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Chapter 8: Southern California – Community
"MY BROTHER PETER has a wife and three children and he lives in a group of identical houses and I used to think it was very eerie. But then I remember going over there on Halloween," says John Nielsen. Here's to the crabgrass "My brother and I had that memorized. They'd bring us out and we'd sing it." Nielsen loves neighborhoods that "seethe." He loves places where you can walk to work and if you regularly stop at a little joint on the way to pick up a carton of coffee, soon everybody in the neighborhood knows you. He likes to talk to people in different strata of society. He likes urban areas that are full of surprises. He thinks the whole point of cities is to bring diverse people together. That is why it troubles him that he feels personally excluded from Edge Cities like the one built by his father, vice chairman of the Irvine Company. His dilemma is sharpened because each such development emphasizes the idea of community. As in "master-planned community." "I feel locked out in the financial sense," says Nielsen of the Irvine that has been such a market success that the median home prices in its region are the third highest in America. "But I don't mean to imply that if I had enough money that is where I'd g0 The things I am interested in are not part of a place like Irvine. There's that whole notion: we're going to build this thing that is perfect for you. We haven't met you but we know what you're like and we know you're going to like it here. That is a repulsive idea, and I wouldn't trust the person who tried to tell me that. You're in the artist's conception. You wake up and you're one of those lanky people walking around evenly spaced. I can't see that. My experience has been that in places like that you have a lot of people who think they have it figured out. You just have the coffee-bean machine here and . . ." Nielsen's voice descends to a whisper. He is almost talking to himself. Then he hurtles back. "That kind of ordered circumstance is scary to me. Maybe the world is divided into people who love to hum 'Is that all there is?' and take random walks and people who don't. It's a hard thing for me." What Nielsen is struggling with is the extent to which Edge Cities weave or unravel the American social fabric. For this reason, his conflicts are historic. Ever since the rise of what used to be called "bedroom communities"—that is, classic residential suburbs—scholars have been trying to define where these places fit into a larger social scheme. Especially in the 1950s, when the floodtide of homes moved out past our old conception of city, the outpouring of journalism, fiction, and sociology on these issues was prodigious. It had a distinct tone. Herbert J. Gans, in his landmark 1967 work, The Levittowners, pungently described the shots that were taken. If you believed the critics, he wrote, the "myth of suburbia" would have you surmise: "The suburbs were breeding a new set of Americans, as mass-produced as the houses they lived in . . . incapable of real friendships; they were bored and lonely, alienated, atomized, and depersonalized . . . "In unison," Gans wrote of that time, "the authors chanted that individualism was dying, suburbanites were miserable, and the fault lay with the homogeneous suburban landscape and its population." Gans described John Keats, author of The Crack in the Picture window, as "perhaps the most hysterical of the mythmakers." Keats's book began: "For literally nothing down . . . you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we're building around the edges of American cities . . . inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions, and perhaps even blood type are also precisely like yours." They were, Keats claimed, "developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch. They . . . actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them." Subsequently, Gans observed, "literary and social critics chimed in . . . Suburbia was intellectually debilitating, culturally oppressive, and politically dangerous, breeding bland mass men without respect for the arts or democracy." Gans bought a house and lived in New Jersey's Levittown for two years to study what processes turned a group of strangers into a true community in the waning days of the Eisenhower era. Of course, the sociologist and city planner could uncover little evidence that there was much change in people when they moved to the suburbs, or that the change that took place could be traced to the new environment: "If suburban life was as undesirable and unhealthy as the critics charged, the suburbanites themselves were blissfully unaware of it. They were happy in their new homes and communities, much happier than they had been in the city." This has not, however, prevented Edge City from giving people the creeps. When I first started reporting on these places, an art critic of my acquaintance pulled up a chair, pushed his face toward mine closer than was really comfortable, and proceeded to get agitated about my project. "Those are not cities!" he exploded. When I systematically questioned him as to why he felt this way, given all the job numbers and market numbers and population numbers, what I found was intriguing. His real beef was that he refused to believe these places brought people together in any larger social sense. He was saying these were not "cities," but what he really meant was that he could not believe they were "communities." It was very specific. To him, Edge Cities were hollow because, among other things, there were not, as in the neighborhoods he loved, front stoops for people to sit on to watch