About 100 years ago, Los Angeles produced about 20% of the world’s oil. Oil derricks dotted the landscape. Homeowners drilled for black gold in their backyards. Yet oil wells, derricks and refineries weren’t the only structures to alter Los Angeles skylines. Company office towers sprung up to accommodate all these employees working in one of the city’s most influential industries. When oil companies were ready to flex their economic power with their own structures, they turned to the leading architects of the day to help them construct a physical manifestation of their industry’s power and reach. With the exception of one, these buildings still stand thanks mostly to adaptive reuse and are now local, state and national historic landmarks. City, county and state officials plan to phase out oil drilling in Los Angeles and California in order to correct long-festering environmental wrongs. Along with the oil derricks, refineries, drilling islands, historic gas stations, oil magnate mansions, these downtown buildings are part of the larger story of how the oil industry significantly transformed Los Angeles’ built environment.
Union Oil Building
Architects John Parkinson and Myron Hunt both designed early office buildings for the oil industry in the Beaux Arts style. In 1911, John Parkinson and his partner Edwin Bergstrom designed the U-shaped Union Oil Building at 215 W. 7th Street, the company’s first permanent presence in Los Angeles. When the new 14-story building opened, many smaller oil companies rented offices there, including oilman George F. Getty. Getty’s Minnehoma Oil Company stayed in the Union Oil Building for 15 years, during which his famous son, J. Paul Getty, joined him when he became of working age. Now the A.G. Bartlett Building, it was converted to lofts in 2002 and is a designated national, California and Los Angeles landmark.
Standard Oil Company Building
Just outside downtown near the present-day Los Angeles State Historic Park, architect Myron Hunt designed a Beaux Arts office for the Standard Oil Company of California in 1914. The building stood across the street from the company’s large industrial site (now Metabolic Studio) and, in the 1970s, was transformed into the Woman’s Building that housed galleries and studios for feminist artists. The building was recently designated a Los Angeles landmark.
The Standard Oil Company of California left its Myron Hunt building in 1928 for a much larger space on the southern edge of downtown at Olympic and Hope. Architect George W. Kelham designed this eight-floor building in a “rusticated late-fifteenth-century, northern Italian ‘Palazzo’ scheme,” according to Winter and Gebhard’s “An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles.” Kelham’s Los Angeles building was a smaller version of the larger building he designed for the same company in San Francisco a few years earlier. The building was designated a Los Angeles landmark in 1988 and is still used as commercial space.
Petroleum Building
The Petroleum Building down the block was built in 1925 to evoke the spirit of “Italian palaces of the high renaissance,” explained a 1924 Los Angeles Times article. For this building, oilman Edward Doheny commissioned architects Meyer and Holler, who had already designed the Egyptian Theatre in 1922 but not yet started Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (which would be built in 1927). Doheny first struck oil in Los Angeles in 1892 and by 1894, he “controlled the largest portion of the city’s emerging oil industry,” according to Jessica Kim in her book “Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941.” By 1925, Doheny was approaching 70 and “letting up,” to quote his “Oil and Gas Journal” obituary. He had sold major interests in his Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company, but maintained leadership over its California subsidiary. He built the Securities Petroleum Building to house this new company while positioning his son Edward L. (“Ned”) Doheny Jr. to take on more leadership. Sadly, Ned Doheny was killed in a well-publicized murder-suicide in 1929 just as federal prosecutors were investigating both father and son in the Teapot Dome Scandal. A year after his son’s death, Doheny was found innocent in his Washington, D.C. trial. When word reached Los Angeles, company staff celebrated with champagne back at the Securities Petroleum Building. Doheny’s office still stands in the building complete with original wood paneling and custom cabinetry.
United Artists Theatre
When the United Artists Theatre opened along Broadway in 1927, the California Petroleum Company operated the 12 floors above it. Designed in the Spanish Gothic style by architects Walker and Eisen, the building was taken over a year later by Texaco and the offices functioned as the Pacific Coast headquarters for the Texas-based company until 1979. Designated a Los Angeles landmark in 1991, the building has been operating at the ACE Hotel since 2014.
