Dateline>City of Angels

This just in… There’s oil in these here hills. Black gold. Texas tea. Possibly billions of gallons of it, says a CNN Situation Room report observed by Metblog L.A.’s Dave Markland.

Geez, you think?

Astounding as the news may be to Wolf and the rest of the outside world, it won’t come as a surprise to native Angelenos schooled in the region’s geology. As any old sabertooth or mastodon who ever waded into the La Brea Tar Pits could tell you, that bubbling crude has been shaping the area’s natural history since the Paleogene Era.

In more recent times, Native Americans collected the primordial goo’s byproducts to waterproof their baskets and canoes, while the town’s early pobladores used the brea (tar) to create asphalt roofing for their adobes and even as an alternative fuel for lamps and cooking.

In fact, legend has it that these uses indirectly led to the famous 1892 oil discovery that made one particular Angeleno, Edward L. Doheny, a very wealthy man.

One Astute Businessman

Doheny had come to California as a prospector, but experienced little luck in mining. One day he observed a man wheeling a cart of the tarry substance downtown. Stopping to ask where the man had been, he learned of nearby asphalt deposits in present-day Echo Park. Figuring where there’s tar, there’s crude, he prevailed on Charles Canfield to help him lease several acres of land in the area and immediately set about digging and drilling. After several mishaps, the pair struck black gold a mere 150 feet below what is now the intersection of Colton Street and Glendale Blvd.

Soon there were “hundreds of greasy derricks and puffing engines” dotting the area and encroaching as far as the southern edge of Echo Park Lake. As Norman Klein observes in his book, The History of Forgetting:

“At one time (c. 1905) there were over a thousand working wells in the area from downtown to Vermont Avenue, and even special tours for a nickel. Oil companies had to pay for stains left on clothing during laundry days. Legend has it that Echo Park Lake at its northern edge went on fire at least once (1907).”

Oil’s Well That Ends Well

Of course, those rigs have long since vanished from the lake shore and vicinity. (So much for the notion that oil drilling forever mars an area’s scenery.) But later strikes from Compton to Signal Hill would further secure Southern California a proud place among the world’s great oil fields. In their almanac, Los Angeles A-Z, historians Dale and Leonard Pitt cite production figures of 1,000 wells pumping an estimated 375 million barrels between the 1950s-1980s alone. And, as CNN reports, experts believe we’re far from tapped out.

Even casual lookers can still spot the evidence of our area’s hidden wealth oozing up naturally through sidewalk cracks along Miracle Mile as well as the sands of local beaches. And yes, there are numerous cleverly disguised derricks still pumping, pumping, pumping throughout the city. But like cell phone towers masquerading as palm trees, the oil rigs are never fully hidden from discerning eyes — whether they’re located along Pico Blvd., off the Golden State Freeway, or on a tiny artificial island in the Long Beach channel.