L.A. Redux / The City Then and Now

Two discouraged gold miners, Edward Laurence Doheny and Charles A. Canfield, arrived in Los Angeles in 1892, determined to make their fortune by drilling for oil. They bought a lot in the downtown area for $400 near the intersection of Glendale and Beverly boulevards. Forty days later, after no success with a pick and shovel, Doheny and Canfield used a sharpened tree trunk as a drill bit and brought in the city’s first producing oil well on Nov. 4, 1892. The dramatic oil strike set off an oil boom that lasted for decades.

Quiet neighborhoods with gingerbread houses and neatly trimmed gardens were quickly transformed by homeowners and leasing companies to make room for drilling rigs. By 1900, Los Angeles had become the oil capital of the West. More than 600 derricks shot up, pumping oil in formerly residential neighborhoods, and 69 of them belonged to Doheny.

In some areas, four or five derricks stood on a single 50-by-50-foot lot. Local legend has it that one man dropped a set of tools down one of his wells but retrieved them from another well owner nearby.

Tent cities sprung up all over town, attracting prostitutes and bootleggers. Gambling houses and saloons were busy 24 hours a day.

The price of oil peaked at $1.80 a barrel before hitting bottom at 15 cents in 1903. In order to reduce the tremendous surplus, the city began spraying oil on unpaved roads to hold down the dust. The policy turned the streets into a gummy black mess that stuck to shoes and carriage wheels.

Great quantities of oil were leaked from redwood storage tanks, and oil-filled gullies overflowed in the streets during heavy rains.

In 1907, Echo Park Lake caught fire and burned for three days. By 1919, the city had passed tougher regulations on drilling sites, and oil prices were rising.

Doheny moved on to discover more oil fields in Fullerton, the Kern River Valley and Mexico. In 1921, new discoveries in Signal Hill and Santa Fe Springs ignited another Los Angeles boom.

The Doheny and Canfield well that marks the birthplace of Los Angeles’ oil history is apparently destined to go out of production. Most of the low-producing wells in the old Los Angeles field are operated by a 100-year-old family firm, the Manley Oil Co. Today, 23 pieces of property with 15 oil wells are for sale.