Llano del Rio, California

01The Lawyer Who Wanted to Build a Socialist City

Job Harriman was not a fringe figure. He had run for U.S. vice president in 1900 on the Socialist ticket alongside Eugene V. Debs, and in 1911 he came within a runoff of becoming mayor of Los Angeles. The McNamara brothers' last-minute confession to dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building collapsed his campaign overnight. Harriman decided that if the ballot box would not deliver socialism, he would build it from scratch on cheap desert land.

In 1913 his Llano del Rio Company quietly acquired acreage along Big Rock Creek, an intermittent stream tumbling out of the San Gabriel Mountains. Membership cost exactly 2,000 shares of stock at one dollar each, three references (ideally from union leaders), and a willingness to answer questions on socialist doctrine. A promised wage of four dollars a day, minus board and stock payments, was meant to bind labor to ownership. The colony's published rules also restricted membership to white applicants — a policy the colony's magazine defended in antiseptic language about "not deemed expedient to mix the races." It is the single fact that, more than a century later, prompted the Virginia commune Twin Oaks to retire Llano's name from one of its kitchens in 2022.

02A Desert City Drafted on Paper

Harriman hired Alice Constance Austin, a self-taught feminist architect, to design the colony's permanent city. Her plan was radical even now: a circular metropolis of kitchenless houses fed by a central commissary, communal daycare, built-in furniture, and heated tile floors meant to dissolve the domestic labor that kept women out of public life. Only fragments were ever built — a hotel, a meeting house, a silo, a dairy, a small granite aqueduct — but the drawings survive, and a young Gregory Ain, later one of California's important modernist architects, grew up watching them.

By 1916 the colony produced roughly 90 percent of its own food. There were orchards, alfalfa and corn fields, a fish hatchery, a poultry yard, a paint shop, a drama society, and a baseball team. Thursday and Saturday dances were the social currency of the place. One colonist wrote that the dances alone would repay "all the effort I have made to become a member of this Colony."

03What Happened to Llano del Rio?

Three forces broke it. First, water: California's Commissioner of Corporations denied the colony permission to dam Big Rock Creek, writing dryly that "your people do not seem to have the necessary amount of experience." The creek ran when it wanted to. Second, politics: a dissident faction calling itself the Brush Gang accused Harriman's board of behaving, in one member's words, "Czar-like," contradicting the colony's own Declaration of Principles. Third, World War I pulled young men into the draft and into wartime factory wages that Llano could not match.

In November 1917, Harriman led roughly sixty families east to Stables, Louisiana, where they refounded the experiment as New Llano. The California site filed for bankruptcy in 1918. Harriman, tubercular and exhausted, died in 1925.

04The Writer Who Came Back to the Ruins

In 1941, Aldous Huxley moved with his wife Maria and son Matthew into a small house in Llano, within sight of the colony's stone skeletons. A decade later he published an essay titled "Ozymandias, the Utopia That Failed" in the magazine Fortnight, borrowing Shelley's image of a shattered king in the sand. Huxley described Harriman's face as that of "a revivalist or a Shakespearean actor" and argued, perhaps unfairly, that the lawyer's weakness had been to think about human beings "only as a Socialist" while ignoring the desert's indifference to theory. The essay is the reason many Californians know Llano's name at all.

05Can You Visit Llano del Rio Today?

Yes, though there is almost nothing to guide you. The site sits just off Highway 138 near 165th Street East, in unincorporated Los Angeles County. It is California Historical Landmark No. 933, but the bronze plaque was stolen years ago and, according to the state, no replacement is planned. Land ownership is split between Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation and private parties. There is no fee, no ranger, no interpretive sign — only the hotel's granite walls, the ruined chimney of the assembly hall, and the crumbled aqueduct, baking in the Antelope Valley sun.

06What Remains of Llano del Rio Today

The hotel's two stone fireplaces still stand, roofless. A hollow silo leans nearby. Fragments of the small cobble-and-cement aqueduct run through the brush. Desert tortoises and Joshua trees have repossessed most of Austin's unbuilt circular city. The colony's paper archive — magazines, blueprints, photographs — lives on at UCLA and the Huntington Library, and in 2017 the Los Angeles Review of Books called the site "the ruins of utopia," which is about right. A century after bankruptcy, Llano del Rio, now a ghost town, is less a cautionary tale than an unfinished sentence in the desert, waiting for someone to read it aloud.