Building: Homes on the Range

San Francisco Merchant James Ir vine could hardly have reckoned the size of the legacy he set up back in the 1880s, when he wove three Spanish land grants into a single parcel of Southern California countryside. Rolling 22 miles inland from the Pacific coast, his Irvine Ranch has remained virtually intact as an 83,000-acre spread, nearly six times the size of Manhattan.

Originally devoted to sheep and cattle, over the years the land has been turned to farming (barley, potatoes, wheat) and later to citrus on a vast scale. The real crop began coming in only a decade or so ago, with the steady outward creep of urban Los Angeles, 35 miles to the north. As the megalopolitan sprawl pressed at its fences, Irvine’s real estate value soared to well over $1 billion.

Now the ranch is beginning to cash in. Last week, completing the first step of a project that may rank as one of the biggest land developments in the U.S., the Irvine Company opened a $20 million, 75-acre super shopping center called Fashion Island. The center embraces 56 handsome stores strung along a broad, tree-lined pedestrian mall overlooking the Pacific. Aiming at well-heeled shoppers from suburban Newport Beach and Balboa as well as Los Angeles, Fashion Islanders expect to ring up sales of $35 million a year.

Master Plan. The center is only part of Los Angeles Architect William Pereira’s master plan (TIME cover, Sept. 6, 1963) to develop Irvine in an orderly way that will avoid swamping land values all around, block the spreading disarray of the ranch’s municipal neighbor to the north. Centered on the University of California’s new Irvine campus, for which the company shrewdly donated 1,000 acres in 1960, the plan calls for an industrial park (which already has 60 contracted occupants, including McDonnell Douglas and Xerox) and residential sectors now abuilding to combine into a self-supporting community of 150,000 by 1990.

However ambitious, the program by no means represents Irvine’s last roundup. Confining development to 40,000 acres along the coast, the company will keep its rich central plains under cultivation, preserve its inland mountain acreage as a wilderness recreation area. And while some companies have been allowed to buy plant sites outright (at prices as high as $32,000 an acre), the bulk of the developed property wilt be leased rather than sold—which guarantees Irvine a handsome income, plus the chance to sell out later at still higher prices.

Though Irvine’s development was inevitable, if only because of rising land taxes, it did not take to its new role without some struggles. Historically, the company was secretive and suspicious of outsiders—a tone set by the founder’s son and sole heir, mustachioed James Irvine Jr. For most of his 55 years as bossman, irascible “J.I.” ruled the range from the spread’s white frame “Mansion,” battling with squatters, poachers and Government agents. At off-the-ranch social occasions, he liked to bring along a pack of unhousebroken dogs to express whatever pique he might hold against his hosts. Found dead of a heart attack at 80 in a Montana creek, where he had gone on a fishing trip, J.I. had tried to preserve the ranch forever by willing controlling interest to a foundation ruled largely by his close friends.

Joan’s Crusade. Eventually, that stirred up more dust than the Hollywood movies (including All Quiet on the Western Front), which used the ranch as a favorite location. Lissome blonde Granddaughter Joan Irvine, now 34 and in her fourth marriage, took up J.I.’s manner, if not his mind. Beginning in 1957, she used her 20% stockholding to launch a series of court and boardroom broadsides against the “old bozos” in the foundation, sniping at the ranch’s $800,000 annual dividend as peanuts and charging mismanagement. The range war deepened in 1959, when Myford Irvine, Joan’s uncle and J.I.’s successor, was discovered in the mansion basement, dead of two shotgun wounds in the stomach and a bullet in the head—a mysterious case that was officially ruled a suicide.

Irvine’s board finally caved in to Joan’s crusade, in 1960 hired Planner Pereira to map out his development program. Not that Joan now considers the West won. Hired on as a neutral non-family company president in 1960, former Navy Secretary (under Eisenhower) and TWA President (under Howard Hughes) Charles Thomas soon likened his job to facing “crossed swords.” Even now, Joan has another antifoundation suit pending in court. William R. Mason, an engineer who succeeded Thomas in 1966, can say with some authority that “to my knowledge, there is no land program in the country which compares with what we have under way here.”