the human drama. Here we were, more than thirty years after David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the stories of john Cheever. And he was still proclaiming the landscape out past the old downtowns as having no ties that bind, no sense of identity, no way of making people believe they were part of something larger than themselves. He felt people had no personal stake in these places. Nobody cared about them. Therefore, these places could not be regarded as cities. I had come to believe that it was not particularly useful to insist that a place was not urban merely because it contained few front stoops or political boundaries. But that didn't mean my friend the art critic had it all wrong. After all, for a place to have an identity, people really must feel they are stakeholders in it. They must feel that it is, at gut level, theirs; that they are willing to fight over it and for it. They must see it as having an importance relative to their personal interests. They must see it, at some level, as community. Yet the forces that bring about Edge City pull strongly in different directions. Edge City arose as a result of individuals seeking out the best combinations of how and where to live, work, and play. Maybe Edge City isn't the puddle of atomization and anomie that 1950s critics of American society wished to believe. But it is less than clear where it connects with ideas like community—the hunger for human contact and the yearning to belong to a larger whole. This is why Irvine is interesting. It is part of the Los Angeles Basin, the birthplace of the American landscapes and life styles that are the models for Edge Cities worldwide. Moreover, Irvine, thirty-five miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, is at the center of a development of staggering proportions. Originally a Spanish land-grant ranch, the hundred-square-mile holdings of the Irvine Company span Orange County, that vast jurisdiction between San Diego and Los Angeles that in the 1980s was the fastest-growing part of Southern California. The Irvine Company controls sixty-four thousand acres of land, much of which stretches past the incorporated city of Irvine. Some of those acres sell for $ 1 million apiece. Irvine is not just another Levittown, a suburb from which people can find work only by commuting somewhere else. The stages of Edge City growth that took two generations elsewhere was collapsed into a third of a lifetime here. The Irvine area is now so big that it can be described as encompassing all or part of three job-rich Edge Cities. The two middle-sized ones are known as Irvine Spectrum and Newport Center-Fashion Island. But the third, the size of downtown Seattle, is named after—it had to happen—John Wayne. Actually, the area's continental-connection airport is named after John Wayne. And the Edge City, which includes the Costa Mesa-South Coast Plaza complex, has become known after the name of the airport. But it was only a matter of time before it came to something like this. Orange County, the birthplace of Richard Nixon, has such a reputation for conservatism that a politician once only half kidded about joining the John Birch Society in order to capture the middle-of-the-road vote. The Irvine area's rapidly growing population, meanwhile, already approaches 200,000, with a high-technology job base of 150,000. The Irvine Company's spread is so big—stretching from the Pacific Ocean to as much as twenty miles inland—that its tentacles ensnare an entire University of California campus and two Marine bases. Irvine, moreover, is the latest version of the Southern California dream. This makes it a prototype of great importance. Irvine is only ten miles from Disneyland in Anaheim. Disney produced such resonant dreams that people carry them around in their heads all over the globe. His Main Street is a more real crystallization of idealized community for more people than any actual nineteenth-century small American town. And Irvine is deep kin to this ideal. It is full of newcomers who are still reaching out to find why they came, what they lost, and who they are. In fact, a travel guide called The Californias, published by the California Office of Tourism, describes Orange County this way: It's a theme park—a seven hundred and eighty-six square mile theme park—and the theme is "you can have anything you want." Come to Orange County. It's no place like home. The danger of a dream, however, is that a place that reminds people of Eden can also taunt them. People's fears and anxieties may be heightened when the dream does not turn out to be as boundless as it first seems; when it quickly hits limits. In fact, Irvine has been compared with the Stepford Wives—perfect, in a horrifying sort of way. The development's newest residential section, Westpark, is an unbroken field of identical Mediterranean red-clay roof tile, covering homes of indistinguishable earth-tone stucco. Homes in Irvine are far more repetitive than those in the old Levittowns. The old Levittowns are now interesting to look at; people have made additions to their houses and planted their grounds with variety and imagination. Unlike these older subdivisions, Irvine has deed restrictions that forbid people from customizing their places with so much as a skylight. This is a place that is enforced, not just planned. Owners of expensive homes in Irvine commonly volunteer stories of not realizing that they had pulled into the driveway of the wrong house until their garage-door opener failed to work. Driving around, what one mainly sees is high blank walls. The shopping center near the University of California at Irvine struggled for years, unsuccessfully, to support