A Tour of the Center of the World
Just head toward the 21-foot pyramid in the middle of the desert.
By Sachi Cunningham on February 19, 2014. Photo by Video by Sachi Cunningham. Photograph by Jeff Minton for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
One morning in late January, Jacques-André Istel woke up at his home in Felicity, Calif., did 100 push-ups and 125 squats, swam in his elegantly lit lap pool, then went back upstairs, where he took a light breakfast in bed, as has been his custom since his boyhood in Paris. After breakfast, he dressed in a blue shirt and ascot and walked to his office at 1 Center of the World Plaza. It was Istel’s birthday; he was turning 85.
Istel is the founder of Felicity and the town’s longtime mayor, having been elected, almost 30 years ago, to an apparent lifetime term. The vote was unanimous: Istel voted for himself and so did Felicity’s other resident, Istel’s wife, Felicia. The town, established in 1986, consists of the Istels’ home and a half-dozen other buildings that the couple built on 2,600 acres in the middle of the desert near Yuma, Ariz., just off Interstate 8. At the north end, up an imposing staircase, sits the Church on the Hill at Felicity — inspired by a little white chapel in Brittany — that Istel built in 2007. The church is gorgeous and serene and looks eerily out of place, though less out of place than the 21-foot-tall stone-and-glass pyramid on the opposite end of town. The pyramid is there to mark the exact center of the world.
Arguably, any point on the surface of the globe could be considered the center of the world — the globe being almost a perfect sphere — and Istel doesn’t argue with that. “The center of the world could be in your pocket!” he told me. And yet, he has managed to make his center of the world the Official Center of the World: In May of 1985, Istel cajoled the Imperial County Board of Supervisors to join in his absurdist joke and designate that point in Felicity as the middle of everything. A plaque now marks the spot; visitors who pay a $3 fee can enter the pyramid and stand there.
Between the pyramid and the hill — in the bizarre heart of Felicity — is an array of triangular monuments. Most are 100 feet long, about forehead high and composed of 62 granite panels. Each panel weighs 477 pounds. Twenty-five years ago, Istel had a simple thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to engrave the names of some loved ones on a “Wall of Remembrance.” (“If you love people,” he said, “you want to remember them.”) So he hired an engraver and then, as that project begat other projects, a masterful young artist to etch portraits and historical scenes into the granite. There are now monuments chronicling, for example, the histories of French aviation, the French Foreign Legion, California, Arizona and the United States. It is an encyclopedic and sophisticated form of cave art. The monuments are anchored three feet into the ground with reinforced concrete. Istel specified to his engineers that they should last 4,000 years.
Very quickly, Istel could feel his so-called Museum of History in Granite consuming his life. (He researches and writes all the text, sometimes moving through 50 or 60 drafts of a single panel; Felicia, a former researcher and reporter at Sports Illustrated, proofs his copy.) But in 2004, he figured he could take on more. He began a set of eight monuments — 461 panels total, arranged in a compass rose, with a multilingual Rosetta Stone at its center. On them, he would record the “History of Humanity.” He’s now about a quarter of the way through: the story begins with an etching of the Big Bang and cuts off after a summary of Viking death rituals.
All together, what’s embedded at the center of Felicity amounts to a stupefying and unsummarizable catalog of human triumph, folly, idiosyncrasy and violence. Here is Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Here is Sandra Day O’Connor. The first recorded game of polo in 600 B.C. The expansion of Islam. H. G. Wells. Lao Tzu. The hamburger. A 19th-century political cartoon deriding Thomas Jefferson as a prairie dog, buckled over and vomiting money. The Ancient Greeks’ belief that diamonds were splinters of fallen stars. Advice from Julia Child: “If you are afraid of butter, use cream.” And because Istel can’t predict who or what his audience will be in four millenniums, he has developed a gift for conveying fundamental truths as though they’re being considered for the first time: “Beautiful and romantic, our moon profoundly influences humans.”
