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The Jews who lit up the oil business

Chanukah’s glow will soon be rekindled, and as we again tell the story of the miracle of the oil in the Temple, it’s also a good time to shed light on another kind of miracle, this one more local, of how Jews helped to light up the early oil business in Los Angeles.
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December 12, 2014

Chanukah’s glow will soon be rekindled, and as we again tell the story of the miracle of the oil in the Temple, it’s also a good time to shed light on another kind of miracle, this one more local, of how Jews helped to light up the early oil business in Los Angeles.

Among urban landscapes in the United States, L.A.’s is unique in that oil flows beneath our feet, its apparatus is right in front of our eyes and at times we breathe its scent. On our way to and from the Los Angeles airport on La Cienega Boulevard, we can see a bare-earth-and-brush scene of grasshoppers pumping away. Driving on San Vicente Boulevard, we see an oil rig awkwardly perched between the Beverly Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

We also know oil and gas as scary neighbors. Many here remember the Palms-Culver City gasoline pipeline explosion of 1976, which took out an entire city block, or, in 1985, a methane gas explosion that blew the roof off of the Fairfax area Ross Dress for Less and demolished the store’s interior.

The discovery of oil in commercial quantities in the L.A. environs near the end of the 19th century brought about a big enough population and business boom that some dubbed this region the “Oildorado.” Drilling down through that history, amid the gushes of oil, are stories of Jewish shopkeepers, investors and property owners — big and small — whose lives have been touched by black gold.

Samuel Prager (1831-1907), a Jewish Los Angeles dry goods merchant, was among the first to see oil’s commercial potential, even before the forests of derricks sprang up northwest of downtown.

Born in Prussia in 1831, Prager came to Los Angeles in 1854 to seek his fortune, starting with a store that sold clothing, boots and shoes. According to a story in Western States Jewish History, by 1867 he was one of the first sellers of oil — a good that decidedly was not dry.

This was before the motorcar, so why would Prager’s customers have needed oil? At the time, oil was used for covering dirt streets and as a lubricant for machinery, and it could also be distilled to create lamp oil.

At various locations in the Los Angeles area — including what we call today the La Brea Tar Pits — the locals were well aware of the tar (in Spanish, brea, a form of oil from which the lighter parts have evaporated) that seeped to the ground’s surface. The first well in Los Angeles, known as the “Dryden Well,” was dug by hand at the site of one of these seeps in 1857, according to the Cypress office of California’s Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR).

Prager, in addition to being a successful merchant, was a community leader known around town as “Uncle Sam.” In 1886, when he was appointed deputy county assessor of the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Herald newspaper noted that Prager’s ability to speak “German, Spanish, Hebrew, French and English,” would be an asset to his new duties.

Like many other Los Angeles Jewish men of that period, Prager was active in Masonry, including the Masonic Board of Relief. He was also an officer of a local chapter of a national Jewish fraternity called Kesher Shel Barzel (Band of Iron).


From left: Samuel Prager and Isaias Hellman. Photos courtesy of Western States Jewish History

Though by the 1890s, new prospectors had come to the area hoping to capitalize on the growing need for oil with the growth of industrialization, and no one had yet dug a well that could produce enough to demonstrate commercial viability.

“E.L. Doheny and a partner had the good luck to strike some of the first oil found in quantities within the city limits,” Harris Newmark wrote in “Sixty Years in Southern California,” his account of L.A.’s early years. Edward Doheny’s partner was Charles Canfield — neither Doheny nor Canfield are Jewish — but in the biography of the Jewish immigrant Isaias Hellman, “Towers of Gold,” written by his great-great-granddaughter, Frances Dinkelspiel, there’s an account of just how the down-on-his-luck Canfield was able to come up with the money for his share in a piece of property that showed promise for oil.

At the time, “Canfield was broke,” Dinkelspiel wrote, so “he went to see Isaias and asked to borrow $500.” Seeing Canfield’s determination, Hellman made the loan, “setting the stage for the creation of one of the state’s largest and most lucrative oil companies.” 

According to Margaret Leslie Davis’ book “Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny,” in 1892, Doheny and Canfield started digging a well, but had to stop because of natural gas fumes. By 1893 they were able to drill down farther by having a crew erect a 20-foot-high derrick made from 4-by-4s, and by using a drill created from a cross-shaped bit attached to a three-inch iron rod.

After several setbacks — the bit fell into the pit and had to be retrieved — and after drilling through solid rock, they withdrew the bit and found it was soaked with oil. The hole, located at State and Patton streets in what is now Echo Park, was the “first free-flowing oil well ever drilled in the city of Los Angeles.”