a bookstore. And this is the place that bills itself as America's premiere master-planned community. It underlines the "community" symbolism with a ten-minute sound-and-light show called Roots and Wings. Roots and Wings is a singular production. It is a twenty-thousand-slide, sixteen-projector extravaganza housed in its own little theater, and it culminates with the rotation of a hydraulically controlled model of some 150 square miles of the area. The model weighs half a ton. It is so exactly detailed, with 385,000 separate structures, that people living in Irvine can identify their own houses. This show is so lavish that the Irvine Company refuses to divulge its cost. Intriguingly, this hymn to community is not used to sell homes. People who are in the market merely for quarter-million-dollar residences never get the red-carpet treatment that includes Roots and Wings. The people who see this pageant are those thinking of moving their companies to Irvine. Roots and Wings is reserved for customers looking for massive amounts of Edge City research-and-development or office space. Yet in this pitch, the customers never hear a word about dollars per square foot. The Irvine Company believes that the following approach is what sells commercial real estate in their Edge City. The lights go down, the sea gulls start flashing on the screens, the music comes up, and the deep male voiceover booms from multiple concealed speakers: "How long since you watched the new day lean down upon the shore? No one about but you and your thoughts. And time, sliding by on its spiral glide. "Here, along the sea, far from the crowds, one can see how perfectly Nature casts her characters and places them upon her stage. Each living thing is drawn to that habitat most ideally suited to the development of its full potential. It is a law of Nature. Instinct, we are told. "But, we wonder, what of that wandering species called man? Called woman? Called child? Are we not also embraced by Nature's laws? Shaped by our habitat, just as the sea bird's flight is shaped by the wind for that special place on earth to hold and nourish our lives? "It is said there are only two lasting things we can give our children; one is roots, the other is wings. This then is the dream. To find a place where we can put down roots; to find a place where our lives can take wing." The Irvine show proceeds to extol the development's "beauty," "work style," "life style," and its "critical mass of finance, knowledge, and resource to rival any major city in America." But then it swings right back and starts hammering at that community theme some more: "If the human community is to work, there must be a lively interplay between the commerce and the arts, between nature and technology, between work and leisure, between private interest and the public good. In a sense it's like planning and creating a living mosaic . . . The design of this living mosaic is especially refreshing because of the rare relationship between where one works and where one lives, in communities where planning brings the workplace closer. It is a gift of time. More time to enjoy another gift. The gift of family . . ." Then the wind-up: "Here is a place where life is lived with a grand and glorious sense of quality and style. Here is a place providing opportunities for the full range of human experience . . . Here is a place where individuals are free to shape their own future, as a sculptor shapes clay." A daddy is shown lifting his child. Freeze frame. He lifts the child higher. Freeze frame. The child is lifted all the way up. Freeze frame. Then the pitch: "We have the dream. We have the plan. We have the people. We have the patterns of a vision firmly in our minds and in our hearts." The child's image melds into that of a sea gull, which, in multiple-image long-lens slow-mo, explodes into flight. "We have the place where we can put down roots. "And our lives can take wing." Music swells, image fades, screen lifts, gauze curtain rises, dramatic lights flare, and the half-ton model of Irvine, turning on its gimbles, rotates into view, beckoning. One is left in awe, speechless. Heavy freight being loaded here. Loaded on ideas and values that are elemental: Roots. Wings. Community. This is the place that Tom Nielsen built, that John Nielsen can't handle. Irvine thus demands that these words—and what they mean to us in the late twentieth century—be probed. The meaning to developers of the word "community" has evolved over the last half century. In the case of the New Jersey Levittown in the 1950s, for example, it was not enough that there were three basic house types costing from $11,500 to $14,500. A collection of such houses would have been merely a "subdivision." What made it a "community" was that for each cluster of twelve hundred units or so, there was an elementary school, a playground, and a swimming pool. Not only that, but a complex of ten or twelve such "neighborhoods" was complemented by a large shopping center, some smaller ones, high schools, a library, and parks, some of which were provided by the builder himself. This was considered real breakthrough stuff. It was no less than an attempt to create from scratch what the builder honestly and open-mindedly thought was the entire range of local institutions and facilities found in the old communities people were enthusiastically leaving. The venerable Gans—who was one hopping sociologist in the late 1950s—came to his Levittown project still whirling from having spent two years living in that part of Boston outsiders regarded as your basic Italian slum. In his book The Urban Villagers, he established that the West End was not a slum at all. What it was, he