Mulholland, William (1855–1935), engineer, was born 11 September 1855 in Belfast, second child among four sons and two daughters (both of whom died in infancy) of Hugh Mulholland, mail guard, and Ellen Mulholland (née Deakers; d. 1862). In 1865 Hugh married Jane Smith, with whom he had three children. The family moved to Dublin by 1860, but in later life William Mulholland retained traces of a northern accent; he was occasionally mistaken for a Scot. He was educated at the Christian Brothers’ O'Connell School on North Richmond St., Dublin. He is said to have been a bright pupil but to have left because of some unspecified misdemeanour. After briefly attending a national school he ran away from home after quarrelling with his father; he eventually joined the British merchant marine at the age of 15. After four years at sea he left his ship in New York and worked as a lumberjack and travelling mechanic before attaching himself to a maternal uncle who ran a dry goods store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For the next two years he worked in the store until his uncle's family decided to move to California after several of the children contracted tuberculosis. Travelling via the isthmus of Panama, Mulholland arrived in Los Angeles in January 1877; the town then had some 10,000 inhabitants.
After briefly working at digging artesian wells (where he developed an interest in geology and began to educate himself as an engineer) and a short spell of gold-prospecting in Arizona, Mulholland was employed early in 1878 by the privately owned Los Angeles Water Co. to supervise and clean an irrigation ditch. While reading obsessively in his subject he rapidly rose in the company, occasionally leaving its service to help design irrigation schemes elsewhere. In 1886, at the age of 31, he became superintendent of the Los Angeles waterworks. He married (3 July 1890) Lillie Ferguson (d. 1915). They had seven children, of whom two sons and three daughters survived to adulthood.
Mulholland developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city's water supply and was retained when the city resumed control of the water system after the expiry of the company's lease. (Although Mulholland remained silent in public during the disputes over control, he later stated that his experiences convinced him that municipal ownership was more efficient and safeguarded the supply from political disputes; he said that for a city to lease out its water supply was like a man leasing out his wife (Mulholland, 121).) Mulholland was a member of the Los Angeles Celtic Club, of which he became president in 1922. However, his attitude towards his Irish origins was ambivalent. His speeches at opening ceremonies often included Irish jokes and anecdotes which cast the Irish in a poor light (portraying his Pittsburgh relatives as stage-Irish figures who kept a goat on their roof, and recalling an old Irish sailor telling him that the Irish didn't succeed because they lacked frugality and prudence). Asked by his children if he wanted to revisit Ireland, he snapped that he never wanted to see the ‘damned island’ again (ibid., 6). Mulholland appears to have been the sort of self-made man who is intensely proud of his achievements, resentful that he had to struggle so hard for recognition, and disdainful of those who failed to follow his example. A certain self-congratulation is implicit in his expressions of regret that well-paid labourers under his supervision failed to save their money and advance themselves.
In 1904 Mulholland took up a scheme to supply Los Angeles with water from the Owens valley further north by building a 235-mile-long (378 km) aqueduct, with reservoirs and other ancillary work on the headwaters of the Owens river for a further hundred miles. The scheme was originally devised by his former Water Co. associate, Frederick Eaton (mayor of Los Angeles 1898–9), who had bought up parcels of land in the valley to block a proposed local irrigation scheme. When the aqueduct proposal was made public the following year, it aroused some opposition (especially from farmers in the Owens valley who wanted the water used to irrigate their land), but this was overridden. Mulholland's reputation as a brilliant and dedicated public servant was of considerable assistance in the referendum required to authorise the issuing of municipal bonds to finance the aqueduct. The aqueduct, constructed between 1906 and 1913, was regarded as the greatest engineering scheme of its day apart from the Panama canal; it involved fifty-three miles of tunnelling (often through solid granite) and many technical innovations, and became the basis of Los Angeles's modern water supply and rapid expansion – by 1920 the city had 750,000 inhabitants. The project came in on budget and before time under Mulholland's incessant supervision; when the aqueduct was opened on 5 May 1913 he famously uttered the words: ‘There it is. Take it.’ Mulholland came to be regarded as one of the greatest engineers of his day, and combined his work for Los Angeles with consultancies for other American cities seeking to develop their water supplies. In 1914 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. He was asked to stand for the mayoralty of Los Angeles, but refused on the grounds that his autocratic temperament was not compatible with elective office.
