On November 5, 1913 something like forty thousand people drove out to a bare hillside in Sylmar to watch water arrive. It came down a concrete chute that is still there and still working, and you can see it from Foothill Boulevard in about the time it takes to read this paragraph. The Cascades is where the Los Angeles Aqueduct ends.
Which is the strange part. In 1913 that hillside was not in Los Angeles. The city had just spent five years and a twenty-three-million-dollar bond issue on two hundred and thirty-three miles of gravity-fed conduit, and it terminated outside its own limits, in the San Fernando Valley, on ground the city did not own.
That was not an accident of surveying. It was the whole point.
The men who knew where it would go
The aqueduct plan went to the voters of Los Angeles in June 1905, and six weeks later they approved the bonds. The route had been under discussion inside the city's water commission well before that, and Moses Sherman sat on the commission. Sherman built streetcar lines and kept close company with Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and with Otis's son-in-law Harry Chandler.
In October 1903 a syndicate led by the Glendale developer Leslie Brand took an option on George Porter's remaining sixteen thousand acres at the north end of the valley. In 1904 it incorporated as the San Fernando Mission Land Company, Otis and Sherman among the shareholders, Henry Huntington and E. H. Harriman among the directors. One day after the water commission approved the aqueduct proposal, the company exercised its option.
Five years later a second and larger group — Otis, Chandler, Sherman, Otto Brant of Title Insurance and Trust, and the developer H. J. Whitley — bought most of the Van Nuys and Lankershim holdings in the south valley for about two and a half million dollars. They subdivided it. Over the next seven years it sold for something near seventeen million.
The Times denied all of it, loudly and more than once, and called the charges malicious. The denial has not aged well.
The clause that did the work
Here is the mechanism, and it is duller than a conspiracy and worked better than one. The federal legislation that let Los Angeles build the aqueduct forbade the city from selling the water outside its own limits. Valley farmers offered to buy the surplus. The city was not permitted to sell it to them.
So the water sat at the edge of the valley — visible, running, and unavailable to anyone who did not live in Los Angeles.
There was exactly one way to fix that. In 1915 most of the San Fernando Valley voted to annex itself to the city, roughly doubling the city's size in a single stroke. Owensmouth, out at the west end and called Canoga Park since 1931, held out and got no aqueduct water until it came in two years later. Land the syndicate had bought as dry wheat ground was now irrigated, inside the city, and worth a great deal more than it had cost.
Los Angeles did not go and fetch water for its people. It fetched water, set it down where its friends owned land, and let the law do the annexing.
What the reserve cost
The aqueduct had an obvious weakness. It crossed the San Andreas Fault, and the people of the Owens Valley, who were not resigned about any of this, spent the twenties dynamiting it. William Mulholland wanted stored water the city could not lose, and built a series of dams to hold it.
One went into San Francisquito Canyon behind Santa Clarita, finished in 1926. On the morning of March 12, 1928 the dam keeper reported muddy water seeping near the western abutment. Mulholland drove out, spent two hours on it, and concluded the silt was coming from road work nearby. The dam failed just before midnight, and twelve billion gallons went down the canyon and did not stop until the sea at Oxnard.
The official toll was about four hundred and fifty and is certainly low: bodies went out to sea, and a great many of the dead were migrant farm workers nobody had counted to begin with. Remains were still turning up in the 1990s. The St. Francis Dam site is the worst civil engineering failure this country had in the twentieth century. The coroner's jury brought no charges and said plainly that no one man, however eminent, should be left to judge a municipal dam alone. Mulholland's career ended on that sentence.
Both ends of it
Stand at the Cascades and you are at one end of a two-hundred-and-thirty-three-mile argument. The other end is Patsiata, the lake this water used to be, and the Nüümü, whose Owens Valley reservation was revoked in 1932 to protect the flow. The valley you are standing in got orchards, then subdivisions, then a city big enough to need a second aqueduct. The valley the water came from got the largest dust source in the United States.
Both of those are still true, and both were legal. That is the part Chinatown leaves out — almost none of this required anybody to break a law.