found, was an archetype of the even-then rapidly disappearing working-class ethnic "traditional" community. Marked by exotic shops and fragrant restaurants and narrow streets and high densities, it was exactly the kind of place that developers are now using as models when they try to breathe life into their new places today. To be sure, the West End did not look like any architect's rendering of community. It had garbage in the alleys, rubble in the vacant lots, tenements with poorly maintained exteriors and rudimentary heating arrangements. So, soon after Gans studied the place, the West End was bulldozed. In the name of progress and on the order of the best and the brightest planners of the day, urban renewal rolled through. The population of the community was scattered. The West End's influence lives on, though. The very phrase "urban village" is now used as it is in Phoenix, a hopeful synonym for Edge City. Developers still strive to create places that also "have it all." In Irvine, that includes not only executive-level housing and stupendously high-end malls, but transcontinental airport connections and, most important, the high-flying white-collar jobs that lift this place out of bedroom suburbia and into Edge City. But. some things do not change. Edge City is similar to what Gans found to be community in the West End three decades ago. Sociologists in the 1950s were still working with the classic definition of "community": "an aggregate of people who occupy a common and bounded territory within which they establish and participate in common institutions." What Gans found, however, was that community and neighborhood were not the same thing. "The West End as a neighborhood was not important to West Enders," he discovered. "I expected emotional statements about their attachment to the area. I was always surprised when they talked merely about its convenience to work and to downtown shopping. After I had lived in the area a few weeks, one of my neighbors remarked that I knew a lot more about the West End than they did." Gans discovered that "life for the West Ender was defined in terms of his relationship to the group," not geography. What West Enders meant by the "group" was divided into three levels: the peer group, those local institutions which supported the peer group, and "the outside world." The "outside world" covered all other aspects of Boston, New England, and America that "impinge on life—often unhappily, to the West Ender's way of thinking." An awful lot of people in Edge City organize their lives the same way today. In America the main idea behind community now is voluntary association, not geography. And the people of Southern California have sophisticated technology to cast wide their search for that bond with others we call community. Take Evan and Ann Maxwell of Laguna Niguel. They moved to the hills just above the Pacific Coast past Irvine in 1970. The place was then mostly rural. They paid $39,000, with a $212-a-month mortgage and a less-than-$600-a-year tax burden. The location was considered breathtaking for two reasons: its natural beauty and its long commute to downtown Los Angeles. Times changed, and so did the Maxwels. They are co-authors of the Fiddler series of mysteries set in Orange County. These and other books they produced were so successful that the Maxwells ended up relying less and less on Evan's Los Angeles paycheck. It was the half-yearly royalty statements from their publishers in New York that would shape their lives—and loosen their ties to the area. In 1984, the Maxwells "cut the umbilical cord to corporate socialism," as Evan puts it. His final assignment for the L.A. Times was one he views as the ultimate for a "cops-and-robbers reporter." He covered security for the Olympics. "I figured, it doesn't get better than this. I'd done as much as I could in daily journalism. So I left." He does not regret it. He and his wife "have elements of freedom you cannot purchase, my friend," he said. But, he observes keenly, the price was giving up an aching amount of community. "The newsroom fills up your life. Twelve or fourteen hours of your day. It is just as consuming and controlling as the small town in Minnesota where I'm from. When I left, I found myself absolutely liberated—and adrift. The paper gives you a sense of who you are. The first time I tried to sneak into a courtroom past a guard and I didn't have a press card of the L.A. Times, it was like I didn't have a last name." Like any small, close community, "the social setting of the newsroom is supporting and constipating. I never realized how much my mindset would change. I have a close friend with whom I can't talk about the newspaper anymore. He takes it absolutely seriously. We can't kid about it the way we did when I worked there. I am an outsider now." Soon, the Maxwells began to note that they had lost more than the community where Evan worked. They'd lost any sense of community where they lived. "The last five years, all hell has broken loose. The last two years especially, there has been astonishing development. Run-away growth with remarkable similarity. The Alpha Beta, the Lucky supermarkets, all surrounded by video outlets, and an Italian or Japanese restaurant with carry-out, and a bagel and doughnut shop." Evan does not believe that he is reflexively against this growth. He has noticed, for example, the seeds of civilization being planted first in the dry-cleaning establishments. "That is where diversity begins. Places that were first run by former USG athletes and then by South Americans were replaced. In came the Asian families, and they remember your name. The others couldn't remember your name after ten years. The