Los Angeles’ Engineer of Dramatic Change Remains a Forgotten Man : His reputation--and life--crumbled in tragedy. But credit William Mulholland, the force behind two aqueducts, with making the city what it is today.

William Mulholland, who was he?

If you stop a dozen people in Los Angeles today and ask this question, the chances are that every one will give you a blank look. The significance is that William Mulholland has become a non-person in the city he made great. And because of this, there will be no ceremonies to commemorate his 140th birthday Monday.

Yet this was the man who held an entire nation captive Nov. 5, 1913, when he stood at the far northern end of the San Fernando Valley to welcome water from the eastern Sierra Nevada watershed for the people of Los Angeles with a brief speech: “There it is, take it.”

With those few words Mulholland had concluded the monumental task of building the Los Angeles-Owens River Aqueduct, a water lifeline that would end a decade-long water shortage and eventually convert a small town into a great metropolis.

For five years, 5,000 men had toiled in desert heat and cold to create one of the great engineering feats of that day, an aqueduct that would bring water 238 miles to Los Angeles by gravity flow alone.

Later, at age 68, Mulholland would direct a six-year survey of 50,000 miles of desert to find a route to bring Colorado River water to Los Angeles and all of Southern California. His success opened a vast region from the San Gabriel Valley to the Mexican border to settlement.

From the pinnacles of these twin achievements, and at the height of his popularity, Mulholland’s life would begin to spiral downward into a tragedy of almost Shakespearean proportions.

Here was a man with a success story so incredible that it almost borders on fiction. He had been born of poor parents in Belfast, Ireland, in 1855, and at age 15 shipped before the mast for four years as an apprentice seaman. He worked on the Great Lakes and then as a lumberjack in Michigan.

In 1877, he rode into Los Angeles on horseback and immediately fell in love with the little pueblo and the river that served it. Later he wrote: “The Los Angeles River was a beautiful, limpid little stream, with willows on its banks. It was so attractive to me that it at once became something about which my whole scheme of life was woven.”

Mulholland went to work as a laborer for the private water company that supplied the city. His job was to maintain the ditches that carried water from the river near Griffith Park to a reservoir in Elysian Park.

Mulholland was a strong-willed, gruff man with an analytical mind. Self-taught, he studied mathematics and engineering subjects in the public library at night. For recreation, he would read the classics.

His intellect and leadership abilities were quickly recognized. He was rapidly promoted from ditch tender to straw boss, to foreman, to superintendent and, finally, to general manager and chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power when it became a city-owned utility in 1902.

Call it fate or predestination, Mulholland was the right man in the right place when Los Angeles desperately needed more water at the turn of the century. He recognized the importance of finding a stable water source for the growing city, and he convinced the citizenry to support construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

The construction of the Colorado River Aqueduct later on should have been the capstone of Mulholland’s extraordinary life, but this was not to be.

As Mulholland slept on the night of March 12, 1928, 12 billion gallons of water broke through a dam that he had designed in San Francisquito Canyon, laying waste to everything in its path, including his reputation. Afterward, his one wish was that he could have perished in place of the 450 people who died.

Here was a person who saw water as God’s gift to humanity. He had spent his life bringing this elixir to the people of Los Angeles, and in the end it destroyed him. He accepted full blame, and he died a heartbroken man, at age 79, on July 22, 1935.

At the inquest on the dam failure, several credible theories were suggested, but none could be proven. One was that Owens Valley farmers, angered by the diversion of water from their region, had dynamited the dam. Another was that the dam had been built on schist, a rock that dissolves in water.

Today there is strong evidence that Mulholland should have been absolved of this tragedy. In 1992, J. David Rogers, a geologist, reported that he had taken aerial photographs of the dam site and uncovered an old slide formation, just upstream of the dam’s east abutment, that had fractured and failed. The essence of Rogers’ report was that Mulholland should not have been blamed, because engineers in the 1920s did not have the capability for geologic analysis that we have today.

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Charles F. Outland, in his book about the St. Francis Dam disaster, published in 1977, quotes an engineerE. Grunsky, who also points to a massive slide at the east abutment that triggered the dam failure.

“In the final analysis, however,” Outland wrote, “the responsibility was his [Mulholland’s] alone: And let the record show he was big enough to accept it.”

The record does show that Mulholland was a person of great integrity, and the accounts that circulate about him today have little resemblance to reality.

Chief among these is the myth about the “rape of the Owens Valley.” The story about how the city supposedly dried up a fertile region is often cited by Los Angeles detractors and opponents of new water projects. In 1974, a fictional film, entitled “Chinatown,” starring Jack Nicholson, also attacked Mulholland’s ethics.

As a result of these controversies, city officials no longer honor Mulholland, not even on important anniversaries. This silence has created a citizenry that knows nothing about him.

What is left are a few clues to his existence. One is a memorial fountain across from the entrance to Griffith Park, at the intersection of Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, marking the spot where Mulholland lived in a shack when he was a ditch tender. There is also a junior high school in the San Fernando Valley and a boulevard that bisects the city on the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains dedicated to his memory.

Who has not heard of scenic Mulholland Drive, where lovers park and view the vast carpet of lights of the city to the south and the Valley to the north. These lights bloom, like flowers in the night, because Mulholland sprinkled the dry land with water.