Three Pinwheels

 

The third largest city in California by land area (behind San Diego and Los Angeles) is a place you’ve probably never heard of. California City was formed in 1958, when developers bought 82,000 acres of the Mojave Desert and pitched it as a planned community: a smarter alternative to piece-meal built cities. The city was originally designed to accommodate 400,000 people. There would be a central park with a manmade lake, two golf courses, and a brand-new Holiday Inn. Every detail was planned, right down to the types of trees in public parks and along city streets. In spite of aggressive promotion campaigns, California City was slow to start. In 1971, Ralph Nader called it “a fraud and a study of government failure.” As of 2018, California City had only 14,000 residents. Most of them are clustered in the city’s west end, surrounded by acres of streets and neighborhoods that were laid out but never built.