Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown

by Marc Weingarten

Thirsty is the history of Los Angeles and its fraught relationship with water. As a city on the make since the early twentieth century, Los Angeles’ resources fought hard to keep up with its unchecked growth. The city’s water chief William Mulholland built an aqueduct to grab water over 200 miles away in Owens Valley, but it wasn’t enough. Thirsty is the gripping tale of Los Angeles’ epic battles for water, the larger-than-life characters that shaped a city’s destiny, and the man-made tragedy that killed 400 and forever changed the way water would be harnessed and allocated.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

280 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2015

About the author

Marc Weingarten is an author, journalist, editor and filmmaker. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Antigone · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Mulholland is, to-date, where everyone winds up when they're researching the history of Los Angeles. He shouldn't be, but he is. It shouldn't be about one man, no matter his aims and accomplishments, yet the amorphous nature of the City of Angels is such that he's the only firm, traceable fact a historian can build a story on. Everything else shifts like the jacaranda on an evening's breeze - in a leaf-clittering hush that lures your ships to shadow.

Mulholland was an Irishman with an eidetic memory. This tends to convince Irishmen that they don't need to go to school or take instruction from anyone. I suspect it was Irishmen who first coined the phrase: Learn by doing. Which William did, arriving West the hard way; by being kicked off the ship in Panama and hiking through miles of mucky South American terrain in search of alternate passage. He arrived in California in January of 1877, and once he saw these sunny climes he stopped looking for anything else.

Mulholland's is the story of desert transformation. He's the Los Angeles river, the Owens Valley, the film Chinatown. He's the King of All Grifters or the driving force behind the establishment of one of the most influential cities in the world, depending upon whom you talk to. He made the deals and diverted the water and built the delivery systems a lot of men got rich on until - at one final, miserable point - his luck ran out and his lack of instruction ruined him.

There are several biographies of William Mulholland. This is not one. Nor is it a history of his achievements and the manner in which they allowed Los Angeles to write its name a little larger on a map. What it is, at its crux, is an information dump. Readers of history will concede that this sometimes happens. Authors go to a lot of work, a lot of work, researching every facet of an incident, an era, a life, a turning point, yet when it comes time to consolidate and disseminate what they've learned, the task proves quite beyond them. Every page of Thirsty carries with it a fistful of facts that were hard-bought, to be sure, and this is in its way a fabulous source for future historians; but no one comes alive on the page, and there's nothing here to track or invest with curiosity.

It's an artifact. Yet and still, at that? A darn good one.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book needed another edit. Too many grammatical errors and mistakes that made some passages confusing or had me going back to reread and make sure I didn't miss something(mixing up Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, using Owens River when talking about the Santa Clara River, etc).

Even with those issues, this was a 3-3.5 star book prior to the final chapter. In those last 20 pages the author jams in 80 yrs of history, comically skews Marc Reisner's views in Cadillac Desert, and semi absolves Mulholland of any wrongdoing or possibly having secondary motives in some of his decisions.

[Caroline Irving · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it - thoroughly enjoyed the writing and learned so much about the complicated history of water infrastructure development in Los Angeles and Southern California generally.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was prepared to give this four stars. I love the subject matter - Mulholland's engineering feats built a "Garden of Eden in the desert" as one ad at that time called it. Los Angeles would not exist - good and bad - if it were not for Mulholland's forsight to build the aqueduct. It is also fun to read about the land (robber) barons who benefited from (and supported) Mulholland's work. In today's world, with all of the talk about bias in the press, it is refreshing to read about the blatant bias of Harrison Otis. He wielded the Los Angeles Times like a cudgel in order to get the aqueduct built, steal the water from the Owens Valley, and personally profit from it.

As a Los Angeles native, interested in the history of this city, I truly love learning about all of it, whether it shines a positive or negative light on my hometown.

I think that Weingarten does a good job with the history, right up until the end. I'm not quibbling with his take on it. I think Weingarten is pretty fair in his assessment of Mulholland, Otis, Chandler, Eaton, etc. My biggest beef is Part 3: Downstream, 1928-2008. Out of 277 pages of his book, Weingarten compresses 80 years into 17 of them. And in reality, only really discusses up to the mid-1930's. I understand that this is not a complete history of Los Angeles. And maybe you didn't want the book to be 350 pages. But water has played a very important role in Los Angeles in those 80 years and you wrote about none of it. There have been continued battles between the Owens Valley and Los Angeles. There have been terrible droughts. The Los Angeles river was reopened for kayaking and exploration. And those are just the parts I remember from my life.

