032 ☼ the life & times of a town
Sold my soul to the company store (on Southern Paiute, Western Shoshone, Cahuilla, and Cocopah land)
Ghost towns are always making a comeback—no matter how many times they’ve been sold. Each buyer has a new vision for it that ultimately fails for one reason or another; ghosts are stubborn and don’t release their haunting grounds easily. Last month, after decades of one-off filming projects and a short-lived plan to DRAIN THE DESERT FLOOR (thank dog that’s out), a new ~mysterious~ buyer snatched up the eastern desert town of Eagle Mountain in California for a cool $22.5m. (This goofy write-up includes multiple screen shots from the different dystopian action movies filmed here over the years.)
Projecting one’s utopian business plan onto a languishing parcel of property is nothing new and Eagle Mountain has had many lives. Located on the southeastern corner of Joshua Tree National Park in Riverside County, an article in a copy of Desert Magazine from 1966 sings the praises of the clean and quiet suburbia of Eagle Mountain. Founded at the end of WWII in 1948 by steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser, the town was an extension of his company and welcomed workers with open arms. As a “company” town with a steel ore mine, Eagle Mountain housed the employees and boasted a fully integrated medical care system (the genesis for Kaiser Permanente) not to mention a shopping center, bowling alley, and a baseball diamond. The heat was unbearable in summer and the town was isolated, making Eagle Mountain a bit of an oasis. But soon it’d be a mirage: the Kaiser Corporation, who owned the town, announced they’d cease operations in 1981. The population dwindled as layoffs began. The corporation evicted families one after the other. Houses were split in half and hauled away on trucks. Even the larger trees were uprooted and sold.
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