Persuading People To Live In Desert

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31908, 8 February 1969, Page 5

Persuading People To Live In Desert

Havasu City Promotion

London Bridge An Attraction

(Newsweek Feature Service)

To lizards, road runners and rattlesnakes, the little town of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, out in the desolate Mojave Desert, possesses all the homely comforts. But only the man who built Disneyland could figure out how to get people to live there.

For Mr C. V. Wood, jun., the brash, paunchy Texan who was the designer and promotional brains behind Walt Disney’s amusement park, the problem at Havasu was basically one of super-peddlermanship: how to promote 26 square miles of desert as a combination poor man’s Palm Beach and up-and-coming new city—and make people believe in it enough to move there.

Somehow, with the help of God and an expanding business economy, he seems to have some chance of success.

“There’s not much difference between designing Lake Havasu City and Disneyland,” says Mr Wood. “At Disneyland the whole objective was to keep ’em happy for 'five hours. Here it’s to keep ’em happy for a lifetime.”

Four years after land ■ sales began, the town has I 4500 permanent residents (one third of them construction workers) and it has already passed Bullhead City to become Mojave County’s second largest metropolis. The streets are paved, there are several hotels and motels, a school, a library, a bar called Crazy Ed’s, a pool hall, “the nation’s first round post office” and—just to prove it’s a real All-American town—a marijuana problem among the teen-agers. Much of Lake Havasu City's employment is provided by the town’s original financier, a Los Angeles industrialist, Mr Robert P. McCulloch, who bought part of the area 10 years ago because the lake offered a good testing site for the outboard mbtors he manufactures. A few years later, Mr McCulloch was rezoned out of building a new factory on his Los Angeles property and decided to-expand at Lake Havasu. Sole Bidder About the same time, he began an association with Mr Wood, who had much bigger ideas about the Arizona area. There followed ah intricate arrangement with the state of Arizona that led ultimately to an auction ef 16,520 additional acres,; Mr McCulloch being the sole bidder. lie paid $954,000. Last year, alone, $lB.l millionwSrth of land was sold on the siteNaturally, it was not quite all gravy. Mr Wood mounted a formidable promotion camjaign, ‘including a five-plane private airline to fly potential lot buyers into town. Prices start at $3500 and go up as high as $30,000 for luxury sites on the brown salty dirt adjoining an 18-hole golf course planted with seed grass and palms imported from California. •The glossiest of brochures —no more misleading than mast of their kind—go out all over the country, singing of the “royal blue” water of the lake (it’s really green), of the mere 235 miles to Los Angeles (that’s air distance; by car over parched Route 66, it’s a gruelling 332 miles), i and of the picturesque Indians in the vicinity. (The only Indians anywhere near are a dying band of 45 Chemeheuvi who keep morosely to themselves.) ‘They are not your glamor-ous-type Indians,” says one city official. Plan. For 100,000 With characteristic optimism. the founding fathers envision a population of 100,000 by 1980, with 40 per cent employed by industry, 20 per cent in services, and another 40 per cent in the tourist business they hope to cultivate. So far, there are two more or less major tourist attractions. The first is a yearly motor-boat race which is

(billed as the “Outboard ' World Championship.” The I billing is easily come by; i since the sport has no govern!ing body, anybody with a lake can stage a race and call it I the world championship. The second tourist attraction, however, is more than slightly stupendous. The 'Wood-McCullouch team went Ito England and purchased (London Bridge. The historic i structure is being dismantled las a traffic hazard and the (Arizona impresarios bought 'it for $2,460,000. I What’s more they bought the wrong bridge. In an 'ironic turnabout, these masiters of the overstated brochure were misled by somebody else’s brochure of picturesque London.

They put in their bid thinking that they were getting the spectacular Tower Bridge, with its two 140-foot Gothic towers standing guard over a formidable drawbridge. Instead, they got the real London Bridge, a grey musty little structure that has been sinking into the mud of the

Thames River for the last 137 years.

It was only a momentary embarrassment. The bridge is being shipped, stone by stone, to Lake Havasu City, where it will be re-erected in the centre of the town. The fact that there is no water in the centre of the town is only another minor engineering problem. A man-made channel will be cut from the bridge to the lake. By 1971, when the entire London Bridge project is supposed to be completed, the total cost will be $5.6 million. To Mr Wood, it all comes out as good economics. “We expect 5.000,000 visitors a year to see the bridge,” he says. But the population of the town is still 95,500 short of the bustling young metropolis predicted 11 years from now. And even the man who built Disneyland can’t be entirely without misgivings. As one visitor to last year’s “Outboard Championship” said: “It’s a pretty nice place to camp, but I wouldn’t want to live here.”