“Once you get that first stake driven, nobody can stop you”

“Once you get that first stake driven, nobody can stop you” is Mickey Wolfmann’s motto, displayed beneath his portrait and presented by Sloane Wolfmann as the principle that has guided him. The slogan’s confidence in forward motion gives a developer’s ambition the force of a rule: begin building, and resistance becomes irrelevant.

The slogan and its setting

The words appear in a faux-chiseled frieze above a portrait of Mickey Wolfmann. In the portrait, he gazes into the distance as though surveying the Los Angeles Basin for lots that can be developed. The placement makes the motto a caption to his image and casts his outlook in the language of land acquisition and construction.

Attribution and personal meaning

Sloane identifies the words as Wolfmann’s guiding motto and calls Robert Moses a great American and Wolfmann’s inspiration. Her explanation turns the inscription from generic encouragement into a clue to the source of his development-minded ideal. The slogan presents the first stake driven into the ground as a decisive threshold: once a project has begun, its momentum supposedly makes it unstoppable.

Dramatic irony and characterization

Doc answers by jokingly attributing the line to Dr. Van Helsing, disrupting Sloane’s solemn presentation with a reference to a vampire hunter. The exchange makes the confident promise sound faintly comic, while the portrait and its search for buildable land preserve its force as a statement of Wolfmann’s ambition. The slogan’s assurance that no one can stop development sits uneasily beside the possibility of opposition implied by the boast itself.