The Gold Coast

57

In 1940 the population was 130,000. By 1980 it was 2,000,000.

At that point the northwestern half of the county was saturated. La Habra, Brea, Yorba Linda, Placentia, Fullerton, Buena Park, La Mirada, Cerritos, La Palma, Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Orange, Villa Park, El Modena, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Corona del Mar, Irvine, Tustin: all of these cities had grown, merged, melted together, until the idea that twenty-seven cities existed on the land was just a fiction of administration, a collection of unnoticed street signs, announcing borders that only the maps knew. It was one city.

This new megacity, “Orange County North,” had as its transport system the freeways. The private car was the only way; the little train system of the early days had been pulled out, like the more extensive electric rail network in Los Angeles, to make more room for cars. In the end there were no trains, no buses, no trams, no subways. People had to drive cars to work, to get food, to do all the chores, to play—to do anything.

So after the completion of the Santa Ana Freeway in the late 1950s, the others quickly followed. The Newport and Riverside freeways bisected the county into its northwest and southeast halves; the San Diego Freeway followed the coast, extended the Santa Ana Freeway south to San Diego; the Garden Grove, Orange, and San Gabriel freeways added ribbing to the system, so that one could get to within a few miles of anywhere in Orange County North that one wanted to go, all on the freeways.

Soon the northwestern half was saturated, every acre of land bought, covered with concrete, built on, filled up. Nothing left but the dry bed of the Santa Ana River, and even that was banked and paved.

Then the Irvine Ranch was bought by a development company. For years the county government had taxed the ranch as hard as it could, trying to force it out of agriculture, into more tract housing. Now they got their wish. The new owners made a general plan that was (at first) unusually slow and thoughtful by Orange County standards; the University of California was given ten thousand acres, a town was built around it, a development schedule was worked up for the rest of the land. But the wedge was knocked into the southeast half of the county, and the pressure for growth drove it ever harder.

Meanwhile, in the northwest half the congestion grew with an intensity that the spread to the southeast couldn’t help; in fact, given the thousands of new users that the southward expansion gave to the freeway system, it only made things worse. The old Santa Ana Freeway, three lanes in each direction, was clogged every day; the same was true of the Newport Freeway, and to a lesser extent of all the freeways. And yet there was no room left to widen them. What to do?

In the 1980s a plan was put forth to build an elevated second story for the Santa Ana Freeway, between Buena Park and Tustin; and in the 1990s, with the prospect of the county’s population doubling again in ten years, the Board of Supervisors acted on it. Eight new lanes were put up on an elevated viaduct, set on massive pylons thirty-seven feet above the old freeway; they were opened to southbound traffic in 1998. Three years later the same was done for the Newport and Garden Grove freeways, and in the triangle of the elevated freeways, three miles on each side, the elevated lanes were joined by elevated gas stations and convenience stops and restaurants and movie theaters and all the rest. It was the beginning of the “second story” of the city.

The next generation of freeways were the Foothill, Eastern, and San Joaquin, all designed to ease the access to the southern half of the county. When those were in it made sense to connect the ends of the Garden Grove and Foothill freeways, which were only a few miles from each other; and so they were spliced by a great viaduct above Cowan and Lemon Heights, leaving the homes below devalued but intact. Then the new Santiago and Cleveland freeways were built in the same way, flying through the sky on great pylons, above the new condos springing up everywhere in the back hills, in what used to be Irvine Ranch, Mission Viejo Ranch, O’Neill Ranch—now the new towns of Santiago, Silverado, Trabuco, Seaview Terrace, San Juan Springs, Los Pinos, O’Neill, Ortega, Saddleback, Alicia, and so on and so on. And as the land was subdivided, platted, developed, covered with concrete, built up, the freeway system grew with it. When the national push for the electromagnetic road track system began, the freeways of Orange County were in place and ready for it; it only took five years to make the change, and work created by this transformation helped head off the recession of the Boring Twenties before it plunged into outright worldwide depression. A new transport system, a new boom; always the case in Orange County, as in all the American West.

So the southeast half of Orange County, when the flood burst over the Irvine Ranch and the development began, grew even faster than the northwest half had, fifty years before. In thirty quick years it became indistinguishable from the rest of the megacity. The only land left was the Cleveland National Forest. The real estate companies hungrily eyed this empty, dry, hilly land; what condos could be put up there, what luxury homes, on the high slopes of old Saddleback Mountain! And it only took a sympathetic administration in Washington to begin the dismemberment of this insignificant little national forest. Not even any forest there! Why worry about it! The county was crowded, they needed that 66,000 acres for more homes, more jobs, more profits, more cars, more money, more weapons, more drugs, more real estate, more freeways! And so that land was sold too.

And none of that ever went away.