Bulldozing a Legend of the ‘80s

In California, boom times are like the tides. They leave high-water marks, ripples that show the point of maximum gain, the spot from which the retreat began. This is particularly true in Southern California, where the relics of a boom are usually left out in the open, for all to see, warnings to the next generation of boomers.

In the small cities of Southern California, you can still find the cultural litter from some of the great booms of the past. Old tourist hotels, now warehouses and garages, with the year “1923” cut into their facades. 1923 was a big year for booms.

Or a grand avenue, lined with 50-year-old palms, leading to nowhere.

As for booms of the ‘80s, there must be any number of places in Moreno Valley or Temecula or Santa Clarita that qualify as the point where the tide lapped highest and then began its retreat. But for this honor, I nominate a tract in the Antelope Valley. Specifically, the subdivision known as Legends at the corner of 30th and J streets in Lancaster.

If you stand across the street from Legends, it all looks like a work in progress. Row after row of half-finished houses growing out of the sand. Neat stacks of Spanish tiles sit on the roofs, as if the workers will arrive tomorrow and finish the job.

But they won’t. Legends will never be finished. It has sat there for more than two years, a ghost tract. One day families were lining up to make down payments, dreaming about their soon-to-be hot tubs and master suites. The next day the developer simply walked away. He was bankrupt. Busted.

And he never came back. Nor did anyone else. The years passed and the frames bleached gray. The Legends billboard on J Street, with its likeness of Marilyn Monroe--she was the “legend,” understand?--began to chip and peel away. Nothing was ever going to save those houses.

So last week the city fathers of Lancaster did something historic. They decided the city itself should buy what’s left of Legends. And then mow it down. Send out a squadron of bulldozers and just level it. Wipe it, and all the failure it represents, from the face of the desert.

This may be a first, and may constitute a change from Southern California’s past. In the ‘20s and probably even the ‘50s, a graveyard of homes like Legends probably would have sat untended until the coyotes had chewed the studs off their foundations. Civic attention would have turned discreetly to other matters until a new boom came along and took care of the problem, one way or the other.

But Legends bugged the city fathers of Lancaster. They hated the ugliness of those ruined skeletons, and--they don’t say this, it’s just my guess--they hated the reminder that the ‘80s had retreated from Lancaster and everywhere else. It was the ‘80s, after all, that created Lancaster as we know it.

So the ghost tract soon will be gone. In a way, it’s too bad. Because the ruins at Legends have a certain quality. You can walk down the unfinished streets of the tract and sense the wild abandon of the boom. How fast everything was all done, how the desert was mowed down overnight. Legends has the capacity to bring back the ‘80s in a way that a finished subdivision never will.

You can see, for example, exactly how the developer cheated on the construction, trying to save a little time or a little money. Floor slabs that were poured on the cheap and have cracked so badly that they would have distorted carpets. If there were carpets. Heating ducts barely stapled to their overhead jousts. Windows that are crooked.

And because you are looking at skeletons, with no camouflage of furniture or landscape, you understand how virtually identical houses were made to look different to potential buyers. A bay window switched from the front to the back. Floor plans that were mirror images--that is, the exact reversal--of the house next door.

All these tricks have been used before, I know, and will be used again. But it’s instructive to see the whole thing laid out in its wasted glory, and to understand how entire towns were built in the same way that Detroit makes cars. Instructive, and possibly even valuable.

Maybe you see where I’m going here. Legends, in a way, constitutes an unrecognized museum of the ‘80s boom. It’s understandable that Lancaster would want to extinguish the unpleasantness, but is it crazy to think that some small part of Legends could be preserved? A short stretch of a street, raw and forever unfinished, that represents the high-water mark of the biggest boom of them all? So we could come, and remember?

Yeah, crazy, I guess. Too bad.