new people are eager to do business, and the stuff is always there when they say they'll have it. You can't fault that." He expects this pattern to expand. "It takes time to do diversity. The Chinese restaurant must fail and be replaced by an aggressive soft-taco place that is part of a local chain of three or four." There is now a secondhand bookstore called Mr. Good-books, in Mission Viejo, onto which, Evan reports, he has just unloaded a portion of his library. He views this retail development as a hopeful sign. Nevertheless, the Maxwells are leaving Orange County. Leaving the place that has been their roots for twenty years, the place where their two kids were raised, the place that was the inspiration for the books that have given them the independence to take wing. "We are no longer comfortable here physically. There is too much traffic. Our community is not our neighbors here. We don't interact with Roz across the street except once a year, when her dog gets loose. Our community is really much broader." They put their four-bedroom Laguna Niguel home on the market because they believe that, for them, community is voluntary and hence portable. They hoped to get $370,000 for their place on an eighty-by-hundred-foot lot. That would pay for a "fifth-wheel "—a big, articulated pickup truck-mobile home combination—plus a large home on 260 acres of southwestern Colorado. The Maxwells would spend part of their year on the road, visiting friends. The rest would be spent in their Colorado retreat four or five hours over the mountains from the nearest interstate, seven to nine hours from an international airport. "We can live out there in Colorado without being a part of the local economy," Evan figures. "Money to us is the basis of our freedom." Their community includes writers in Seattle and Indiana, agents and editors in New York, a computer junk man in the Silicon Valley who buys and sells overstock equipment, and a refugee from the Massachusetts Route 128 computer realm who now reconditions covered wagons. "We're in touch with them on a weekly basis by telephone, by fax, by UPS. "Our daughter, Heather, loves to travel. Her role model is a friend of ours who works in the Canadian embassy in London. She met her husband here when he was working for the Border Patrol and she was working with Asian refugees. We speak to them regularly and visit [in England] once a year. The world is now a place where it is possible to achieve a sense of community that would have seemed idealistic or idiotic only ten years ago." In fact, a semiretired Seattle physician who raises big draft Paso Fino horses is the friend who brought to their attention the Four Corners region of Colorado, where they are planning to move. There, Evan says, "the West still lives. Real Louis L'Amour country. We like open landscape, an outdoor life. Looking at the San Juan and La Plata Mountains." In the old days in Laguna Niguel, "the hills were absolutely glowing. They were green in spring, turning to gold in summer. The prettiest landscape in the coastal west. There were red-tail hawks and golden eagles. We became particularly fond of raptors. This was the best place in the world to watch raptors conduct their daily lives. They are now living off the freeway margins, but it's not the same." The Maxwells expect soon that their neighborhood will hold 150,000 to 200,000 humans, instead. There are considerable ironies to all this. The Maxwells are thinking about moving to that part of Colorado where old ideas of connections between humans and community still live. The reason they can do so is that their personal sense of community is dependent on microchip connections. They recognize the incongruity. In fact, they plan to use it as material in their next book. They will be looking at the West as a two-tiered place with the old-line landowners and ranchers and café owners on one level and Third Wave people like them—semiretired doctors from Seattle and writers from California—on another. To be sure, the Maxwells' portable definition of "community" is more advanced than most. And it is not without its flaws. Evan acknowledges that his son harbors some anger that the place he has always thought of as home is somewhere he will not be able to return. But the Maxwells illuminate a key aspect of any discussion of "community" in Edge City. "Community" today is different from "government," "shadow government," or "neighborhood." It is entirely voluntary and thus fragile. If you don't like the ties that bind you to others—for even the most ephemeral or transitory or stupid reasons—you can and may leave. You are no longer forced to proclaim your identity as part of any inexorable membership in a larger whole. You must find in yourself the reason to create a bond with other humans. In America, the most highly mobile society in history, people reach out in a myriad of directions for work and play—and now they search in varied directions for society and friendship, even family. It is rare to the point of being bizarre to have the bulk of one's peers living in one neighborhood today. Even if you are "in the neighborhood," you do not just "drop in." You call first. Peer groups—community—are defined by job, avocation, church, or some other institution, far more than by location. Oddly, government bureaucrats for once have used a word accurately. It may seem silly to see Washington news stories with referoups to help people in Romania and China. "Who knows if it does the Chinese any good," he says. "Does our people a lot of good." A competing evangelical nondenominational church that he refers to as "obnoxious Christians" spent the previous election trying to run homosexuals out of