The territory of Irvine covers an area extending for around twenty-two miles from the mountains of Riverside County to the Ocean, and running for about nine miles along the coast between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. The Irvine Ranch, now a single estate, was formed from the merger of two ranches from the Mexican period and one ranch from the Spanish period. The Rancho San Joaquin, ceded to Jose Sepulveda by the Mexican government in 1830, stretched inland from the coast roughly as far as the line now marked by the San Diego Freeway. Until 1810, the area further inland, the Rancho Lomas de Santiago, belonged to the Yorba family, who had received it as a gift from the king of Spain. The third estate coincided with the Canyon de Santa Ana and was the property of another branch of the Yorba family. The greater part of these estates belonged to the mission of San Juan de Capistrano up to 1820, i.e. until the time when Mexico gained independence. Mexican rule only lasted a few years, for in 1848 California was conquered and annexed by the United States which, with the imposition of a system of redemption through heavy taxation, caused the bankruptcy, of the Mexican landowners and the destruction of an economy based on cattle raising.

Within a few years debt, usury, and drought wiped out the fortunes of the Mexican families and in 1860 William Wolfskill, a pioneer and Indian fighter, acquired a part of the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana and the whole of Rancho Lomas de Santiago, establishing the first large orange plantation in California.

In those years the greater part of the land in Southern California was up for sale. There was a strong flow of migrants from the other states of the Union and from Northern California, and many of the purchasers came from San Francisco, the first economic center of the American West. In 1864 the first regular link between Los Angeles and San Diego was established, with a stagecoach that, crossing the Irvine Ranch, covered the one hundred and thirty miles in about twenty-four hours. Over the following years, with the depression that followed the Civil War, migration to the West increased still further and the value of land in California rose steeply.

In 1864-66 four gold prospectors acquired the Rancho de San Joaquin and the land owned by Wolfskill. They were Llewellyn Bixby, Benjamin and Thomas Flint, from Maine, and the Irish-Scot John Irvine who, having come to America at the time of the Gold Rush, had made his fortune as a trader in San Francisco. In 1870 James Irvine bought out his partners and began to develop the property as a farm: the existing vines and flocks of sheep were replaced by orange groves, soybean, and maize. On the coast, where Newport Beach was later to grow up, the activities of the trading port were developed around the wharf constructed in 1888, In 1892 James McFadden, the proprietor of that land, founded the seaside resort of Newport Beach and constructed a railroad link with Santa Ana. These were the eighteen eighties, the years of the great boom that followed the completion of the transcontinental railroad lines, the Southern Pacific Railroad (1876) and the Santa Fe line (1885). And yet the development of the ranch came to an abrupt halt in this period. In the sixties and seventies, at the end of a long period of drought, the waters of the Santa Ana river completely flooded the plain upstream of what is now Newport Bay and turned it into a marshy delta. The lands belonging to John Irvine I were flooded and remained unusable until 1900, when the civil engineers repaired the banks and drained the natural delta.

In 1886 the founder of the family died and his heir, also called James and a legendary figure in the conquest of the West under the nickname of "JI," left San Francisco to settle in Orange County.

In 1897 Irvine donated 160 acres of land to the local community to be used for recreation, sport and leisure activities. This was Irvine Park, which still receives thousands of visitors a year. Over the following years "JI" built a school for the children of his workers and set up the first post office in the area at East Irvine. In 1904 he merged all the estates to form the "Irvine Company," a truly industrialized farm that became the first Californian producer of beans and barley.

