Like much of the southern end of this grid, Lakewood was until after the Second World War open farmland, several thousand acres of beans and sugar beets just inland from the Signal Hill oil field and across the road from the plant that the federal government completed in for Donald Douglas at the Long Beach airport. Each of the seventeen thousand five hundred houses would be nine hundred and fifty to eleven hundred square feet on a fifty-by-hundred-foot lot.
Each would be a one-story stucco seven floor plans, twenty-one different exteriors, no identical models to be built next to or facing each other painted in one of thirty-nine color schemes. Each would have two or three bedrooms, oak floors, a glass-enclosed shower, a stainless-steel double sink, and a garbage-disposal unit.
Each would sell for between eight and ten thousand dollars, Low F. There were to be thirty-seven playgrounds, twenty schools. There were to be seventeen churches. There were to be a hundred and thirty-three miles of street, paved with an inch and a half of No.
What he meant, of course, was the perfect synergy of time and place, the seamless confluence of the Second World War and the Korean War and the G. Bill and the defense contracts that began to flood Southern California as the Cold War set in. Here on this raw acreage on the floodplain between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers was where two powerfully conceived national interests, that of keeping the economic engine running and that of creating an enlarged middle class, could be seen to converge.
What happened at the site of the hundred-foot pylon in the spring of was Cimarron: thirty thousand people showed up for the first day of selling.