Irvine. "We did not do that," Timmons stresses, firmly. His stand on abortion boils down to community social work. "We're saying, look. If you have an unintended pregnancy, if you are considering abortion, please call us. If it's a financial situation, we will pay for the baby, we will pay for your counseling, for your medical care and for the delivery, and we will help you get the baby adopted or whatever you need to do. There's 20 percent of the people who are anti-abortion and 20 percent pro-abortion, okay? I'm going for the 60 percent in the middle who are basically lost. They'll always gravitate to the normal. What I want to show them is that the person of Christ is very, very normal and that that will make you normal as well. And that's the real issue here. We're all abnormal. Our M.O. here is "I'm not okay, you're not okay. But that's okay. See?" In fact, Timmons is running something of a spiritual shopping mall. You can see it in his physical plant. The anchor is the fan-shaped twenty-five-hundred-seat auditorium with no kneelers but marvelous acoustics; a strong whisper at the focus of the stage echoes easily off the far back wall. Most of the surrounding structures look like low-rise corporate offices but function as spiritual boutiques. They contain meeting rooms of various sizes to which demographically targeted groups go to have their specific needs met. Some Sundays, he has to use satellite parking with shuttle buses. Timmons describes himself as "audience-analysis oriented," but says he's never found a need to advertise. In the basement there is a day-care center. Of the four hundred families enrolled in it, he says, 70 percent are not even part of his church. What does community mean to him? "I think community is where people feel safe. I think it's where they feel that they're not going through this thing alone. There's something about that ache of loneliness that everybody's got. You've got to make contact somehow. "We have a time in our service where everybody stands and they greet one another and I usually give 'em something to do If the Lakers are playing I'll say whisper a prayer for the Lakers. It's the kind of thing where you've got to get people to touch people. I sense that's what they need. All these transplants need a safe environment where they can trust and depend on somebody. They need to know that they're not alone." Perhaps it is in such fashion that roots are put down in an Edge City the size of Minneapolis that was nothing but a cattle ranch twenty-five years ago. Tom Nielsen, vice chairman of the multibillion-dollar Irvine Company, is a calm, solid man. The face of his son, John, got a lot of its best chiseled features from him. Of course, the two look more clearly alike if you discount the senior Nielsen's buttoned-down corporate garb and adjust for windage with John, who has been known to show up for an appointment with long blond hair, peach fuzz on his face, glasses with thin gold rims, and a shirt marked with the logo of a pizzeria. Tom Nielsen is a thoughtful man. He says ruefully, of the early years of Irvine, "I don't think we thought of ourselves as building cities. There was no vision that we were building a city for tomorrow. We were doing a better job of suburbanizing Southern California and trying to take the conflicts out of traffic patterns." It is he who, unbidden, volunteers that he has a son who is critical of all the works of Irvine. It is he who urges me to speak to John. Tom Nielsen grew up in Orange County, in Fullerton. He remembers when "it seemed that the three miles from Fullerton to Anaheim was a long distance. You'd actually leave one place and go through some orange groves and arrive at the other one. Yes, I played in the orange groves. Well, now you don't know where Fullerton and Anaheim or any place stops and ends." That's not the only thing that's changed since he was growing up, he acknowledges. "The way we've built houses—there's nothing that encourages you to get to know anybody next to you. You never see anybody in the back yard. I've lived in houses where all around me I didn't know any of the neighbors. It didn't bother me because I was so busy. We moved from place to place. Maybe I don't have the same need—the sense of this community that they're complaining isn't here. It doesn't resonate to me personally." When we first spoke, he mentioned, "I've talked about that at length to my son who is a writer. My son? He grew up in a lot of different places. Never really lived in Irvine. I don't think he'd like to live in Irvine. Why? For all the reasons you've cited. We argue about this all the time. "Have we created a place where you can have roots? I think you can. I admit my dad did stay in the same house for forty-five years. I don't know how my children would feel. We didn't stay in any house more than five years; I don't know where their roots are. I know where John thinks they are. He thinks they're at a place called Piru, where we lived in a huge old Victorian mansion and he was in the midst of a community that was a very special place for him." Piru is just below the Sespe National Condor Sanctuary in a valley in Ventura County. It is beyond the San Fernando Valley, as far north of Los Angeles as Orange County is south. The Nielsen family was living there because the mansion belonged to scions of the Newhall Land and Farming Company, another legendary and ancient California landholding family, for which the elder Nielsen was working at the time, developing a place called Valencia. "We moved because of another job. I'm sure my son would be happy to chat with you, because he has more than a passing interest in this subject. He reminds me that when we built