The metropolis that never was: Eerie photos show outlines of planned California city that's still state's third-largest by acreage - but which is largely just empty desert scrub

Eerie photographs have revealed what remains of a ginormous new California City which never came to fruition. 

The ghost town was set to be the third-largest city in the Golden State based on its 203 square mileage, but 65 years after it was created to be a thriving metropolis it's still largely barren.  

Aerial photographs show a vast network of roads etched through the Mojave Desert, intended for the suburbs which were never constructed. It spans the third-largest site in the state - smaller than only Los Angeles and San Diego. 

In echoes of the never-realized California City vision, a billionaire group is also planning to create a utopian 'walkable and green' city in Solano County to rival San Francisco.  

California City lies 100 miles northeast of LA in Antelope Valley's Kern County, mostly comprising roads which are named but have no houses. 

Lincoln Boulevard, Rutgers Road and Aristotle Drive are penciled in between the creosotes and scrubs, but they remain unpaved. 

The wasteland was intended to rival LA when it was purchased by Nathan Mendelsohn in 1958.

The Columbia University professor-turned real estate developer mapped and carved out streets and neighborhoods where he hoped people would purchase lots to build homes and businesses in the population boom of California.

Streets were named after cars, such as Cadillac Boulevard, Chrysler Drive, and Dodge Street or universities, such as Stanford Avenue, Columbia Road and Georgetown Street.

The city was even meant to have a 160-acre 'Central Park' similar to the one in Manhattan.

Though Mendelsohn sold more than 52,000 lots, few of those buyers developed their property, according to Business Insider.

By the 1970s, only 1,300 people lived in California City and even now the city has not reached the population Mendelsohn anticipated or hoped for, and there are still 118,000 acres of undeveloped land.

Residents of the ghost town mostly live near the park. Most of the streets remain unpaved.

The town has its own school district and public bus service, but has no chain grocery store or hotels, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Most of the people who live in California City work at Edwards Air Force Base or a prison nearby.

Photographer Noritaka Minami was interested in the planned, but undeveloped city for photographs that are being exhibited with the Aperture foundation.

'The fact that these streets in the desert are mostly unoccupied to this day should raise the question whether the water-rich wonderland proposed by Mendelsohn was actually realistic or could have ever been sustainable in an environment like the Mojave Desert,' Minami told Co.Design.

Prof Shannon Starkey, who has spent years researching the city, said it was projected to hold 400,000 in its optimistic early days.

'For lack of a better description, [developers] really understood and pitched California City as an alternative and potentially competing city with Los Angeles,' the associate professor of architecture at University of San Diego told SFGATE. 

Starkey said the city took around a year to design, with planners envisaging a downtown center which could accommodate 100,000 people, and six satellite suburbs holding between 30,000 to 50,000 residents. 

It would even come complete with a golf course and a Central Park with an artificial lake. Photographs show that these two aspects at least have been built. 

To celebrate the park's opening, Mendelsohn flew over the lake in a helicopter and dropped 10 gallons of water from New York City's Central Park to baptize the new site. 

But the plans fell apart when the anticipated 'land rush' - new residents buying up lots to settle down in the new metropolis - never happened. 

And things turned from bad to worse in the 1970's when people who had purchased land sued the owners, claiming they sold it at an inflated value. 

The owners were slapped with a civil penalty by the Federal Trade Commission for false advertising, requiring it to refund $4 million to more than 14,000 customers.

Today the desert metropolis is home to the highest population it's ever had at nearly 15,000 people, comprising retirees, and workers at the nearby Edwards Air Force Base and mines in the neighboring town of Mojave.

Meanwhile in Solano County, Silicon Valley investors who purchased vast swathes of land have said they now have all the acreage they need to create a new 'walkable and green' utopian city.

Flannery Associates LLC has spent more than $800 million discreetly buying up areas around Travis Air Force Base in Solano County over several years, for a project dubbed 'California Forever'.

The billionaires behind the group, whose identities were finally revealed at the end of August, acquired around 814 more acres in October, meaning it now owns more than 53,000 acres in the region.