Really, for me, it was just a random spot on the map. Hiking a ridgeline at Red Rock Canyon State Park in the deserts of Southern California, I was ready for a very late lunch. Once I reached the highest point on the path and got a little bit of cell reception, I searched my phone for the nearest place to get a little grub. I wasn’t fussy—a hot dog stand, a greasy spoon, a food truck, whatever. Just as long as it was close. I was hungry.
Like an oasis, I spotted a cluster of restaurants about 20 minutes away, red-pegged on the Google Map down a rod-straight road that bloomed into miles and miles of streets. Zooming in, it appeared that I had somehow discovered a lost civilization, one that left curving lines strongly resembling many typical 20th-century subdivisions, all those looping crescents and cul-de-sacs, replicated over and over again in an urban area rolling out to the east. In the middle of nowhere.
Climbing into my rental car, I made the short drive, passing scrubland and solar farms, the rugged line of the El Paso Mountains off to my left, rising from the floor of the Antelope Valley. Arriving, I found a town that didn’t look quite right. Most of the development stretched along one long boulevard—one that, again, appeared to have been traced on the edge of a ruler. Popping into a well-known chain for a fast-food burger, I asked the guys at the next table what, exactly, was going on here. “Welcome to one of the biggest cities in California,” one of them smiled.
He wasn’t kidding. By land area, California City, California, is the third-largest city in the state. But if you were to rewind the clock and travel to this spot in the middle of the 20th century, you’d find almost nothing here but some rattlesnakes and maybe a few Joshua trees. But in 1958, Nat Mendelsohn, a Columbia University sociologist who had become a real estate developer, had an idea. He would build a city that would rival Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Mendelsohn purchased vast tracts of land, and a well-known architectural firm laid out a city plan in the middle of the Mojave Desert that encompassed more than 120 square miles. They built an army of salespeople and sold plots of land through newspaper ads and celebrity advocates. Mendelsohn made millions. But things didn’t really go as planned, and growth was slow.
Some of those grand plans came to fruition, most notably, the construction of two golf courses, as well as Central Park, which includes a 26-acre man-made lake. A four-story Holiday Inn rose from the far shore of the lake. I parked and found a busy place. Kids climbed and swung on well-maintained playground equipment. Atop a mound that once hosted a waterfall and, by the looks of things, maybe some sort of lazy river ride, a few teenagers joked around on a bench, like teens anywhere. And at the end of a path, under a gazebo that looked straight out of an EPCOT fever dream, a young family was fishing. “Just getting the family out for a little fresh air,” the father said to me.
Seeing a disused community pool, I asked a young woman in a black hoodie whether it was still operational. “Oh, they open it in the summer,” she explained. And what about the lake? I heard you could rent boats?
“Not anymore, but I bought a pedal boat awhile ago at an auction, the same ones they had here,” she remembered. “Cost maybe thirty bucks. I just need to fix it up and I can take it out there.” She added that they had a tortoise sanctuary, although she’d never actually spotted one there.
The guys at the fast-food place had explained that they enjoy the quietness of this town, that traffic is never an issue, that having just one stoplight—and zero rush hour—is a real bonus. And far from being a dying place, “Cal City,” as everyone calls it, is actually one of the fastest-growing places in the state, a phoenix rises from the ashes of Mendelsohn’s folly.
In the 1980s, just 3,200 lived here. Now, it’s home to 15,000. The woman in the park noted that the value of her home has increased three-fold in less than a decade. On the day of my visit, older model houses in poor repair stood next to brand-new two-story homes that wouldn’t look out of place in any middle-class suburb.
I drove around a little more, in search of those lost subdivisions. First, a quick stop at the bones of that hotel, its four floors classic and unmistakable as a 1960s Holiday Inn. Except here, one side was wide open, appearing to have been sheared off, exposing the interior of the rooms, small cubes now devoid of their double beds and televisions, and guests.
And those lines on the map finally started to add up. Driving out past the last bits of the town, the tract housing just petered out. But the streets didn’t—or, at least, they almost didn’t. Green signs, the same you’d expect to find in any quiet community in America, marked the entrances. But the actual roadways remained more imaginary than real, dirt tracks that just disappeared into the desert.
Leaving town as the sun made its way toward the horizon, I remembered something noted by the guy at the fast-food place. “This place won’t be on any picture-postcard tour of the state,” he said. “But we like it out here, it’s peaceful.” And the woman at the park added that the growth has been huge. “You can feel it,” she said.