this, we destroyed all the places for the nesting owl. That's why there's an owl on Tower Two. That's right. He keeps telling me you've got to worry about the raptors in this part of the country and you can't develop it all. He wrote a story on the condor that appeared in Sports Illustrated. " Wings. The condor, which has a greater wingspan than any creature in North America, is so threatened it no longer exists in the wild. John, who his father acknowledges has a thing about roots, writes about endangered wings. This was how John ended up in Virginia one balmy spring afternoon; he had come to work in Washington. Sitting over a platter of cold cuts, he talked of the intense conflicts he had had over such communities as Irvine, at the same time that he was going out of his way to be fair. His particular desires and aspirations, he understood, hardly—reflected the American statistical norm. He mentioned his brother Peter to make the case. "My brother lives in Irvine, you know, and he just loves it. He works for the National Bank of Canada. He's younger than me. My role in the family—I'm one of those early rockets they launched right after Sputnik; in the old films they blew up. I'm the one that went with the monkey in it." The first time I talked to John Nielsen, he made an effort to give Irvine an even break. "I'm trying to be real rational about it, because I have a great amount of respect for my father, if not for everybody in his business. Building a community from scratch is not that old a science. This day, he notes, "My father's really proud of all these things, you know. He's the kind of person who would not feel uncool saying, 'Every day in every way I'm getting better and better.' He's a very intensely mainstream person. That's why my father's in the business. He likes to shake hands, and his idea of a good time is either let's go to a zoning hearing or let's drive around and see the new project." He acknowledges that he and his father have had a continuing dialogue about the soul of such places as Irvine. "'Ale don't have big long talks. It's not like we sit down and have an exchange and debate. It's like, 'John, we bought this house in Palm Springs and want you to come out any time. We want to give you the membership in the tennis club.' " `I don't want it.' " `Why not?' " `I don't know.' " 'Why don't you want to come out to Palm Springs and golf?' " `I don't like to golf.' " 'What do you mean, you don't like to golf?' "That kind of conversation. I said, Dad, let's go listen to the blues. Let's paint each other and run naked down the street. "He's a Horatio Alger. He really believes in that, and I think many more people agree with him than agree with me—BUT THEY'RE WRONG! I notice the principle of exclusion—extreme separations of wealth and a class system. They're not what was taught these places would be, which is mixed places, attempting to re-create the city environment. These are places that people go to so they don't have to be around whatever they deem undesirable. "There's something that gnaws at you. I don't know whose fault this is. But I think the idea of killing the birds that land in your lake because they foul the grass—you know, poison—I think there's something bizarre about that. And they say, 'Well What do you mean? Birds are a problem.' " John is intensely interested in his family's roots. "Hans Peter Nielsen and his brothers came from Denmark and settled in Lexington, Nebraska, and most of 'em moved as a group to Orange County in the late 192os. H.P. came with his kids Harold and Arthur and Carl and everybody but Einar and Olga. And Harold is my grandfather. He opened Nielsen's Menswear in Fullerton, which was this little island in a sea of orange trees. The clothing store stayed open till the early 1960s, when they introduced credit cards and he thought that was the end of society. My father and his brother lived in the same house essentially their whole life. They had a giant train set in the back, in a second house my grandfather had built. It was a re-creation of Fullerton. It was very exact. "I guess you can see it coming. My grandfather always seemed in a daze when I would drive home. His wife died in 1969. He lived in this house and he wasn't leaving it. They would gradually widen the road and cut back the front yard. It was one of those L.A. homes that look terrific now. It was low, with a big patio and a shuffleboard court in the back and you have that weird green plastic stuff but it's all been bleached white from a zillion years in the sun. You'd sit out there with a dart board. My grandfather drove me to work once and he hadn't been to downtown Los Angeles for thirty years and he was just shocked. There were so many people everywhere. "My father comes from that old Orange County world. He feels very much that he's a local boy. He's trusted. Although he has said to me, you know, 'Sometimes I go to these Rotary meetings and I'll talk to 'em—the older guys—and sometimes I feel like they look at me as if to ask, What happened? What happened to our world?' " John's world was one in which "we were always moving into brand-new houses." The elder Nielsen was correct about where his son's roots lay. "I lived in all these suburbs and for two years of my life I lived in a Victorian mansion surrounded by orange orchards. It is just so radically different. When I come back, I go there. I took a girlfriend out to see it. I go back to Piru and walk into Sanchez Liquor. He says, 'Hey! That's Nielsen!' I haven't been there in twenty years. He says, 'It's Nielsen! Yeah, I caught you shoplifting!' He did! I stole a little red squirt gun. He told me to go tell my mother." Community. "I remember the