Los Angeles City Oil Field

Los Angeles City Oil Field
The Los Angeles City Oil Field in the Los Angeles Basin of southern California. Other oil fields are shown in light gray.
Country	United States
Region	Los Angeles Basin
Location	Los Angeles County, California
Offshore/onshore	onshore
Operators	Numerous ()
Field history
Discovery	prehistoric
Start of development	1857
Start of production	1890
Peak year	1901
Production
Current production of oil	3.5 barrels per day (~170 t/a)
Year of current production of oil	2008
Estimated oil in place	0 million barrels (~0 t)
Producing formations	Puente (Miocene)

The Los Angeles City Oil Field is a large oil field north of Downtown Los Angeles. Long and narrow, it extends from immediately south of Dodger Stadium west to Vermont Avenue, encompassing an area of about four miles (6 km) long by a quarter-mile across. Its former productive area amounts to 780 acres (3.2 km²).

Discovered in 1890, and made famous by Edward Doheny's successful well in 1892, the field was once the top producing oil field in California, accounting for more than half of the state's oil in 1895. In its peak year of 1901, approximately 200 separate oil companies were active on the field, which is now entirely built over by dense residential and commercial development. 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 of the field led directly to the discovery and exploitation of other fields in the Los Angeles Basin. Of the 1,250 wells once drilled on the field, and the forest of derricks that once covered the low hills north of Los Angeles from Elysian Park west, little above-ground trace remains.

The Los Angeles City field is one of many in the Los Angeles Basin. To the west are the still-productive Salt Lake and Beverly Hills fields; to the south is the Los Angeles Downtown Oil Field. Ten miles east-southeast is the Brea-Olinda field, the first to be worked in the region. Even larger fields are still productive in other parts of the basin, such as the giant Wilmington field which stretches from Carson to Long Beach.

Terrain in the vicinity of the Los Angeles City field includes gently rolling hills cut by ravines draining south. Elevations range from around 250 to 500 feet (150 m) above sea level, with the highest elevations in Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. Urban development is dense in the part of Los Angeles containing the field's former productive area, with numerous apartment blocks mixed with commercial and light industrial structures. U.S. Highway 101, the Hollywood Freeway, parallels part of the field to the north, and California State Route 110, the historic Arroyo Seco Parkway – the first freeway in the United States – cuts directly through the eastern part of the field immediately south of Dodger Stadium. The neighborhoods that contain the field include, from west to east, Koreatown, Westlake, Echo Park, Chinatown, and Elysian Park.