The boom was on. Within two years, dozens of companies had leased land near Doheny’s and Canfield’s well, producing an estimated 750,000 barrels of oil in just two years in what was called the Los Angeles City Oil Field.

By 1920, a group of Jewish investors, who were restricted from membership in many of the city’s athletic clubs, purchased a 142-acre plot of land on an unpaved portion of Pico Boulevard, right in the middle of a swath of undeveloped rolling hills dotted with oil derricks — in the midst of the neighborhood now known as Cheviot Hills. The investors’ plan was to turn the land into a private golf course and club, and thus was born Hillcrest Country Club, with Samuel Newmark — nephew of Harris — as the founding president.

“Drilling Through Time,” William Rintoul’s book about the history of California’s oil business, tells of how, in the late 1950s, Signal Oil, after successfully drilling for oil in nearby Beverly Hills, picked a brushy ravine within the Hillcrest golf course as an ideal oil drilling site to tap into the Beverly Hills field, as well as one below Cheviot Hills.

Inasmuch as the proposed site was located just 100 yards from Hillcrest’s clubhouse, how did they convince a board of already wealthy members to drill?

“Perhaps if we sign with Signal, we will be as rich as Bob Hope or Bing Crosby one day,” Jack Benny, a Hillcrest member, is quoted by Rintoul as saying.

Though Signal found the Hillcrest directors concerned with “rising costs, insurance, taxes and overhead,” they “succeeded in getting permission to drill,” Rintoul wrote.

Signal hired Hollywood sound stage experts to ensure that the drilling rigs would be quiet. To make the equipment inconspicuous, architect Henry C. Burge from University of Southern California was brought in to design a tower that would be surrounded by palms and painted green at its base, then gradually turn to sky blue at its top. (The tower is gone now.)

Signal originally drilled 33 wells within an isolated area on the course (and another 15 wells under a site in nearby Rancho Park). According to DOGGR records, the remaining approximately 12 wells on the country club grounds, operated by the Hillcrest Beverly Oil Corporation (which in 2011 was purchased by E & B Natural Resources), are still in operation today. In 2013, according to DOGGR, 62,427 barrels of oil were pumped from those 12 wells.

According to a 1972 article in Time magazine, Hillcrest “members, who have shares in the club, collect tax-sheltered dividends on their original initiation fees, and ‘B.O.’ (for ‘before oil’) memberships have become so valuable that they are willed from father to son.” Hillcrest officials declined to comment for this article.

Other Jewish Angelenos live with drilling islands camouflaged within their midst, as well — sometimes uncomfortably so. There have been fears of health risks associated with the flower design-covered “Tower of Hope,” which encloses the rig at Beverly Hills High School that is visible from Olympic Boulevard and whose oil output also pumps royalties into the school.

However, according to the Associated Press, in 2007 Superior Court Judge Wendell Mortimer Jr. said he was not persuaded that there was any danger related to the pump’s operation, and dropped the Beverly Hills Unified School District from a lawsuit claiming the well had caused cancer in former students.  

Some have mistaken the Cardiff Tower, an enclosed oil pumping station located at Pico Boulevard and Doheny Drive, for a shul. Nileguide.com, a travel website, says it looks “very much like a synagogue tower.” Drilling Contractor Magazine, an oil industry publication, includes a photo of B’nai David-
Judea Congregation that is misidentified as the nearby oil rig tower. According to a 1999 Jewish Journal article by Julie Gruenbaum Fax, “many homeowners and shuls hold royalty rights and get paid a quarterly sum for the oil extracted from their property.”

Further east on Pico Boulevard, there’s an oil building at Genesee Avenue known as the Packard Well Site, which sits on property purchased by Henry Jacob Clar, according to an article in Western States Jewish History by Norton Stern.

Clar was born in Ukraine around 1885; after living in Colorado, where oil was discovered on his farm, he moved his family to L.A. in 1922. Here he worked as a waiter, and from his earnings he invested in property, including the one on which the Packard structure sits. Even after his death in 1970, the royalties received from Standard Oil continued to flow. 

At the L.A. oil industry’s high point, there were tens of thousands of active wells in the L.A. basin, but even as that number has by now declined to perhaps less than 3,000 active in L.A. County, for some in the Jewish community, even with the perceived risk of proximity, oil is the gift that keeps on giving.

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FOR THE RECORD: The number of barrels of oil pumped in 2013 from the Hillcrest Country Club site has been corrected.

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