California City — The Ghost Grid

Off to your right, a road peels east toward one of the strangest places in the Mojave. California City looks ordinary from the highway, but stretching past its small downtown is a vast grid of paved streets with almost nothing on them — curbs, cul-de-sacs, and named avenues scratched into the creosote, waiting for houses that never came.

In 1958 a sociology professor turned developer, Nat Mendelsohn, bought some 82,000 acres of desert out here and set out to build a city to rival Los Angeles. The master plan, drawn up with landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, imagined 400,000 residents gathered around a green Central Park and a 26-acre lake. Salesmen sold lots hard. When the town finally incorporated in 1965 it held barely 800 people. Today it is California's third-largest city by area — over 200 square miles — yet home to only about 14,000. By the 1970s the Federal Trade Commission was after the developers for misleading sales pitches, and the ghost grid you can still trace from any satellite map became one of the desert's great monuments to optimism outrunning reality.

The land has older stories too. The Desert Kawaiisu, a Numic-speaking people related to the Southern Paiute, ranged across these western Mojave flats, hunting antelope and gathering mesquite long before any grid was surveyed. Look around as you pass: windmills crowd the ridgelines toward Tehachapi Pass, birthplace of American wind power in the early 1980s and now home to some of the largest wind farms in the country. Ahead near Mojave sits the airport and its boneyard of mothballed airliners, and the highway peeling east — CA-58, the old road to Barstow.