Tustin, California

Columbus Tustin platted the town that bears his name in eighteen seventy, laying out a grid of lots on land he had bought from the old Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. Tustin had come to California during the Gold Rush, failed to find gold, and pivoted to real estate, which turned out to be the better bet. He promoted his new townsite in Los Angeles newspapers, luring settlers with promises of fertile soil and mild winters.

Orange and walnut groves took hold. Tustin incorporated in nineteen twenty-seven and spent the mid-twentieth century as a quiet suburban enclave. Its most dramatic modern chapter came when the Marine Corps Air Station Tustin closed in nineteen ninety-nine, leaving two of the largest free-standing wooden structures in the world, enormous World War Two blimp hangars, standing empty on a sixteen-hundred-acre site.

One of them burned in twenty twenty-three, and the land is still being redeveloped today.