Richfield Oil Building
Of all these oil buildings, perhaps the most stunning was the now-demolished Richfield Oil Building, located at Fifth and Flower Streets. Draped in black and gold glazed terra cotta, this Art Deco gem stood out among the downtown skyline with its 136-foot oil derrick-shaped tower with word “RICHFIELD” spelled down the sides. Designed by Morgan, Walls and Clements, the 1929 skyscraper stood at 15 floors with three basements. The Gladding, McBean terra cotta was considered the ceramics company’s finest achievement during the Art Deco era. Artist Haig Patigian sculpted four figures (representing Aviation, Postal Service, Industry and Navigation) for the entrance and the forty nine-foot terra cotta winged figures that stood watch atop the roof that represented “motive power”. Despite pleas to preserve the building, demolition began in 1968 to make way for the ARCO Towers.
In 1966, Richfield Oil merged with Philadelphia-based Atlantic Refining Company and established ARCO. The company moved its headquarters from New York to Los Angeles, where A.C. Martin & Associates designed two 52-story towers in the Corporate International style. As Robert Winter articulated, “The dark polished stone-sheathed twin towers of the new buildings are formal, dignified, and reticent.” Though ARCO moved out in 1999, the towers still operate as office space though they show little of the Art Deco opulence that once stood on the site. Gilded elevator doors from the original Richfield Building stand on City National Plaza and hint at the bling that once stood at Fifth and Flower.
General Petroleum Building/ Mobil Oil Building
Down the block at Sixth and Flower, the General Petroleum Building/ Mobil Oil Building was the first post-WW2 building in downtown when it was completed in 1949 and the largest. Since the 150-foot downtown height limit was still in effect, architects Walter Wurdeman & Welton Beckett went wider. Long aluminum fins that run down this Late Moderne structure serve as sun shades for this building that set architectural precedent for future office buildings in Los Angeles. The building is both a California and Los Angeles landmark and won a Los Angeles Conservancy award for its adaptive reuse transformation into the Pegasus Apartments.
Superior Oil Company Building
Its mid-century neighbor, the Superior Oil Company Building is better known as the recently-shuttered Standard Hotel. Architects Claud Beelman and William Simpson designed this Corporate Moderne structure with a beautiful lobby that pays homage to the building’s oil roots. Doors with handles shaped into a stylized “S” (for Superior Oil) open into a lobby with a back-lit metal sculpture along the ceiling that depicts scene from the oil industry. Superior Oil moved its headquarters to Texas in 1963. This national and local landmark transformed into The Standard Hotel that is now closed.
The oil industry was a source of major commissions for Beelman. Beelman and his partner Alexander Curlett designed the Union Oil Company’s second building at 7th and Hope in 1923, which has now been turned into commercial office space. More of Beelman’s oil buildings can be seen along Wilshire Boulevard, including Getty’s Tidewater Oil Building, the Getty Oil/Union Bank Building and Westwood’s Occidental Petroleum Center.
Unocal Building
In the 1960s, the Union Oil Company reorganized as Unocal and moved into the Unocal Building just west of the 110 Freeway. Designed by the firm William Pereira and Charles Luckman in the Miesian-style on Crown Hill, the building was the tallest building in Los Angeles when it was opened in April 1958. In 1996, the company moved to El Segundo and the space they vacated is now the Los Angeles Center Studios.
Sources
Creole, George. “Claud Beelman’s Corporate Moderne style 1951–1963.” USC School of Architecture, 2012.
Davis, Margaret Leslie. “Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny.” UC Press, 2001
Elkind, Sarah S.. “Los Angeles, the Energy Capital of Southern California,” in “Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence.” University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
Gebhard, David. “The Richfield Building 1928-1968.” Atlantic Richfield Co., 1970.
Historical Society of Southern California, “Southern California Quarterly,” Vol. 97, No. 3 (Fall 2015). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/scq.2015.97.issue-3
Kim, Jessica. “Invisible Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941.” UNC Press, 2019.
