Selling the flavors of the Southland
The Valley’s last commercial citrus grove faces an uncertain fate
Fifteen thousand acres of citrus groves once blanketed the San Fernando Valley, but now just a single commercial citrus grove remains, a half-mile from the 101 Freeway on the border of Tarzana and Woodland Hills.
At 14 acres, Bothwell Ranch represents less than one-thousandth of what once was, before the orchards and ranches of the Valley gave way to tract housing, cul-de-sacs and two-car garages.
Citrus production amid the multimillion-dollar homes is far from a viable occupation, and the Bothwell family put the property on the market earlier this summer. The $13.9-million real estate listing boasted of the potential for constructing 26 single-family homes on half-acre lots. Less promoted but nonetheless implicit was the end of a way of a life, albeit a vestigial one.
But a sale has yet to be brokered, and the fate of the property remains uncertain. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council took steps to preserve the property as a historic-cultural monument. The city’s Cultural Heritage Commission still has to consider that proposal in what will undoubtedly be a lengthy process, but setting the designation in motion has essentially hit pause on any potential development.
“It’s part of what makes the identity of the San Fernando Valley,” Councilman Bob Blumenfield, who represents the area and proposed the landmark designation, told me over the phone. “When you think about the San Fernando Valley, you think about aerospace, you think about the indigenous past, you think about ‘The Brady Bunch,’ and you think about our agricultural history. And there’s not that many signs left of it.”
Surprising as it may sound today, Los Angeles was actually the top agricultural county in the nation for four decades, from 1909 to 1949, said Rachel Surls, author of “From Cows to Concrete: The Rise and Fall of Farming in Los Angeles.” Citrus crops were integral to that success, but equally if not more integral to the branding and selling of Southern California into being.
“The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, different citrus marketers and organizations such as Sunkist oranges were very much a part of basically making Los Angeles look like this golden, almost tropical, agricultural paradise where people could come and get a whole new start,” Surls explained of the boosters. “That positioning of Los Angeles as a place where citrus grew was really, really key to the growth of Los Angeles.”
For Southern California, the orange was — as Charles Fletcher Lummis observed more than a century ago — not only a fruit, but a romance. Citrus crate labels became a regional art form in themselves, often crammed with as many elements of local iconography as could fit on one wood crate.
The labels highlighted Southern California’s natural beauty, while leaning in to idealized nostalgia for the region’s Spanish Mission past. The first citrus orchard in Alta California was planted at Mission San Gabriel in 1804; the first commercial orchard came to downtown Los Angeles a few decades later, with seedlings secured from Mission San Gabriel.
The citrus industry rose in tandem with the railroads: The oranges went out and the people came in. (It should be noted that this citrus paradise, like nearly all Anglo mythologies of Southern California, was built on the backs of an immigrant workforce whose lives were far from perfectly sun-kissed.)
The advent of refrigerated rail shipping in the 1880s facilitated the boom, as many Midwesterners received their first taste of the exotic fruit arriving like a stand-in for the Southern California sun itself. The citrus marketing campaigns were inextricable from Southern California’s alltime greatest selling point: the weather. (See also: rancher and developer Lucky Baldwin’s famous 1880s line, “Hell, we’re giving away the land. We’re selling the climate.”)
“My ancestors, at least within the past few generations, lived in the Midwest. I remember my grandmother and other relatives talking about getting an orange in their Christmas stocking,” Surls recalled.
“You know,” she continued, “an orange was something very special.”
In 1939, at the apex of citrus culture, at least six railroad trains pulling 50 cars left L.A. laden with citrus fruits every day.
Citrus production in the Valley declined sharply after World War II and into the early 1960s, as rapidly growing suburbs replaced orange groves, and commercial production largely migrated to Central California.
Suddenly, the San Fernando Valley came to represent a very different version of the good life, as a suburban pastoral supplanted actual open space. The Valley became “not just a suburb, but the ideal of a suburb,” as writer and urban scholar Joel Kotkin once told the Daily News. By the early 1970s, only a few hundred acres of citrus groves remained.
And now there is just Bothwell Ranch. The issue of preservation is made more complicated by the fact that the ranch is private property. Curbed LA reports that the Bothwell family is far from happy about the potential landmark designation, which they fear will hurt the resale value and scare away potential buyers.
Blumenfield mentioned that he had reached out to various conservancies and land trusts to alert them of the site being for sale, and said an “ideal solution” would be an entity that cares about the history of agriculture swooping in to purchase the facility and preserve it as both open space and historic site.
Why, I asked Blumenfield, if the city is bothering to get involved, don’t we push for affordable housing at the site?
“It would be a tricky one, given the zoning that’s there, and the resistance to changing the zoning,” the councilman explained.
“We’re trying to put affordable housing everywhere in the city, and I’ve got a lot of different coals in the fire, so to speak,” he said. “And we’re getting pushback even in — I’ve got some blocks, these five parking lots in Reseda that I’m looking at as doing a feasible study about the possibility of doing some sort of housing there.
“And it’s like we started World War III over there, trying to get people even just willing to look at a feasibility study,” Blumenfield said. “And that’s on a parking lot. So, you can imagine, in an area that’s zoned for these large homes and that’s an orange grove. It would be a very uphill battle.”
When seen in aerial photographs, the ranch looks like a lush anachronism — a green rectangle plucked from the agrarian past and neatly but nonsensically deposited into an upscale residential jewel box of red roofs, turquoise pools and tennis courts.
“We’re overrun,” as the late Bothwell matriarch told a reporter of the encroaching development in 1998. She spoke with a sigh. “But you can’t stand in the middle of Ventura Boulevard and say, ‘Stop!’ ”
No one except the Cultural Heritage Commission can stop time.