In winter, dense tule fog can descend without warning over downtown Bakersfield and the seemingly endless stretches of carrot fields and pistachio groves beyond. In summer, blazing heat empties the streets of pedestrians and bleaches the mirage-like undulating hills near the base of the Grapevine, that harrowing stretch of Interstate 5 that leads to and from Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley through the Tehachapi Mountains.
Manuel Muñoz, the writer and 2023 MacArthur Fellow, grew up in Dinuba, north of Bakersfield, where he set his literary crime novel, What You See in the Dark, a wildly imaginative 1950s-set spin on the making of the movie Psycho. He still marvels over how he got on a plane at 18 and left his home for Harvard. Living and teaching in Tucson now, he continues to be inspired by the Central Valley’s dusty towns and discounted people.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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The Grapevine, Muñoz says, “represents how global Los Angeles is versus how much more isolated and rural and cut off the whole Valley can sometimes seem. They’re worlds apart.”
For thousands of years, the Yokuts tribe lived here. Antelope, elk, and deer roamed a fertile forested area, its marshland fed by three lakes. Spanish colonizers and their Catholic mission system enslaved the Yokuts, and an 1833 malaria epidemic, introduced by fur trappers, decimated the tribe’s local population, which dropped from 20,000 to around 600 by 1910.
Nearly 30 years after the epidemic, Colonel Thomas Baker was credited with saying, “This is God’s country. Some day it will be filled with happy homes.”
Baker, founder of the city first incorporated in 1873, had headed west in search of gold. Instead, he reclaimed swampland and farmed beans, corn, potatoes, and alfalfa. Other settlers grew cotton and built irrigation that began to drain lakes and tributaries. By the early 1900s, the once-green landscape was dotted with hundreds of working oil wells. Fortunes were made. Bakersfield became known as “the Queen of the San Joaquin.”
Then something shifted. Locals blame the late comedian Johnny Carson, who in 1957 performed a stand-up gig here and thereafter described the city as “the armpit of California.”
Though Carson died 20 years ago, the taunt lingers. Yet, with homeownership increasingly elusive, Californians priced out of San Francisco and Los Angeles are ignoring the taunt and moving here—despite a crime rate that is startlingly higher than the California and national averages. To their surprise, they discover a city with a rich but often ignored history of art, music, and architecture.
In July 2024, more people searched for how to move from Los Angeles to Bakersfield than from any other city, according to Redfin. (San Franciscan searchers were next.) The data analysis platform Aterio reports that between 2020 and the end of 2025, Bakersfield’s population—around 411,000 at the start of 2024—will have grown by 8.7 percent, with an additional 5.6 percent growth predicted by 2030. The lure: This past September, the median closing price for a Los Angeles house was $1,012,476; in San Francisco, more than $1.4 million. Bakersfield’s median: $384,500.
“I didn’t expect to come back,” says Vikki Cruz, exhibition programs coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A Bakersfield native, a painter, and a former curator at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, she is one of numerous local millennials and Gen Xers, pandemic returnees, and new settlers who are revitalizing a city once dismissed as offering nothing but oil wells, croplands, and pollution.
Cruz and her husband, Wesley Brown, a financial analyst at LACMA, returned during the COVID-19 shutdown to work from their Bakersfield investment cottage. Now they stay in L.A. only a night or two a week. “During the pandemic, we were able to save,” says Cruz, who refers to returnees as Bakersfield Boomerangs. “We purchased another home. So we’ve really locked it down.”
When Ademar Sanchez and Bill Eggert told friends they were moving to Bakersfield from their Haight-Ashbury apartment in San Francisco, they heard “Why?”
The “why” was a 2,400-square-foot 1953 house designed by the local architect Whitney Biggar, an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright. Sanchez and Eggert had searched unsuccessfully online for distinctive homes in the Midwest and had no intention of staying in California until the sight of this house’s floating staircase hit Eggert as he walked in. “I knew I wanted it,” he says.
Inside, lofty windows overlook nearly half an acre planted with tangerine, peach, orange, pear, guava, and loquat trees. A treehouse-feel office opens to one of three decks. A basement ripe for remodeling brings the square footage to nearly 5,000. “It’s a lot of house,” Eggert keeps telling me, stubbled and wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, as he shows the place off on a Sunday afternoon.
For months, they wielded a putty knife and a hammer, chipping away ugly white bathroom tile to uncover the original seafoam color. A mint-green O’Keefe & Merritt stove is still being refurbished, but a vintage Norge refrigerator awaits installation, and new hardwood floors gleam in the beam-ceilinged living room.