Following the San Francisco earthquake (1906) and the destruction of all the buildings they owned in Northern California, the Irvines moved to Orange County for good and devoted themselves to the development of agriculture, irrigating the land, planting orange groves on a large scale, progressively mechanizing the methods of cultivation (with the construction of a plant for refining sugar beet), and building infrastructures, including the dam in Santiago Canyon and the creation of Irvine Lake (in the nineteen twenties). In 1937 the James Irvine Foundation was set up and given a majority stockholding in the Irvine Company. A non-profit organization, it was founded with the aim of contributing to the development of the county in the fields of welfare, health, education, and culture. In 1947 James Irvine died, leaving a territory that was still organized for agricultural production but that had already been modified by the first signs of modernization. The Second World War brought large military settlements and a massive expansion of the aeronautical and oil industries that were already present in the area, giving a new boost to the flow of migrants into Southern California.

After the war the first consequence of industrial development was the birth of new suburban areas in the northern part of the county which, in the absence of any regulation, continued the undifferentiated expansion of the conurbation of Los Angeles. At the same time, during the fifties and sixties, the Santa Ana Freeway and then the San Diego Freeway were constructed. But when Orange County and the Irvine Ranch found themselves under threat from the unchecked growth of Los Angeles, a new factor came into play that was going to have a decisive influence on the county's future. At the end of the fifties the Pereira and Luckman architectural studio was given the job of finding a site for and planning a new campus for the University of California. The preliminary hypothesis envisaged a campus that would be up and running by 1965, and that through a process of gradual development would eventually attain, over the course of forty or fifty years, the dimensions of UCLA. After a series of initial difficulties Bill Pereira was able to persuade the Irvine Company that establishment of a new university campus would be the keystone of the second phase in the development of the county. The business empire founded on agriculture and stockbreeding was beginning to decline and the area was coming under pressure in the north from the rapid expansion of the residential suburbs in the counties of Los Angeles and Riverside. The company was persuaded of the reality fact that a revival could only take place through the development of new, quality settlements and the creation of a new fabric of production. In 1960 the Irvine Board accepted Pereira's proposal and sold a thousand acres to the University of California for the symbolic price of one dollar.

This marked the beginning of the history of urban and contemporary Irvine, which was dominated for a long time by the conflict between the company's private interests, the state's planning and tax regulations, and the local public interests which, in 1971, found a means of representation in the newly created municipality of Irvine. In the early sixties the company commissioned Pereira to draw up a plan for the urbanization of the Irvine Ranch. In 1964 Pereira submitted a "Land Use and Circulation Plan," followed by the "South Irvine Ranch General Plan Amendment." Pereira's scheme envisaged the division of the territory into three sections: a coastal area, comprised between the San Diego Freeway and the coast, where the first and largest investments would be made; an area in the hills to the north which would be set aside for new housing developments; and the central valley which, according to the plan, was still to be used for agriculture, with the exception of John Wayne Airport and the helicopter base of the Marines. The effects were immediate: work commenced on the construction of Newport Center, Eastbluff Village, the university campus, Rancho San Joaquin, and Turtle Rock.

In the sixties the company was turned into an agency for urban development and hired a staff of city planners that, in 1968, presented the county with a new scheme, the "Central Irvine General Plan." By now the construction of a new city was under way: it was the beginning of a new phase and the members of the Irvine family were forced to yield control to new and more dynamic operators. In 1977 the Irvine Foundation, following the passing of a new state law that made the humanitarian aims of the foundation incompatible with its entrepreneurial activities, ceded its stock to a group of private operators who, at a cost of 337.4 million dollars, gained control of the entire property, The same year a new development scheme was submitted, the "Urban Design Implementation Plan," which was jointly adopted by the company and the municipality. The objectives of the plan were the definition of modes of urbanization within the framework of the general plan and the introduction of regulations that would be able to preserve the now well-established values of Irvine over the long term. As one of the plan's authors, Donald C. Cameron, put it, "our new plan may not take into account, in detail, the political attitudes of all the jurisdiction it's true, but there are some overall political attitudes of the people in this part of the country that are in the plan but that were not in the old plan; the reason being that at the time the original plan was done, there were no people to consult. We began with theory; we started to implement; we have learned both from the people who have moved here and from our mistakes; and we hope that new and better information will always produce better results." (A.R.)

< BACK | NEXT >