Temecula: Half the Anguish Is Getting There

Recently we drove down to Temecula, where I was to make a talk to the Friends of the Rancho California Library. The trip opened my eyes to what is happening in what we used to think of as the boondocks.

Temecula is about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles in southwestern Riverside County. It is situated in a valley 15 miles below Lake Elsinore amid stony brown hills. It is wine country. The air is dry and clear.

We took the Santa Ana Freeway to Garden Grove and switched to the Riverside Freeway to Corona. It was midday on a Thursday. The Riverside Freeway was as crowded as the Santa Monica Freeway at 5 p.m. We crept along from 15 to 30 miles an hour. I wondered, as I always do on crowded freeways, where everybody else was going, and why they didn’t stay home. Of course we had a legitimate goal.

As we neared Corona, vast tracts of new houses appeared on the hills and in the valleys beside the freeway: mostly large stucco houses in earth tones with red tile roofs. There were seas of them. Beyond them new ones were going up, now skeletons of raw studs. I wondered who bought them. Did all the people who lived in them commute? Were they retired? Were they rich? Certainly there wasn’t enough industry in Corona and the other small towns around to employ them.

I remembered that my barber had said he and his wife had grown tired of crime and congestion in Eagle Rock and had moved to Corona. They got up every morning at 4 o’clock to get him to his shop and her to her job in Los Angeles. He said they didn’t mind the drive. They were happy.

Did all the people who lived in these thousands of new homes commute? From the ads in The Times’ Real Estate section, I knew those houses were out there. They are going up everywhere. In Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, San Diego and in northern Los Angeles counties houses are going up by the tens of thousands. One day it will be one solid city from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Beyond Corona we took I-15 past Lake Elsinore and on to Temecula. Not far beyond Elsinore the housing tracts began again. I believe Rancho California is the biggest development in the Temecula area, but there appeared to be others as well.

The houses were clustered together in islands. They infiltrated the valleys. They climbed the hillsides. They were almost all two stories--big, boxy, look-alike houses, the architecture Hollywood eclectic. I saw almost no signs of life. Cars were in some driveways, but few people were visible. Were they all commuters?

We bypassed the town of Temecula itself and drove straight to Temecula Creek Inn. Our room overlooked a golf course as green as Ireland. We were to be picked up there by Joyce Scully, president of the Friends of the Library, for the evening meeting. She was on the dot.

Having minutes to spare, she drove us around one of the new tracts that was encroaching on the brown hills. Evidently it was an expensive section. Enormous houses stood isolated on hilltops. The architecture would be hard to define; it seemed to combine French chateau, English Tudor, Pennsylvania farmhouse, California mission and Taco Bell. Some were pretentious beyond belief. A medieval chateau with a sentry tower in the wall. A castle with stone turrets. A house of gables and towers that looked like the “Psycho” set. They were homes that betrayed the long-restrained fantasies of their owners.

I asked Mrs. Scully where that many people with that much money came from. She had no idea. “There can’t be that many chief executive officers,” she said sensibly.

We drove on to the high school--a large collection of plain one-story buildings. Since there was a high school, real people with real families must live in some of those houses. We met in the auditorium. Mrs. Scully told me the present library was in a storefront, but they had already gone over the top in a $500,000 fund-raising drive for a new one. That seemed to mean there was community, as well as houses.

Dinner that night at the Temecula Creek Inn was civilized, and the wine was superb.