Eggert works in risk management and Sanchez in banking, so one might expect a whiff of remorse over the time-consuming expense of restoration. “Homeownership is no joke,” says Sanchez, who has a chevron mustache and dark curly hair.
Chirping birds and squirrels rustling in eucalyptus trees have replaced the Haight’s sirens, garbage trucks, and night cries of the distressed. In 2022, a year in which the median California home price topped $800,000, the pair paid $449,500. So, no regrets.
“We knew nothing about Bakersfield, aside from it being ‘the armpit of America,’ ” Sanchez says, sitting on a turquoise upholstered sofa near an 18-foot-high brick fireplace that hints of Wright. “But there’s more to it than you see just driving through and smelling the oil and the agriculture.”
THE ARTIST’S EYE
I became aware of Bakersfield about a year and a half ago, when I heard about RAM gallery, an ambitious venture created by Rachel McCullah Wainwright, who succeeded Cruz as curator at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.
Decades before, on my way to San Francisco, I had detoured to one of Bakersfield’s famed Basque restaurants for a meal of lamb chops, beans, and crusty bread. Since then, I hadn’t given the place a thought, despite the late critic Jonathan Gold’s persistent raves about the local cuisine: “All garlic and cholesterol and all-you-can-eat.”
On a hot August evening in 2023, I made my way to RAM, blocks from the still-thriving restaurant row in Old Town Kern, a run-down neighborhood of public housing and empty storefronts east of downtown. The Bakersfield poverty rate is 16.5 percent, higher than California’s overall 12.1 percent. In East Bakersfield, it’s 45.62 percent.
Steps away from a cluster of men shooting up in the entrance to an abandoned building was Wainwright’s sophisticated gem of a gallery, where a group show incorporated painting and sculpture by artists connected to Bakersfield’s Kern County, including Ali Vaughan, whose work reflects the vast surrounding farmlands that helped build the city. There were paintings, too, by Venice, California–based Charles Arnoldi, of the midcentury West Coast circle that included Ed Ruscha, Laddie John Dill, and the late Billy Al Bengston. Guests cheek-kissed and milled about the airy 3,500-square-foot space as tattooed servers with nose rings offered olive skewers and glasses of champagne.
“There is an awkward tension with what goes on outside of RAM and what goes on inside,” admits Wainwright, who is dark-haired, intense, and partial to urban-chic designer wear yet has a down-to-earth disdain for fashionably incomprehensible artspeak. She once expected her Cal State Bakersfield art history degree to vault her out of her native Central Valley. Instead, she stayed, determined to change the cityscape.
“We’re in it for the long haul,” she says about Old Town Kern, which she loves despite its grit. “What justice is art doing if it only exists in New York or L.A.?”
RAM, it turns out, was born after Wainwright mounted a 2018 museum survey of Arnoldi’s work and confessed to him her dream of opening her own gallery. In 2019, needing storage for his often massive wood sculptures, abstracts, and well-known stick paintings, Arnoldi impulsively paid $350,000 for a 7,500-square-foot Bakersfield property. “A building like that in Venice would cost $15 million,” he tells me.
Impressed by Wainwright, he offered her half the space.
The pandemic intervened, and Wainwright remained at the Bakersfield Museum of Art while her British-transplant engineer husband, Henry, set to work building out the expansive gallery to include smaller, intimate spaces. RAM opened in March 2023.
“A couple of hundred people showed up,” remembers Arnoldi. “Even a couple of people in black tie.”
That show included the pop- and hip-hop-influenced paintings of Bakersfield native Kristopher Raos as well as witty installations by the noted New York– and Los Angeles–based conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg. The latter keeps an extension to his L.A. studio in downtown’s historic Bakersfield Californian Building, designed by Charles H. Biggar, father of Whitney Biggar, architect for the Eggert-Sanchez house. Ruppersberg visits town with his partner, Annette Leddy, a onetime curator-collector for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, who spent her early childhood in the area.
Ruppersberg and Arnoldi are relative latecomers to the Bakersfield art world. Ruscha, Joe Goode, Lita Albuquerque, Ed Moses, and Mary Weatherford, among others, spent time as visiting artists in Cal State Bakersfield’s Art and Art History Department.
As I drove around Bakersfield on that first trip, neon signs atop the 1928 Padre Hotel, the art deco Fox Theater, and the Nile Theater acted as beacons in unknown terrain. Another evening, downtown, after I watched couples fling their partners about the tiny dance floor at Rooster’s Honky Tonk, I was charmed to come across Guthrie’s Alley Cat, a dive bar around the corner whose animated sign added to the city’s noir glow.