The building of the aqueduct has also given rise to much controversy and numerous accusations of conspiracy. Eaton (whom Mulholland defended in public, though their private friendship later broke down) was certainly associated with other businessmen in land speculation around the terminus of the aqueduct at the San Fernando valley. Though Mulholland does not appear to have profited from this, he was accused of collusion with speculators by those who believed the aqueduct should have been extended on a ‘high line’ to serve neighbouring districts, but was able to show that the San Fernando terminus was preferable for technical reasons. Allegations that ‘water famines’ were deliberately engineered to stampede the Los Angeles citizens into supporting the bond issue are unsubstantiated.
After the completion of the aqueduct Mulholland continued to develop the Los Angeles water supply. From the early 1920s he lobbied for the municipalisation of the electricity supply and for the development of a new water supply for the city from the Colorado river via Boulder Dam. He was responsible for initiating large-scale surveying work which identified the preferred route for the Colorado river aqueduct, though the scheme was completed only after his death. Meanwhile, the increasing rate of water extraction from the Owens valley led to renewed local opposition, recapitulated criticisms of the original water seizure, and bomb attacks on the aqueduct (1924–7). Hostile newspaper coverage presented Mulholland as wielding municipal power to crush the hard-working descendants of the pioneers. Mulholland's critics see his actions in this ‘water war’ as aggravating an original water theft; his defenders argue that the opposition was manipulated by local speculators trying to force the city to buy Owens valley land at inflated prices, and point out that other American cities have developed water supplies at the expense of smaller communities without being similarly demonised.
Mulholland's last years were overshadowed by the collapse on the night of 12/13 March 1928 of the St Francis Dam, which he had built in the Santa Clarita valley northwest of Los Angeles between 1924 and 1926. About 500 people are estimated to have lost their lives in the resulting flood, the worst civil engineering disaster in twentieth-century America. Disputes continue about whether it was caused by construction faults (Mulholland had raised the height of the dam during construction without strengthening its base) or by geological factors, and – if the latter – whether they could have been detected with the technology available to Mulholland. Mulholland accepted formal responsibility for the disaster and resigned from his superintendency of the Los Angeles department of water and power (though he remained as a consultant). He died on 22 July 1935 of arteriosclerosis and apoplexy.
Mulholland can be seen as a product of the American progressive era, with its emphasis on technocracy, belief in the expert public servant, and confidence in big infrastructural projects undertaken for the general good even if sectoral interests suffer thereby. He has also become a central figure in a counter-myth of California history (strengthened by post-1960s loss of faith in the benevolence of officialdom), which emphasises the dark underside of Los Angeles's glamour, the role of powerful and exploitative business interests in shaping the state, and the ecological fragility of the irrigated southern California landscape. In this vision – represented, for example, by the film Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski, 1974) which brought a highly fictionalised version of the story of the Los Angeles water wars to audiences far beyond California, and in which the predatory tycoon Noah Cross and the doomed engineer Ellis Mulwray both contain elements of Mulholland's public image – Mulholland is presented as a Promethean figure whose achievements are inextricably bound up with transgression, and whose final collapse prefigures an inevitable and perhaps desirable apocalypse for California as a whole. This image is probably unfair to Mulholland, but its existence is part of his historical legacy.
He is commemorated by Mulholland Drive (linking Hollywood to the sea), Mulholland Dam (in the Hollywood Hills), and Mulholland Middle School in Van Nuys, California, and by a memorial fountain erected by his friends in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, where he began his career as a supervisor of ditches. In 1990 Life magazine named Mulholland as one of 100 individuals who had most influenced the shape of life in twentieth-century America.