I arrived in Felicity on Istel’s birthday and was invited to stay in one of the 12 motel-style apartments that the couple built on the east side of the museum and were lately having trouble renting out. (One was occupied by an Ocean Spray produce inspector, who was visiting vegetable-processing plants in the area; in another was a former employee for the California Highway Patrol who had agreed to a monthlong lease and has so far stayed 11 years.) On the desk in my apartment was a formal letter, handwritten on mayoral stationery, inviting me for a birthday toast at a dive bar in Yuma called Jimmie Dee’s, then dinner at the Indian casino. “We will leave Felicity at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 28, 2014,” it said.
Also in town were a strait-laced, retired private-school headmaster named Donn Gaebelein and his wife, Norma Gaebelein. Donn is Istel’s oldest friend; they met almost 75 years ago, in eighth grade. At first, Gaebelein said, Felicity makes no sense: Why is any of it here? Why does this frenetic Frenchman keep compulsively building more of it? Take the church, Gaebelein said. Not only is Istel not religious; his mother was Jewish. And yet, he went through significant trouble to build this magnificent little chapel on a hill; in fact, he built the hill, too, hiring heavy machinery to push earth out of the flat desert and into a scrupulously engineered, seismically fit trapezoid 35 feet high. Istel, Gaebelein said, can articulate exactly why he felt obligated to build that hill for the church — “I’m a traditionalist, and I believe in protocol and courtesy; if you build a house for a higher power, for God, it should be the highest thing,” Istel would tell me — but he can’t explain why he built the church in the first place.
“Jacques will die not knowing why he built that chapel,” Gaebelein told me, “but also knowing that he had to.” Honestly, he added, you could say that about everything here. This was Gaebelein’s 15th stay in Felicity, he said — it’s how he and Norma dodge winters in New York. At some point, what looked like absurdity had tipped into profundity. “You have to live with this place, you have to sleep on this, to get the feel of its power,” he said.
Istel is handsome and fit, with a square jaw, olive skin and a sweep of slightly graying black hair that gets matted on his forehead by midday if he doesn’t keep an eye on it. He was sitting at his computer, ascot knotted, yellow sweater tied primly over his shoulders, when I came by his office the next morning. (The office is next to Felicity’s combination gift shop and post office and upstairs from the “brasserie,” where a woman named Debbie makes pretty good sandwiches.) Istel began relaying his life story, which, even before the part about starting a town in the middle of the desert, reads like a magical-realist novel.
He was born in Paris in 1929, the third of four children. His father, André Istel, was a distinguished financier — a partner in a couple of brokerage firms who served as an adviser to Charles de Gaulle and French delegate to the Bretton Woods conference, which established the I.M.F. and the World Bank. André was stern; Jacques characterizes much of his childhood as moldering boredom interrupted by corporal punishment. When he misbehaved, he would get whacked — first by his governess, then his mother, then his father. “It would go right up the chain of command,” he said. Of all the siblings, he was the most defiant. (Jacques-André’s younger brother, Yves-André, lived up to their father’s vision. He was a managing director at Lehman Brothers and now serves as a senior adviser at Rothschild.)
Jacques was 11 when the Nazis occupied Paris. “It was absolutely catastrophic,” he told me. His father got the family out on diplomatic passports and, after fleeing through Spain and Portugal, they arrived in New York in August 1940. “We assumed we had lost everything,” he said. But his mother, who taught Jacques and several neighbors’ children at home while living in Paris, eventually returned to find that the parents of these students had clandestinely rescued all of the Istels’ furniture during the war, then returned it. Even their laundry was washed and folded.
In New York, Istel felt uprooted and lost. He was sent to the Stony Brook School, a Christian boarding school on Long Island, where, despite not speaking a word of English, he was thrown into the eighth grade. One teacher gave him comic books instead of textbooks. Every night, he lay in bed weeping.
Then in 1943, the summer after he turned 14, Istel rode his bicycle 200 miles to Vermont, sleeping in barns and picking up a job mixing concrete. That went well, so the following summer, he decided he ought to hitchhike across the United States. He’d saved up $7 after all. He was struck by the openness and generosity of people he met; he was falling in love with America.
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