Where a smokestack city once vied for...

By CECILIA RASMUSSEN

Feb. 16, 1996 12 AM PT

Where a smokestack city once vied for space with thousands of acres of vegetable crops, today stands the South Bay community of Torrance. Replete with upscale homes, the city offers inhabitants access to El Camino Community College, one of the country’s largest, and a shopping center bigger than many neighborhoods. And you can get there or leave on its own transit system.

In 1912, the city’s founder, Pasadena financier Jared Sidney Torrance, began creating his dream of a modern industrial city by luring businesses, particularly steel manufacturers and oil producers. In 1921, the year it incorporated, a forest of wooden oil rigs rose in the wake of the first gusher of the Torrance oil field. With a bountiful supply of crude, the Mobil refinery, then General Petroleum, opened in 1929.

After World War II, the refineries were no longer alone in the bean fields. In the late 1950s, tract homes were built west of the factories in the hope that prevailing winds would blow the smoke away from them. As industry grew to the north and south, Torrance residents began complaining about noise and pollution.

That, together with a decline in the demand for the city’s industrial products and more economical production elsewhere, led to the wane of Torrance as a manufacturing city by the 1970s.

But it marked the start of an era of redefining the founder’s dream, and the community would soon become “the balanced city: industrial, residential, commercial.”

Torrance became home to what was then the world’s largest shopping mall, the Del Amo Fashion Center, and concerns about growth, traffic and noise associated with it became factors in City Council races.

By the 1980s, the city wooed Pacific Rim traders and high-tech industry to new industrial parks. The American headquarters of Honda and Toyota replaced a U.S. Steel plant.

Today, Torrance is known for its generally peaceful suburban scene, one that has gone from its smokestack past to a high-tech future.

TORRANCE TIDBITS

A Landmark: Torrance High School on Carson Street has been seen my millions as West Beverly Hills High School on TV’s “Beverly Hills 90210.” Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine, is remembered as editor of the alternative student newspaper, the Sardine, before it was banned in 1963.

Head-Turner: The 111-year-old The Iowa Courthouse Building, which now looms off the Crenshaw exit of the San Diego Freeway, was bought by lawyer Dudley Gray when it faced demolition. The former Council Bluffs, Iowa, government seat was hauled to Torrance in pieces and reassembled in 1980.

Hollywood Riviera: The gated, beachfront community, where F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived, was built on the Torrance-Redondo Beach boundary line that once passed through the middle of the now-defunct Hollywood Riviera Beach Club. According to a vintage Times clipping, it sometimes caused “late-nite revelers to shift their base of operation a few feet” when drinking hours ended in one of the two cities.

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By the Numbers

CITY BUSINESS

Incorporated: May 12, 1921

Square miles: 20.5

Number of parks: 31

City employees: 1,450

1995-96 budget: $163 million

PEOPLE

Population: 133,107

Households: 52,831

Average household size: 2.5