DeWitt Reaburn and Mulholland Highway. Photo by Joann Deutch

LOS ANGELES—The chief engineer of Mulholland Highway (now Mulholland Drive), DeWitt L. Reaburn, was unceremoniously sacked in 1925 despite having successfully guided the Mulholland project to completion.  At the time of his ouster, he was overseeing the widening of Cahuenga Pass, which cost $100 million, and the completion of Beverly Boulevard connecting the valley and the city for $1 million. His name was practically erased from memory.  He’s not listed as a city engineer; he doesn’t even have a Wiki entry.

While Mulholland Scenic Highway began as the vision of William Mulholland, who understood that in order to populate the hillsides of Los Angeles we needed water and gravity, hence the need for Mulholland Highway. But it was not Mulholland who actually engineered and supervised the building of Mulholland.  That task was left to his assistant from the Los Angeles Aqueduct project, DeWitt L. Reaburn.

So who was Dewitt L. Reaburn and why did he get fired?  For a man who accomplished so much, why is it that his story is so hard to dig up? He was elected to the Society of Civil Engineers in 1904 which marked the beginning of his career.  He was attached to the Los Angeles Aqueduct project sometime between 1908 and 1913 in his capacity as the Saugus Division Engineer.  In the late 1910s he became the superintendent of Mount Rainier National Park, and this period marked the beginning of our National Park Service.  Reaburn’s next major project was Mulholland Highway, which was in the planning stages beginning in 1922.  By the time it was funded and completed it was December 27, 1924.  On August 22, 1925 the Los Angeles Times headline read, “Builder of Mulholland High Way Ousted by City for ‘Administrative’ Reasons.”

The Los Angeles Times decried the dismissal as the workings of Los Angeles’ republican Mayor George Cryer, who was elected as a reformer, along with the “city political boss” Kent Parrot and “the City Hall Gang,” who sought to place these construction projects and their funding under the control of the newly appointed city engineer. When the vote to oust Reaburn was taken, the decisive third member of the Board of Public Works was absent from Los Angeles. During other decisive votes, two board members were in jail facing charges of accepting bribes.  Allegations were hurled that Reaburn squandered money and poorly “administered” the contracts.  Reaburn’s supporters pointed out that, in fact, his projects came in early and under budget.  The new city engineer was to be paid $2,500, which was more than Reaburn received. Reaburn’s supporters asked where, in fact, were the savings?  The reply was that “City employees could attend to these matters as part of their usual duties.”  So City Council abolished Reaburn’s job, fired him, promptly reestablished the job and appointed John Shaw.  

Allegations abounded that Cryer was controlled by the city's political boss, Kent Kane Parrot, and a coterie of bootleggers and criminals, including "vice kingpin" Charles H. Crawford (aka The Gray Wolf of Spring Street). The loosely organized crime syndicate operating within the city government became known as "the City Hall Gang" during the 1920s. It was the stuff of Raymond Chandler’s villains. Crawford’s widow even built the original shopping mall, “Crossroads of the Worlds,” on Sunset Boulevard as a memorial to the gangland warfare where her husband died.

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