Nestled in the hills of Beachwood Canyon, the community of 300-odd souls known as Krotona was for a time in the early 20th century the national headquarters of the esoteric, high-minded Theosophical Society. Here, followers of Helena P. Blavatsky, founder of the theosophy movement, lived, meditated, studied and worked in fantastical buildings designed for them by prominent architects including Richard Requa and Arthur and Alfred Heinemen. A reporter visiting Krotona described an idyllic scene:

[Outside] you won't see nor hear any movement … except the birds in the trees, the humming insects in the lazy sunshine, and the daring goldfish in the splashy fountains, while the roses nod to you, and the little Moorish summer houses with their enveloping vines will make you sure you've discovered a bit of dreamland.

But this utopian dreamland was not to last. Annoyed by increasingly cosmopolitan Hollywood, the Theosophist’s decamped for Ojai in 1924, where they remain to this day. Many of their Beachwood Canyon buildings, including the iconic Krotona Inn, are now sought after apartments and luxury estates.

According to journalist Bonnie Johnson, exiled Mexican anarchist and social revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon rented a 5-acre plot at Silverlake’s Ivanhoe Reservoir in 1914. Here, he and his followers lived in a ramshackle commune of small shacks, growing produce and poultry which they sold in Downtown Los Angeles.

The commune also produced Regeneración, a revolutionary newspaper. In 1916, the community was raided and Magon was arrested (at the urging of the bellicose Harrison Gray Otis, whose hatred of socialists and communists knew no bounds). The commune was soon disbanded, and Magon was convicted of sedition. He died at Leavenworth Prison.

Perhaps California’s most famous Utopian experiment, this socialist colony deep in the Antelope Valley was incorporated in 1913. Founded by famed socialist Job Harriman, Llano Del Rio had at its peak some 1,500 residents attempting a communal, co-equal way of life in the harsh, deserted desert. By 1917, the commune boasted its own hotel, Montessori school, art studio, hatchery, library, dairy, barbershop, machine shop and a printing press which cranked out Harriman’s numerous socialist tracts.

But the colonies glory day’s proved to be short-lived. In 1918, Llano Del Rio was abandoned, the victim of in-fighting, financial woes and that old California problem- lack of water. Some colonists followed Harriman to New Llano in Louisiana, while others stayed in the Antelope Valley.

Decades later, writer Aldous Huxley interviewed some of the Llano colonists. “All of them bore witness to the happiness of those first few months at Llano,” he wrote. “Housing, to be sure, was inadequate: food monotonous, and work extremely hard. But there was a sense of shared high purpose, a sustaining conviction that one had broken out of an age-old prison and was marching, shoulder to shoulder, with loyal comrades, into a promised land.”

Founded by the ironically wealthy progressive reporter William Ellsworth Smythe, the “Little Landers” cooperative was based on Smythe’s belief that, “a little land and a living, surely, is better than a desperate struggle and great wealth.” Believing that California was the promised land for the common man, he started the first Little Landers farming commune near San Diego in 1908. In 1913, he teamed with a developer to start a second commune on 273 acres of boulder-strewn ranch-land in the Tujunga Valley.

The new community, made up mostly of idealistic, progressive Angelino’s escaping the city, centered around Bolton Hall, which (like many of the Little Landers homes) was constructed with boulders on the land. Among the "Little Landers" were asthma sufferers, Civil War vets, middle aged bachelors, eccentric artists and, according to settler Mabel Hatch,"lots and lots of spinsters.” Independent women flourished in the new community, where arts and crafts, hard work, and individuality were all prized.

But the rocky soil proved inhospitable to farming, and lack of water and frequent fires caused more problems. By the 1920s, many of the original Little Landers sold their plots, and Bolton Hall was turned into an American Legion. Today, Bolton Hall is a museum, where you can learn about this little, soft-hearted community, which never really found its footing on the harsh Tuhunga terrain.

Founded in Los Angeles by former addict Charles E. Dederich in 1958, Synanon started out as an innovative drug rehab program. According to journalist Matt Novak, Dederich soon transformed Synanon into an experimental communal society that he hoped would transform the world. "This is the kind of revolution that moved the world from Judaism to Catholicism to Protestantism to Synanism," Dederich said. "This is a total revolution game."

Starting in 1967, Synanon members lived and worked out of the Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, once a grand jazz age hotel that had fallen on hard times. With properties all over the state, the group grew to include non-addicts, who simply wanted to become part of the groups communal way of living. Over the 1970s, Synanon transformed into a sinister religious cult. Dederich and his followers resorted to violence in an attempt to silence critics. They failed. In 1991, Synanon permanently disbanded.

Today, Casa del Mar is once again a beautiful, luxurious hotel—an entirely different kind of Utopia.

In the late 1960s, famed hippie prankster Hugh Romney, aka Wavy Gravy, and his nomadic band of counter-culture followers lived in this ramshackle commune, which they nicknamed the Hog Farm. High in the deserted hills above Sylmar, commune members were usually high on LSD, pot, or a combination of both. In 1968, a reporter for Avant Garde magazine reported on the unique way the community was run:

Administration of the commune is on a daily rotation basis with everyone, kids included, taking turns as "Dance Master" or "Dance Mistress." "When you have this many people living together," Romney observes, "you've got to dance or you step on somebody's hand." The Dance Master sees that things get done by someone who wants to do them. He coordinates. He mobilizes the as-needed "garbage runs". Several times a week, by law, the supermarkets throw out tons of perfectly edible vegetables and fruit. The Hog Famers browse in these remains, unobtrusive parasites on the nutritive wastes of an affluent society. The Dance Mistress sees to the day's meals. Vegetable stews and cheap brown rice feed the people.

