What Lake Havasu City is known for

Lake Havasu City is a planned Arizona town on a man-made reservoir shore, known for a genuine London bridge that it bought and shipped across an ocean stone by stone, with a channel dug beneath it. The city now draws more than 800,000 visitors a year, and tourism brings in some 835 million dollars in direct spending.

A shoreline with no famous draw

Robert McCulloch bought this shoreline in 1958, 3,353 acres of river country that was Mojave land before Parker Dam raised the lake. On it stood a wartime airstrip and the Spratts’ fly-in fishing resort, open since 1950. With C.V. Wood, who laid out Disneyland, he platted a city in 1963, and early lot sales were slow.

A desert land promotion lives or dies on foot traffic it does not yet have. McCulloch needed a reason for buyers to drive out and look, something a rival subdivision could not copy across the highway. Fish and warm water were not enough.

Buying a landmark

In 1968 McCulloch paid the City of London $2.46 million for the London Bridge, which was sinking under traffic and for sale. Its facing, roughly 10,000 numbered stones, went by Panama Canal to Arizona and was re-hung over a new concrete core. Only then was a channel dug beneath it. The bridge was rededicated in October 1971.

What the bridge earns

The stunt worked and never stopped. The lots sold, the town grew, and today Lake Havasu City holds close to 60,000 people. The city now draws more than 800,000 visitors a year.

Why it worked

In 1963 this shoreline held little the outside world wanted to buy, so a draw had to be imported and committed to. Anyone can advertise cheap desert lots. Only Lake Havasu City could offer the original stone of a real London bridge, re-hung over a new core, spanning a channel dug for it, one improbable fact no competitor could match.

McCulloch did not just gesture. He paid millions and moved 10,000 tons of stone across an ocean. Absurdity was the point: a town nobody can forget is a town people drive to.