February 6, 2018 - Built in 1967, what looks like a windowless beige office building along Pico in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood hides 52 oil and gas wells owned by Sentinel Peak Resources. A derrick on tracks moves from well head to well head within the roofless ...

July 23, 2018 - Derrick disguised as a church bell tower via Google Street View · Others, like the one in Beverly Hills, are clad in faux architecture, dressed up to look like huge chimneys or church bell towers and other urban structures. Los Angeles is, after all, known for crafting imaginative but believable illusions, both in and beyond Hollywood. Oil harvesting equipment hidden inside the shell of a fake building via Google Earth

Oil and gas wells are hidden all over the city. Over 50 are disguised here, behind the walls of a fake skyscraper, at the Packard Well Site. The businesses along Pico Blvd, and the homes in the adjacent Mid-Wiltshire neighborhood, preferred ...

November 4, 2021 - TIL that Los Angeles is actually an active oil pumping field that at its height provided 25% of all the oil in the world. It's still pumping today, they just hide the many derricks in boxes and pretend they aren't really there.

November 2, 2020 - Today the oil fields of Los Angeles continue to produce the bubbling crude with extraction equipment that informs L.A.’s built environment. A surprising number of oil derricks are hidden in plain sight, designed and architecturally camouflaged with windowless façades of office buildings, like movie sets on busy boulevards.

August 25, 2018 - Los Angeles was once nothing more than a forest of derricks leaching oil. Although the country has since evolved into an entertainment metropolis, its booming oil industry has not vanished, it has simply hidden from the public’s eye.

March 22, 2023 - On a busy thoroughfare near the ... across the street from a flooring store. Hidden within the seven-story beige structure is an oil derrick that once serviced more than 50 wells....

December 21, 2025 - Some notable Los Angeles oil drilling rigs that are hidden in plain sight include Packard Well in Mid-Wilshire. This is a large beige building, that does not have windows. From the outside, it disguises itself as a skyscraper.

January 9, 2026 - As of 2011 only one oil well remains active – behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue one block east of Alvarado Street in the Westlake neighborhood, producing about 3.5 barrels per day (0.56 m3/d). The fortunes made during development ...

December 10, 2024 - The 165-foot derrick at Beverly Hills High was dubbed the “Tower of Hope” in 2000 and clad in a vinyl, sound-absorbing sheath festooned with flowers painted by hospitalized children.

April 2, 2026 - The view across The Pike amusement park and downtown Long Beach, California, in 1940 shows a forest of oil derricks in the background. Water and Power Museum Archive · Oil rigs were so pervasive across the region that the Los Angeles Times described them in 1930 as “trees in a forest.” Working-class communities were initially supportive of the industry because it promised jobs but later pushed back as their neighborhoods witnessed explosions and oil spills, along with longer-term damage to land, water and human health.

August 26, 2014 - An aerial view of Grissom Island, one of four oil drilling islands in San Pedro Bay, off the coast of Long Beach. The four islands contain nearly 1,500 wells, accessible by movable derricks. View on Google Maps.

One of Southern California’s ... later became Los Angeles County’s largest drilling site, the 1,000-acre Inglewood Oil Field in Baldwin Hills....

March 3, 2026 - The well reached a total depth of 3,500 feet in June 1922, discovering the Torrance oil field, at times known also as Del Amo oil field. The well came in at a rate of 2,500 barrels of oil per day from Pliocene sandstones.

April 9, 2025 - A field of oil derricks in Huntington Beach, CA in the 1920s. This photo really bothers me. ... TIL that large crude oil storage tanks around the world use floating roofs that sit right on top of the oil ... TIL: The city of Los Angeles is the 3rd most productive oil field in the U.S., but most of the oil wells are camouflaged inside of fake office buildings and even sculptures.

November 5, 2014 - LA crazily has more than 55 active urban oil fields: About 3,700 derricks extract black gold from wells all over the city, and while hundreds of these bobbing metal rigs can be seen along La Cienega Blvd on the way to LAX, many more are disguised ...

April 15, 2024 - The view across The Pike amusement park and downtown Long Beach, California, in 1940 shows a forest of oil derricks in the background. Water and Power Museum Archive · Oil rigs were so pervasive across the region that the Los Angeles Times described them in 1930 as “trees in a forest.” Working-class communities were initially supportive of the industry because it promised jobs but later pushed back as their neighborhoods witnessed explosions and oil spills, along with longer-term damage to land, water and human health.

November 14, 2015 - Los Angeles GeoHub · Private Organization · View Map Download · More · Open in ArcGIS Map Viewer · Open in ArcGIS StoryMaps · Oil Wells (Inside LA County) Oil Wells (Inside LA County) Read More · Looking for something else?