colorful name: the rape of the Owens Valley.
‘Round about 1915 there was this fellow by the name of William Mullholland (yes, THAT Mullholland, the one they named the street after), and he had some serious plans for Los Angeles, plans that would lead to a real estate scam, the likes of which are rivaled only by those of Lex Luthor and assorted Scooby Doo villains. Los Angeles, as many of us are painfully aware, is a pretty dry place. At the time, it had barely enough water to sustain itself and could not accommodate expansion of any kind. Mullholland’s plans to irrigate water from the Owens Valley were not met with the degree of support he had hoped for (farmers in the Owens Valley were particularly not thrilled, surprise surprise). So this guy, this guy after whom we have named one of the most iconic streets in all of Los Angeles, this guy who had it all, this guy who was the head of the Department of Water and Power, THIS GUY faked a drought. Now, it doesn’t take much to fake a drought in Los Angeles (as locals are well aware—- we got ourselves a real one right now), but Mullholland’s plan involved surreptitiously dumping tons of water into the ocean. Drought-plagued L.A. residents voted for an aqueduct and were upset when, of all the nerve, the initial water was directed into the San Fernando Valley, not yet part of Los Angeles. Well, not for long. The Owens Valley, on the other hand, became an arid and unfarmable wasteland.
And that is how the Valley first became incorporated into the city of L.A. (of which it now makes up more than half). Talk about getting off on the wrong foot. With origins so sordid and contemptible, is it any surprise that the Valley has suffered such a bad reputation? It should come as no shock then that upon my first viewing of Chinatown I was left feeling both outraged and somehow ashamed, as though in growing up in Van Nuys I was somehow in collusion with the corrupt forces that had ruined the lives of so many Owens Valley farmers. And that is why I think the Valley’s history is important. Those of us raised in the San Fernando Valley have, indirectly, inherited the contempt and guilt left over from the travesty that gave us our homes. We were born to a reputation that many of us did not even know the origin of, and, given that so many native Angelenos have first-generation parents, could not possibly have been responsible for. The put-down that “The Valley isn’t even part of L.A.” is a (perhaps unconscious) call-back to something that happened nearly a century ago.
Would I call this a soul-crushing burden? Hardly. But it does make every Val feel like they have to pick a side between L.A. and the Valley, and many of them do. As for me, I see them as one and the same and claim them both as my own.
Guess that Mullholland greed is still in the water.