The text could also use a good dose of editing. Several grammatical errors and missing words took me out of the story. I probably would not have used the word autodidactic three times (To be fair, I think once Weingarten used autodidact; either way, it sounds like you don't know how else to say self educated.). But the main reason I knocked it down a star is because there is a lot more history there that could have been at least mentioned.

[Jeremy Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this feels like an incomplete and insufficiently edited manuscript, Weingarten lays bare the historic, but ongoing challenges that exist for the drought-heavy towns and cities and valleys of Southern California. Prior to this book, I only knew of Mulholland as the titled beginning of dark, Hollywood films, like Mulholland Road and Mulholland Falls, titles that now feel like metaphors of a man, William Mulholland, whose workaholic and ambitious traits led to a tragic and largely unforgivable disaster, the kind of disaster that can make a man question everything he ever did before that moment. But for a state still struggling with drought, it felt like Weingarten was writing a screenplay with limitations, like someone told him he was only allotted 300 pages, and he suddenly realized on page 250, that he had only gotten as far as the 1920s, so he blurted a bunch of super fast history into the last tenth of the book, attempting to catch everyone up to the modern era, but failing miserably.

Only two pages in the entire text (if that) were given to answering part of the subtitle, the question of Chinatown (which I thought meant something other than the Jack Nicholson film). And then there were a bevy of errors, page after page of missing words or misspelled words that got on my nerves, the reality, I suppose, of an independently published work that lacked some oversight.

Thirsty was well-intentioned and informative, but greatly flawed.

[K Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tells a great story, but with some distracting errors...

Overall I enjoyed the story Mr. Weingarten tells. It's a tale common to the American westward expansion: taming nature and building monumental infrastructure in order to serve the needs of the incoming populations from the east.

But the book, while it held my interest, does suffer from some distracting errors that should have been caught by the publisher. Typos, syntax mistakes, and even grammatical errors abound. Nevertheless, I would recommend the book to anyone with even a passing interest in the 20th Century development of Southern California and its growth into one of the world's major urban and agricultural centers.

[James Hallmark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the story of the California Water Wars is fascinating: the engineering necessary to move water 233 miles from the Owens Valley east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the San Fernando Valley; the politics of the water war; the battles (bombings and protests and occupations); the tragedy of the San Francisquito Dam failure that killed at least 431 people and ended Mulholland’s career; the environmental impacts of these actions. It is a story of great triumphs, shady dealings, rigged elections, money, scandal, and human ingenuity. I loved it. It is a very interesting story of what is likely the key factor that allowed Los Angeles to become a major city

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting read on the growth and watering of Los Angeles

An engaging historical read on the political history of Los Angeles based on its need for water in order to grow. A little uneven at times, it nevertheless manages to turn a dry topic (pun intended) into an interesting story.

[Gayle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding read -- nonfiction but reads like a historical fiction page turner. Just enough technical detail so that the non-engineer can understand the issues of the battle for more water sources. Fascinating history of the development of Los Angeles, with surprising details on how much effect the newspapers of the era on popular opinion.

[Anai Chess · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some distracting typos and other errors in the book, but now I know who Mulholland was and a good deal more about the history of a great city. Is Los Angeles justified in its appropriation of water in central California? I am too biased to answer.

[Natalie Aldrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a while to finish, but overall really fascinating. Conceptually great - this book gives great context as to why regions of southern California look a certain way and how much the aqueduct changed the landscape and the lives of so many.

[David Dahl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting take, well written history of Los Angeles Water

[Marianne Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed thoughts on this book ... Particularly regarding the facts concerning the St. Francis Dam incident. First off, Weingarten refers to the area as Santa Clara -- nope, it was in the Santa CLARITA area although the near was not named Santa Clarita until the incorporation of the city in 1987. Yes, the River is the Santa Clara, but not the region. At the time of the occurrence of the disaster, it was probably referred to as Saugus or Newhall -- so based on that, and particularly since that is one of the most events that happened regarding William Mulholland, I'm inclined to question some of the other facts Weingarten states. Most of it appears to be factual -- the need for water in the southern desert of California, Owens Valley situation, the eventual outcome that impacts Los Angeles even now. Overall, the book is interesting, and if someone could verify certain points, I would appreciate it.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy read to get you warmed up for learning about the history of Los Angeles.

I've been starting a number of books on the history of LA for some time now. The style of Thirsty has been the easiest to read in a couple of sittings. It stays focused on one main topic, the LA River, and keeps side stories to a minimum. It has managed to inform me, and inspire me to revisit some of the other more dense books with a better understanding of LA history.

If you're looking to learn more about LA, I highly recommend this as a first book on the list.