Eventually, the original speculators sold their interests in the town. Many of these lots were purchased by buyers who had never actually visited the region. Of the initial 4,000-acre purchase, the real estate speculators subdivided the land into 4,465 lots. In reality, the mostly barren region of the High Desert had a history of being used for filming movies and television Westerns which capitalized on the area’s sparse desert landscape, and the manmade lakes were only around 5 feet deep. They took a small natural lake formed in a basin around Lovejoy Spring and developed it into a larger pair of artificially filled lakes, one dedicated to fishing and one to recreational boating and swimming.Īlong with the new lake and name came a new image, reinforced by advertising portraying the area as a resort destination and mentions of a country club and lakefront luxury lots. Once called Wilsona after then-president Woodrow Wilson, and then Los Angeles Buttes, real estate speculators in the 1960s Antelope Valley development boom changed the name to Lake Los Angeles. Lake Los Angeles sits lakeless on the western edge of the Mojave Desert at an elevation of over 2,600 feet, feeling much closer to an eastern California desert town and much further from the metropolitan image evoked by the name Los Angeles. Instead, the now-nonexistent lake is a remnant of the town’s manipulative speculative real estate history. Lying over 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles, in the eastern Antelope Valley, is a community named Lake Los Angeles.