Lake Arrowhead Village

The lake was supposed to be farm water. In 1891 a syndicate of Ohio money, James Mooney of Cincinnati and the soap maker James Gamble among them, formed the Arrowhead Reservoir Company, bought timberland around Little Bear Valley, and in 1893 began a dam meant to send water down to the dry benchland below. Twenty-two years of work never delivered a drop of it. A California court ruled in 1913 that water could not be carried out of one watershed into another for irrigation, and the scheme collapsed with the dam most of the way built.

What was a white elephant as a waterworks was an asset as scenery. Anglers were already coming to the half-filled lake by the thousand. After Mooney died, a group of Los Angeles investors bought the whole holding, renamed themselves the Arrowhead Lake Company, and finished the dam thirty-one feet higher than it had been drawn.

The village opened on June 24, 1922, at the end of a spending program reported at some eight million dollars. McNeil Swasey designed it in a Norman idiom — steep roofs, half-timber, a dance pavilion, an outdoor movie theater, bath houses on the beach — with three hotels behind it: the Arlington Lodge, the Village Inn, and the North Shore Tavern, which is now UCLA's conference center. The studios used the lake constantly.

Then the village was destroyed deliberately. By the late 1970s the 1920s buildings were failing and partly condemned, and the new owners handed them to the Lake Arrowhead Fire Protection District for a month-long training exercise in April 1979, a burn to learn. Almost everything went. What stands today opened in the early 1980s, larger, in the same alpine key, with shops and factory outlets.

One building came through the fire: the octagonal dance pavilion, which holds a restaurant now. And the lake is private, bought by the surrounding property owners in 1975, so the ordinary way onto the water is the tour boat from the village dock.