The group soon decamped for less dusty quarters. Wavy Gravy and his followers still live at various Hog Farm locations, including one in Berkeley. The old Sylmar location is now owned by a small community church.

Writing for Curbed LA, Steven Treffers says that in 1912, Jared S. Torrance and his partners, the founders of Torrence, set out to create their own version of Utopia—a “modern industrial city” exempt from unions and zoning laws. They hired famed SoCal modernist Irving J. Gill to design their planned town’s buildings. He was particularly interested the creation of economically democratic workers neighborhood’s of single-family homes, based on the belief that they would encourage “moral behaviors while discouraging unrest.”

On the newly laid out Gramercy Avenue, Gill designed 10 four-room bungalows of concrete and stucco, with innovative features that made them hygienic and hospitable. They were "almost monastic in their austere simplicity, the wide, unbroken wall spaces in their neutral tints proclaim peace, restful quiet." Torrance residents, however, were unimpressed with Gill’s stark version of Utopia, and the entire project floundered.

Torrance would not grown substantially LA’s post-war suburban boom. Today, only three of Gill’s Utopian residences remain.

Founded by a group of Theosophists in 1903, Halcyon is located on 125-acres in San Louis Obispo County. Settled by New York Theosophists Francia LaDue and Dr. William Dower, at its height, the cooperative community included a working farm, craft shops, a general store, world-class library, and a printing press. The Blue Star Memorial Temple named after LaDue, known as the “Blue Star,” was designed by well-known LA architect Theodore Eisen in 1923. Today, it is known as “The Temple of the People.”

Halcyon now includes single family homes, and boasts around 100 members. The community still publishes the Theosophical magazine the Artisan, started by the founders decades ago.

This bohemian Santa Barbara neighborhood started as place for post-war beatniks to live and create in a rustic, non-judgemental community. “This sleepy-looking corner of Santa Barbara was once the epicenter of one of California’s most spirited utopian communities,” reporter Katherine Stewart writes, “where naked nymphs danced on grapes harvested from the Santa Ynez Valley, then rinsed off in the radical innovation we now know as the hot tub.”

Centered along winding Mountain Drive, this unofficial commune was the home of architects, artists, painters and writers. Lovingly called the “chicken yard of Monticito,” it was famous for its annual Wine Stomp, and weekly community get-togethers. These included the men’s only Sunset Club, and the women’s only Stitch and Bitch. Many residents were committed nudists and believed in free love and experimental drug use.

“It was a utopia if you were an ‘alpha male’,” recalled Judy Young, a frequent visitor. “These men spawned dynasties, made their houses by hand and worked whatever their art was. They wanted to have interesting, aesthetic lives, and they did. They all drank heavily and smoked. They thought they could get away with it forever. But like all dreams, it didn’t last.”

According to Stewart, Mountain Drive is still a close-knit-, if more traditional and family-friendly- community. “Back in the 1960s, parents were off doing their own thing and weren’t paying very close attention to us kids,” one resident told her. “Today, however, the kids are the focus. There are 30 or 40 kids at every event. And they’re well cared for.”

This legendary music-producing, vegetarian, free-love hippie-cult, founded by Jim Baker aka Father Yod, created their own version of Utopia in the “Mother House,” a sprawling Los Feliz mansion built by the blue-blooded Chandler family in 1914. For one year, in 1972, they lived their communal lifestyle in the mansion, wearing all-white, practicing free love, and raising their children as a group, until the Chandler’s declined to renew their lease. “We were kind to everyone,” a member recalled, “and kept the house immaculate, but we were up at 3:30 a.m. every morning for meditation, played music, and liked to walk around nude, among other things. sometimes we would see men on the hill peering down at us with binoculars, and police helicopters occasionally hovered over the compound."

The Source then moved to the “Father House,” an estate in Nichols Canyon where 140 people crammed into the three-bedroom home. To make more space, they built “beehives,-” small wooden enclosures where members could sleep. In 1974, Father Yod and his followers moved to Hawaii, where he died a year later in a hang-gliding accident.

Madame Katherine Tingley, known as “the purple mother,” was named successor to Theosophical Society president William Q. Judge in 1896. In 1900, she decamped to Point Loma and opened the “School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity,” and other facilities- including housing for fellow Theosophists and the first Greek Theater in America. Nicknamed “Lomaland,” the colony was an important hub for the arts in Southern California. Today, Lomaland is home to Point Loma Nazarene College.

Located 30 miles outside of Bakersfield, this town was founded in 1908 by Colonel Allen Allensworth, a former slave. Allensworth was a minister, teacher and the first black man to become a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. Allensworth was the only California town funded and governed solely by black Americans. “Their dream of developing an abundant and thriving community stemmed directly from a strong belief in programs that allowed blacks to help themselves create better lives,” one government history notes. “By 1910 Allensworth’s success was the focus of many national newspaper articles praising the town and its inhabitants.”

Sadly, the town’s progress was hampered by poor soil, inadequate water resources and the loss of the Santa Fe railroad stop. In 1914, Allensworth was killed when he was hit by a motorcycle. Some of the towns pioneering families still live in the area. Historic downtown Allensworth is now part of the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.