The Fake Buildings That Hide LA’s Massive Oil Industry - YouTube

Okay, today, we’re going to be talking  about LA’s most precious sludge. And no,  

I’m not talking about the MCU, I’m talking  about oil… petroleum… the slicky icky. You see,  

Los Angeles has a massive petroleum industry that  digs for oil right in the middle of the city. But  

I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing that, because  they do a really good job at keeping it a secret. 

It turns out, LA county actually produces a  whopping 18 million barrels of oil a year—and,  

sure, Houston can do that in like a  week, but half of Houston looks like this  

and Texas public schools still consider crude  oil a vegetable. What’s unique about LA’s oil  

wells is that they’re not all sitting in some  barren oil fields on the outskirts of LA;  

they’re actually in LA, hiding between the  café-bookstores and the bookstore-cafés.  

There are thousands of these rigs scattered  throughout the city, and most of them are digging  

for that sweet black dinosaur vinegar within 1,500  feet of a house, school, church, or hospital. 

Now, unless you’ve always wanted to live within  walking distance of a giant piece of industrial  

petroleum-pumping equipment—which, knowing  my audience, is probably most of you—you  

might be wondering: how the hell do people  put up with this? Well, the answer is, most  

Angelenos don’t even realize that they’re living  in the middle of a massive oil field. For most of  

the city’s history, the oil industry was pretty  hard to ignore: there were giant oil derricks  

along the streets and the beaches, crude oil  frequently ended up in people’s houses and yards,  

and lighting the candles on your birthday cake  was probably the most dangerous thing you’d do  

all year. The Angelenos were so knee-deep in black  gold, in fact, that during the second World War,  

they even voted to install oil pumps in their  own backyards. While that might sound a little  

crazy now, this is essentially the entire  reason that Los Angeles was able to become  

such a massive metropolis—for a while there, LA  alone was generating a quarter of the world’s oil  

and everyone was getting filthy rich. Or at least  getting filthy. Of course, the public’s enthusiasm  

for these thousands of greasy Eiffel Towers  didn’t last forever, and eventually the people  

of LA decided that their city needed to look less  like this and more like this. So, the petroleum  

companies devised the most American solution  possible: keep drilling for oil and just cover it  

up. Like, literally… cover it up. Let me explain. In the 1960s, Occidental Petroleum wanted to  

drill for oil in this Orthodox Jewish  neighborhood outside of Beverly Hills.  

Now, the petroleum executives knew exactly two  things about the Orthodox Jewish community: one,  

they didn’t like giant oil derricks; and two: they  seemed to like synagogues. So, as a compromise,  

Occidental Petroleum decided that they were going  to build a giant oil derrick, but they would  

disguise it as a synagogue. Or at least something  resembling a synagogue… kind of. What’s important,  

though, is that the building didn’t end up  looking as ugly as this, which was so exciting  

that the mayor of LA personally attended the  ribbon-cutting and called this beige rectangle  

“an outstanding contribution to civic beauty.” From the 60s onward, all sorts of these disguised  

oil derricks started popping up around LA.  There are even entire oil-pumping platforms  

off the coast of Long Beach that are disguised  to look like islands, with trees, fake buildings,  

and artificial waterfalls to mask the sounds of  drilling, pumping, and business guys jumping into  

giant pools of gold coins. Of course, most of  the wells aren’t as cleverly hidden—they’re just  

sitting in big windowless boxes like this or this.  And some are still more-or-less sitting out in the  

open like this one, the “Tower of Hope.” This  oil derrick operated right in the middle of a  

local high school and—despite the fact that it was  about as well hidden as a brand new oil derrick  

on Christmas morning—it was beloved for its floral  walls painted by thousands of local sick children…  

that is, until it allegedly started getting all of  the other children sick and the school renamed it  

the “Tower of Hope You Don’t Get Cancer.” Whoops. Now, if you’re feeling left out because you don’t  

live in LA, don’t worry—this sort of thing isn’t  unique to LA or, for that matter, the petroleum  

industry. This apartment at 58 Joralemon  Street in Brooklyn, New York, for example,  

might look like the home of an introverted  vampire or a particularly distressed squid,  

but the windows are blacked out because the whole  thing is actually just a ventilation shaft for the  

subway below. Same deal with this sculpture in  Nuremberg, Germany, depicting the life and death  

of a married couple—if you find yourself tearing  up around it, it’s probably just the subway fumes.  

And in Toronto, it can be hard to tell whether  your neighbor is a human being or a hydroelectric  

substation, because their hydroelectric  substations live in buildings like this.  

Most major cities have some clever  way of hiding ugly infrastructure,  

and that’s probably for the best… just don’t be  disappointed if you never meet anyone from the  

windowless apartment building across the street. Of course sipping that spicy jurassic juice in  

the middle of one of the world’s largest  cities doesn’t always go spectacularly,  

like back in October when 126,000 gallons of the  stuff leaked out of a pipeline off the coast of  

Long Beach causing an environmental disaster  and, worst of all, canceling an airshow that,  

I swear this is true, I was planning on going  to. On the bright side, at least I was able  

to stay up to date on the issue thanks to my  subscription to Morning Brew. