Oil!

Two weeks ago, Major League Soccer had it's championship game - The MLS Cup. As a beat reporter for the LA Galaxy, one of the teams in the Cup, I got to go a bunch of MLS sponsored events, including a rooftop party in Downtown LA. The Standard is a luxury hotel with a rooftop bar and beer garden, a part of a chain of similar hotels. 

Not a very inspiring building, built in 1955 as an office and headquarters for the Superior Oil Company. It's a functional high rise, an impressive height for 55 and showing a coming architectural trend of function over form.

The architect was Claud Beelman, who also designed the Eastern Columbia Building and the Garfield Building downtown. He has several buildings listed on the National Register of Historical Places. However, this isn't going to be a post about architecture. 

I happened to catch There Will Be Blood a few days after, and was intrigued by Southern California's oil history. Superior Oil seems to be a latecomer if they built their headquarters in '55, but Union Oil and Standard Oil were here since the turn of the century. In the movie an oil field under Signal Hill is referenced, and the Huntington family made their money on oil. Anyhow, it seems a subject ripe for digging into, so let's go ahead and do so. 

The Union Oil company was founded in Santa Paula, CA. Their headquarters in Santa Paula is a National Historic Landmark, but they only used it for ten years, between 1890 and 1900. At the turn of the century, they moved to Los Angeles.

When they came in 1900 they only needed one room, in the 312 Tajo Building at first and Broadway. The company had to move three times as they kept expanding. Eventually they moved into their own building. 

The Union Oil headquarters from 1911 to 1923 was the Bartlett Building in the Spring Street Financial District. At the base of the Bartlett Building were the Rush Drug Co., Hull's Grill, and Lamar's. It's a 14 story building, and when it was completed in 1911 it was the tallest building downtown. 

So what happened about 1910 that made Union Oil such a big player? They made a deal with the Independent Producers Agency, a group of small oil producers, to build pipelines from Kern County to Union's oil facilities on the Pacific Coast. This was the historical event fictionalized in There Will Be Blood, and I'm assuming was recounted in Upton Sinclair's book Oil! which the movie was based on and lends its title to this post. 

Before that deal, the Independent Producers had to pay high shipping costs to send their oil back east via railroad, and then take low prices per barrel from Standard Oil. Suddenly, so many lines from There Will Be Blood make sense! 

"So Standard offered us a million dollars for the Little Boston leases, and I told H. M. Tilford where he could shove that, and we made a deal with Union! On the pipeline! And that whole ocean of oil underneath our fields!" 

So what's the union in Union oil? That would be the union of small oil companies owned by Wallace Hardison, Lyman Stewart, and Thomas R. Bard. Hardison was born in Maine, and followed his brother to the oil fields of Western Pennsylvania. That area became the home base of John Rockefeller and Standard Oil. If this was a Pennsylvania history blog, that'd be a segway into the Rockefellers and all their contributions to that part of the country.

But we're about LA history, and the important thing to note is that because Rockefeller controlled the Pennsylvania oil fields, that drove a lot of oil men out to Southern California to prospect. Oil was discovered in Santa Paula in 1883. Hardison came out with Lyman Stewart, and their original company was called Hardison & Steward Oil Co.

Stewart's contribution to society is funding the publication of The Fundamentals, which became the holy book of the Fundamentalist Christian movement.

The third member of their union was Republican Senator Thomas Bard. He assisted in the formation of Ventura County, officially split from Santa Barbara County in 1873. He also helped build the town of Port Hueneme.

So the three of them form Union Oil and they become an alternative to Standard Oil for the California independent oil prospectors after the pipeline is built from Kern County. With regards to that pipeline, the discovery well of the Kern River Oil Field was dug by hand in 1899. It's the fifth largest oil field in America.

Huge discovery wells, Union Oil pipelines, gee this is all sounding familiar. Kern was originally a mining area, which isn't surprising as many of the early oil men used mining techniques and hoped to get lucky. When I saw the Kern oil field was dug by hand, before the pipeline workers really would just dump oil into big holes until it could be barreled and shipped.

Now, Union Oil was established 1890, and then Standard Oil entered California in 1900. At that time Union and six other companies had all been flourishing in California for around a decade or so. Standard was founded in 1870, so it's likely that the Kern field is what got them to come out to California.

Union was Standard's biggest competitor, especially after the 1910 oil pipeline. I keep mentioning that pipeline, and that it went to the Pacific Ocean, but I haven't said where it went. Well any resident of Wilmington or San Pedro should be able to tell you about the oil refineries down by the port. Union Oil built their 200 acre refinery in 1916 in Wilmington, then four years later built a four acre site at the harbor for receiving and shipping oil.

That birds eye view of the harbor shows the gigantic campus of the Wilmington Refinery in the forefront. While the campus is in Wilmington, most San Pedro residents know of it as the Great Pumpkin. Since 1952, the refinery has painted one of its three million gallon storage tanks as a big Jack-O-Lantern. Local kids can go down on Halloween to see it up close and get candy corn.

Here we've got a couple of workers looking at a model of the refinery. These days, the refinery has been split between three different oil companies. That's how gigantic the campus is! 

You can see the new Union Oil Building on the left there in the picture, it's the one with the sign reading Union Oil Bldg. There's also a Bullocks in front of that. This is looking south on Hill Street, as it crosses 7th Street. Or looking North. But that's definitely Hill St. 

The 12 story building was necessary for a company for $100,000,000 at the time according to the LA Times. It was designed by, wait for it, Claud Beelman. However, this one didn't make the Historical Register of places. Funny how all of this started with a party, and still all the connections can be made, yeah? 

Union's greatest achievement was the discovery of the oil field in Santa Fe Springs in 1919, which really put the company on the map. The biggest oil field in Los Angeles wouldn't be found until 1932 in Wilmington, which is the third largest oil field in America behind Purdhoe Bay, Alaska and the East Texas Oil Fields. 

That's enough ink spilt about the oil spilt in Southern California. As always, I've only scratched the surface and I'm sure I'll be inspired for more entries to come. Now I know how a rooftop party, There Will Be Blood, and a oil tank painted like a pumpkin are all connected. 

Googie Restaurants In Los Angeles

Since this blog has started to center around buildings and maps, I've had to invest energy in understanding architecture and cartography. I'm sure we'll get back to maps at some point, but right now it's all about buildings. Architecture plays such a role in the "history by sight" that I've been doing on this blog, but that also requires me to be able to identify different types of architecture. Which I can't do.

I can do some research into architectural periods, so I can at least fake it. For instance there was a classical revival known as Beaux-Arts that hit America in the late nineteenth century and influenced many buildings on the Berkeley campus. Given that it's called the Coliseum, I'd lump Memorial Coliseum in the Beaux-Arts category, with it's peristyles. The USC campus, however, fits more into the Art Deco style that was big through the roaring 20s. Then there was Streamline Moderne that influenced the Pan Pacific Auditorium, and finally the movement we're going to get into today - Googie.

Beaux-Arts and Art Deco were about building impressive, long lasting structures, things get simpler and sleeker in Streamline Moderne. What I understand about Googie is that it's designed to catch your eye, to engage in non-verbal communication with this new beast - the automobile driver.

I've been making a lot of noise these last few weeks of how cool downtown used to be with its theater district. Even in those pieces, I had to concede the separate theater district in Hollywood, and the suburban theaters popping up all over the landscape. Los Angeles transitioned quickly, like blink and you miss it quickly, from a centralized city to a bunch of suburban hubs connected by a central concept.

Much like Downtown and Hollywood, these suburban commercial centers had theaters, department stores, restaurants, and coffee shops. The idea with Googie was to develop consistant and striking signage and architecture to make a restaurant instantly recognizable. Some of these restaurants are still operating, like Pann's in West LA.

I was lucky enough to eat at Pann's this past weekend, and it's definitely a treat. It's gotten new coats of paint, but otherwise it's the same place the opened back in 1958. It's got everything I want from a California 50's diner: rock walls, angular architecture, and a fun Jet Age sign. 

That's the other big component of Googie. We're going to space! We're going to have flying cars and jet packs! Let's build a Space Needle and a Theme Building at the airport! Of course, LA and Seattle were super on board with the moment, as they had the large aerospace industry that I'm gonna have to write about someday. 

We snagged some original menus from Pann's take a look at this: 

The prices can be deceiving. That De Luxe Dreemburger adjusted for inflation costs $9.03, for a 1/2 of beef that sounds about right for a restaurant burger. The 1/4 pound Dreemburger costs $6.28. 

The half spring chicken is all fried chicken, and is still the centerpiece of their menu today. So naturally it's what I ordered. Good food, and it all cost less than the $13.74 the inflation calculator says it should be. 

That family night special actually sounds like a great deal. It's the same chicken meal, but without soup. I had clam chowder with my meal, and by the chicken got there I was too full to really make a go of it. 

The family that owns and still operates Pann's has quite a Los Angeles restaurant history. George Poulos (truncated for extreme Greekness, the original family name is Panagopoulos) learned to cook in the military, then in '47 at The Pantry downtown. He first managed a restaurant at Yum Burger on Manchester blvd across from Inglewood High School. The Poulos family finally opened Pann's in 1958. 

Of course, '58 is fairly late for a style that dates back to 1949. That's when the Bob's Big Boy in Burbank opened up, the home of the Double Decker burger (which is also quite tasty). In 1951 you have examples with Johnie's Coffee Shop on Wilshire, and the first Norm's restaurant. Which leads me to my next example (which I've also eaten at).

Downey is home to a lot of restaurant history, with the oldest standing McDonalds and the original Taco Bell. It also boasts this great Googie treasure, Bob's Big Boy once Johnie's Broiler once Harvey's Broiler. Harvey's (then Johnie's then Big Boy) opened in 1958, the same year as Pann's. Now Johnie's shouldn't be confused with the Johnie's downtown, but it is a great coincidence. It's possible they were under the same ownership, but I can only find circumstantial evidence of that. It's convincing circumstantial evidence though. That S curved arrow in the Johnie's Coffee Shop photo is also in the Johnie's broiler parking lot, and they're spelled the same which is an irregular spelling for Johnny. 

Many of the same great features as Pann's, big circular booths, rock walls. They filmed part of an episode of Mad Men there, when Don and his kids are in California and Bobby spills the milkshake. Filmed part of Pulp Fiction at Pann's (as well as the now gone Holly's). 

Johnie's was just one of the great coffee shops, operated as a restaurant up until 2001. By the time I was in high school and driving around, they were selling cars on the property. It was declared a landmark, then illegally torn down. Bob's Big Boy, who at one point had declared bankruptcy, bought the property and rebuilt it to the original specifications, but with the Bob's signage. 

Anyhow, that's a quick look at a couple suburban Googie restaurants I've had to fortune of dining in. 50's diners like Johnny Rockets always end up looking like midwest Streamline Moderne 40s diners playing music from the 60s. Shades of the restaurant in Back to the Future, I imagine. When I think 1950s, I think Googie, and the quirky little coffee shops it begat. 

***Update***

Seems I missed an important point when I first wrote this article. It's not just that Pann's and the original Norms, and Johnie's Coffee Shop all look like each other, they were all designed by the same firm. At the time the firm was known as Armet & Davis. John Lautner is the architect who designed the coffee shop Googie's which coined the term for this architectural style, but Armet & Davis have quite a few landmarks to their credit. 

Johnie's Wilshire was the first of their biggest contribution block to Googie architecture. That place was commissioned in 1955, in '56 they designed three restaurants in the LAX area; Pann's, Holly's, and Falcon Coffee Shop. 

This original menu is probably the closest we'll get to seeing Holly's, which has been demolished and is now an autozone. Holly's and Pann's almost feel like sister restaurants, don't they? We know they used the same architect, but their menus look like they were designed by the same person, and both menus feature a Dreemburger. Why ee? I don't know if I'll ever get an answer to that question. 

Holly's offered their Dreemburger for 45c to Pann's 80c, so clearly Pann's was the higher end option in area eats. Holly's also offers a Dreemburger De Luxe, like Pann's, but also 35c cheaper. The biggest difference I see in the menus is Holly's doesn't offer a chicken dinner, they're strictly steaks. 

If you click on the menu, you can see the devil in the details. Holly's has the rock wall, and plenty of light from the all glass front. It's longer than Panns, so instead of a square with a triangle hat, it looks more like a rectangle with a triangle flourish on the end. 

We'll be here forever if I try and show every building Armet & Davis designed, but their next building was the original Norm's in West Hollywood. However, now you know about the four really cool restaurants they designed before the ubiquitous Norm's.