Weatherford was struck by Bakersfield’s neon too, even its burned-out signage. Starting with her 2012 series The Bakersfield Project, she began incorporating lit tubing into her oversize abstract canvases. Speaking to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, she described the Bakersfield she encountered as “like Texas inside California, or the town that time forgot.”
LIVING IN HARMONY
Maybe not anymore.
“It’s a town that punches above its weight,” says businessperson and architecture enthusiast David Coffey, house manager and curator for the soaring 1961 Ablin House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Creator of the Bakersfield Built symposium, Coffey divides his time between a 1941 Los Angeles apartment designed by Richard Neutra and a 1937 Neutra modernist house in Bakersfield. Twenty-two years ago, he moved here simply for the house. “Tell someone you’re from Bakersfield, and there’s an echo effect,” Coffey says. “Wait three beats, and the next thing you hear is ‘Bakersfield?’ ”
Yet Maristella Casciato, a senior curator of architectural collections for the Getty Research Institute and a Rome native, moved from Brentwood to work at the Wright house for a period during the pandemic. “There’s a humanity,” she says about Bakersfield. “You feel comfortable. You feel yourself.”
Wright and Neutra are not the only notable architects who built in Bakersfield. Decades ago, John Lautner, Cliff May, Eugene Kinn Choy, and Edward H. Fickett all designed properties here. A school of young architects, one of them Choy, emerged from Kern County Union High classes taught by the late Clarence Cullimore Sr., who designed the shuttered 1929 Granada Theatre, which neighbors RAM. These students went on to graduate from the University of Southern California, UC Berkeley, and Ivy League universities. Some came home to create and build.
Now others are building and restoring.
In 2016, Daniel Cater returned from working at a large San Francisco company to start his own architecture firm. “San Francisco is a great place to dream, but dreams don’t always translate,” Cater says. “I never got to connect to the end story.”
In downtown Bakersfield, he’s designing upscale apartment buildings that are transforming their neighborhoods by attracting new retail businesses and cafés. And he’s the architect tasked with reimagining the city’s art moderne Woolworth’s building, one of a handful of downtown structures to have withstood a 1952 earthquake and its aftershocks.
Emily Waite; her husband, Sherod; and his now-former business partner in the financial advisory firm Moneywise plunked down $1.9 million in 2021 to buy the downtown former five-and-dime. Moneywise will take over the second floor. The first floor and basement will become a cultural hub. Converted into an antiques mall after the last Woolworth’s in the United States closed in 1997, the Bakersfield store housed the only still-functioning luncheonette from the U.S. chain.
“A lot of time in Bakersfield, we have outside investors or people from L.A. who purchase buildings, and then they just sit there,” says Waite, who has a pink-tinted wavy bob. “We didn’t want that to happen.”
First-floor retail space will include the Bakersfield Sound Co., which sells music gear, offers lessons, and presents concerts. But the focal point will be the 74-foot-long lunch counter, which will have burgers, fries, and shakes on the menu. It will also be a reminder of the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, student sit-ins that led Woolworth’s to desegregate.
To help explain that history to visitors when the building opens—in March, if all goes as planned—Cecil Brown, a digital humanities lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley, is experimenting with an immersive, augmented-reality feature to include the songs and voices of real people from Greensboro and Bakersfield. “It was a cathartic moment for not just Black kids but white kids,” says Brown. “It was all symbolic. It wasn’t about the cup of coffee.”
RAM’s Wainwright is also talking with Waite about addressing a blank wall above the lunch counter that calls for a mural or paintings by BIPOC artists.
A musical performance space, a bar, a recording studio, and practice rooms will be in the basement. “We don’t have a lot of amenities for the creative community here in town, so we want to provide a place,” says Waite, a singer-songwriter. That lack is surprising, since music is as much a part of Bakersfield’s history as its architecture.
Once regarded as Nashville West, the city is best known for the Bakersfield Sound: the raw steel guitars and fiddles that backed Merle Haggard (born in neighboring Oildale) and Texas émigré Buck Owens.
On weekends, grannies in prairie dresses and cowboy boots, young couples, and teens still line dance at the late Owens’s Crystal Palace to country and western bands. The award-winning Johnny Owens and the Bakersfield Sound, headed by Buck’s youngest son, is often on the bill. Owens always ends the set with his dad’s hit “The Streets of Bakersfield,” written by local country-gospel composer Homer Joy: “I’ve spent a thousand miles of thumbin’ / Yes, I’ve worn blisters on my heels / Trying to find me something better / Here on the streets of Bakersfield.”
