Was chatting with a friend in England yesterday who’d been reading about LA’s history as an oil town and I realized it’d been nearly a year since my last oil history post, so I’ve put together a collection of shots taken in Signal Hill in the third decade of the city’s ‘Oil Boom.’
The Long Beach Oil Field was discovered by the Royal Dutch Shell Company (now just “Shell”) on June 23, 1921, sparking an immediate rush to the area, with realtors selling off plots at $10K an acre ($175K today), and new wells going up within days. By the end of the week, there were nine derricks in the area, and a year later, there were hundreds, earning the area the nickname “Porcupine Hill” for its appearance from a distance.
While not the first oil discovery in the Los Angeles Basin, it proved to be the most productive, where even two competing derricks built within feet of each other could both produce hundreds of barrels a day for each owner. And, while fiercely competitive, these oilmen were organized enough to band together and incorporate the area of Signal Hill in 1924 to avoid annexation by Long Beach which might have brought zoning restrictions and added taxation. Truly the unchecked wild west, and by 1930, Southern California was producing a quarter of the world’s oil supply.
When these were taken, 15-ish years later, LA had grown tired of the pollution generated by the oil industry, leading to a war within our city government, as the heavily bribed members of the City Council repeatedly tried granting companies “unrestricted” drilling rights within the city, only to have them vetoed each time by Mayor Fletcher Bowron who dared them to put it on the ballot and give the public a voice. It was a fight that led newspapers to refer to him as: “Mayor Bowron, the Man Nobody Likes But the Voters.”
Photos:
• 1-4. by Andreas Feininger, 1947
• 5. by B. Anthony Stewart, 1941
• 6. Cameron Pl & Long Beach Blvd, 1948
• 7. Pasadena Ave & Spring St., 1949
• 8. Sunnyside Cemetery, by Herman Schultheis, 1937
• 9-10. by Nina Leen, 1945
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