The Battle of Ft. Ord

Abrams Park is a subdivision of low-rise duplexes overlooking sparkling Monterey Bay. Its streets are a tangle of loopy cul-de-sacs, embracing playgrounds and islands of overgrown shrubs. The city of Monterey, with its famous aquarium, museums, parks, golf courses and Fisherman's Wharf, lies 10 minutes away, and the beach is reachable by bike. As a place to raise a family, Abrams Park would be hard to beat. Yet it is largely deserted. Weeds grow waist high in lawns and the houses' windows are either broken or blinded by plywood. The silence is absolute.

I'm on my bicycle, and in the course of an afternoon I've ridden for miles through one abandoned neighborhood after another, each filled with residences ranging from boxy cinder-block duplexes to enviable ranch houses. It's like being in one of those creepy end-of-the-world movies. A door creaks in the breeze; pushing it open, I find myself in a sunny living room with a spotless white carpet and clean paint. The stove and refrigerator appear new. A water heater--its labels still fresh--stands in a closet.

This ghost city is the corpse of Ft. Ord, one of the largest installations ever built by the United States Army. Stretching from the beach to the foothills of the coastal range, it is the size of San Francisco. In addition to houses, I pass soaring auditoriums, baseball diamonds, gymnasiums, an airfield, office buildings, steepled chapels, a hospital and enormous tank hangars encircling 10-acre parking lots--a skateboarder's dream. There are regimental rows of wooden barracks by the hundreds, and dormitories stenciled with the names of the rifle companies that occupied them--"Recon: Quick Silent Deadly." Just about everything is painted a dreary Army beige and surrounded by wind-whipped palm grass, untouched for nearly a decade.

Ft. Ord was the largest base to be shut down in a wave of military installation downsizing after the Cold War ended. When it closed in 1994, its 45 square miles of extraordinary beaches, parkland and wildlife habitat--along with more than 10,000 buildings--were to revert to civilian use. For surrounding Monterey County, that gift amounted to a miracle in a region that has the greatest need for affordable housing in the United States. The National Assn. of Home Builders surveyed 190 places last year, comparing housing prices with local wages, and found that Salinas--the Monterey County seat, 16 miles from here--is the least affordable in the country, followed by Santa Cruz, 25 miles to the north, and Watsonville, which lies smack in the middle of the bay's coastline 11 miles away.