Though it remains open, the 550-seat Palace is, sadly, up for sale, a belated victim of the pandemic, says Owens.
Country wasn’t the only sound that came west with the Dust Bowl refugees, derisively nicknamed Okies and brought to life by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. The resonant-voiced, Grammy-winning jazz singer Gregory Porter, whose mother was a preacher, credits Bakersfield’s vibrant southern-gospel scene as an influence. Porter and Jonathan Davis—frontman for the nu metal band Korn and once labeled “the ultimate hybrid misfit” by Britain’s Melody Maker magazine—both attended the city’s Highland High School.
Indeed, something in the Bakersfield air, murky as it can be, seems to spawn creativity.
Another temporary pandemic returnee, New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck taught classes on Instagram from her parents’ kitchen and collaborated via Zoom with celebrated choreographer William Forsythe on The Barre Project (“A half-hour of perfection,” said the Guardian). Her early Bakersfield training at her mother’s dance studio still affects her dancing and choreography, Peck tells me in an email: “I am so grateful.”
“There has always been this world that is beyond just the surface,” says Claire Leddy Hackett, retired chair of the performing arts department at Marymount High School in L.A. “It’s not all about cowboys, though cowboys certainly made their mark.”
Hackett’s grandmother, the artist Stephanie Stockton—married to Christopher B. Stockton of the pioneering California family—helped found the Cunningham Memorial Art Gallery, which evolved into today’s Bakersfield Museum of Art. Hackett spent her Bakersfield childhood running between her grandparents’ 1800s farmhouse, which she now owns and visits, and the Neutra post-and-beam home built by her parents, Kern County district attorney Albert Leddy and Patricia Stockton Leddy. Patricia was an artist, editor, and publisher of the Santa Barbara Review and a dancer who studied with Martha Graham. The Leddys commissioned plans from Neutra and built the place themselves.
When Hackett was around three, her father lifted her up a ladder, handed her a hammer, and explained that they were about to build the roof. “I remember when my mother said, ‘This wall can’t be here,’ and she and my father taking sledgehammers, knocking down a wall, and creating a larger space,” she says.
After the house was finished, Neutra and his wife would visit. He sketched, and Dione Neutra played her cello.
“There was definitely a small world, and a larger world, of very interesting people,” says Hackett. “It’s partly an accident, but it’s partly the story of California, in that it has drawn people to it.”
CHANGE CATALYST
A year after my first visit to RAM, on another warm August evening, the gallery hosts an opening in an Old Town Kern that is seeing further transition. More affordable housing is going up, and a few blocks from the gallery, plans are underway to reopen Narducci’s restaurant, at the site where President William McKinley once slept, when it was the Cesmat Hotel. For a few years, Vice Mayor and Councilmember Andrae Gonzales has envisioned turning the nearby and long-closed Sumner Train Depot, built in 1889, when East Bakersfield was the town of Sumner, into a gathering place with food, art, and retail space. The project is gaining steam. “It’s huge, what Rachel has done,” Gonzales says. “She has become the catalyst for revitalization in that corner of Old Town.”
“Artists who have come here see the potential,” says Wainwright, whose collector base is mostly buyers in their 30s to early 50s. “People who are just buying homes, people who are just starting collections and reevaluating what it means to be a collector as more than just decorating your house. It’s supporting the arts. It’s supporting culture.”
Tonight’s show is a collaboration with the nonprofit White Wolf Wellness Foundation, through which Art Institute of Chicago graduate Stephen Winters and his wife, Katherine, are restoring 13.7 acres along the Kern River. A saxophonist plays soft jazz while a pair of the couple’s Nigerian dwarf goats stand in a pen munching from a feed bag. Winters’s paintings and drawings of barn animals and wildlife nearly sell out.
“She’s one of those rare blends of a culturally sensitive and creative person that’s also got their shit together,” Stephen says of Wainwright. “She can probably go into the business world and be a killer, but she’s deciding to fight for art.”
He and Katherine, a Bakersfield native, were heading from Chicago to the Central Coast when they stopped in Bakersfield and stayed. It was a place, they thought, where millennials could get things done.
“I just feel like Bakersfield has been taken advantage of,” Katherine says. “It’s kind of like an abused person where you don’t realize, Honey, you’re worth more.”•
Louise Farr is based in Los Angeles, where she’s a contributing editor for the Writers Guild of America West magazine. She’s the author of the true-crime book The Sunset Murders.