place. I remember the sign that says 'If you ask for your beer in Spanish, you'll get your change in pesos.' It is the only part of Southern California that I know that has not changed." Roots. "I think everybody has a little treasured place and if that goes then they're not coming back." Home. "My father would always bring my grandfather over, put him in the room, turn on the football game, and go in the computer room and work on the computer. I'd sit there with my grandfather. "My grandfather would turn to me and say, 'There he goes. Going to play with that machine again.' "I'd say, 'Well, that's the way he is.' "He'd say, 'He was always like that, too.' "So I'd sit there and talk to old Harold." The Nielsens, father and son, readily talked into my tape recorder separately for more than two years about the differences in their perspectives. More of a challenge was getting them together. Finally they agreed. They chose the locale: California. Then they chose the place: the dappled pastels of the coffee shop at the Irvine Hilton. They chose to sit side by side. Sure enough, the conversation soon came around to the subject of that Victorian house in Piru. What is it that that Victorian has? What does it have that Irvine doesn't? I asked. JOHN: This house was built to be a Utopia. The guy planted the yard with biblical fruits. It had square nails. It had curved windows. It was ridiculous. That's not a legitimate alternative to anything—to live in a Victorian mansion in an orange orchard in an abandoned part of a country. I'm not saying I disliked it, either. I've always thought that that would be profoundly sad, more sad than anything else, when I drive out there and all that stuff's gone. I don't care if they change the onion fields or the walnut trees—which they've done. But when I come and all of a sudden the Newhall Land and Farming Company has converted that whole thing to "Orchardsville"—that will be profoundly depressing. What for? I can't tell you. If you don't know, I can't. tell you. TOM: I see it as almost irrelevant to what we're trying to talk about. I wouldn't feel that way at all if I went out there. If the Newhall Land and Farming Company had found a way to convert the land and provide a place for people to live, I mean that wouldn't bother me. Yes, I'd view it as an improvement, if it ended up being a nice area that people were living in and enjoying and all that. They could even do parts of the San Fernando Valley there, as far as I'm concerned. JOHN: Oh, Dad. [He looks up at his father in an almost pleading way.] You and Mom lived in the same house your whole lives, and I don't know how many times I've moved. You feel that I've missed out on something that you had. What is it? TOM: I had the continuity or the association with a group of people over sixteen or seventeen years. What did I get from that? I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know. JOHN: Well, there you go. TOM: I know where my roots are. "They're right here in Fullerton. Absolutely it has changed. But I don't go up there and say, "Oh isn't it too bad there are no more orange trees." I mean, I don't think we regret that there are no more orange trees left, no. Happy to see a new university and happy to see lots of things that have happened. I'm accepting the fact that we're going to have more people in this part of the world than we do today. If that involves the conversion of land in the Simi Valley to handle 'em adequately, that's okay with me. Is that okay with you? I ask John. JOHN: No. It might have been ten or twenty years ago. But now the thing that heightens it is, you know, the Simi Valley's all that's left. I mean, that might not be literally true, but look at Orange County. It's just plastered. TOM: There's land in Ventura County. There's all kinds of land all over. All I'm saying is if we could come to some agreement I'm perfectly willing to say, "Okay, let's preserve the area out along that river." Maybe that's important. But we want to develop this part. Now, John wouldn't even let us do that. John says no to everything. Is there anything like sacred ground in the late twentieth century? I ask. TOM: Sure there is. There is lots of sacred ground and it's being protected in lots of places by lots of people. JOHN: You talk and talk and I think you're right, you make it sound all so overwhelming, and this is the way it should be. But still it leaves me cold. You know much more than me and you've got it all figured out. And I still don't want to live there. The coffee shop of the Irvine Hilton is called Le Café, and it is a pleasant place. The flooring and the glass walls have been calculated so as to blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors, making it air-conditioned cool but vivid. The table at which the Nielsens sit has taupe benches, with accents of yellow, aqua, and pink. On the walls there is a sixteen-unit enamel-on-aluminum piece of modern art. It shows palms, water, high-rises. Next to it there is a little plaque. Irvine Landscape 1985, it is called. The conversation with the Nielsens goes on through most of the afternoon. But it doesn't go much of anywhere else. Both are calm. Both are rational. Each is polite to the other. Neither changes the other's mind. That outcome is probably telegraphed in the early part of their conversation. Maybe it is when I ask the elder Nielsen the same question I've asked so many other people in Orange County by then: What does community mean to you, as in "master-planned community"? What he seems mostly is a little perplexed by the question. Says Tom Nielsen, "It doesn't mean—anything more than a marketing term."
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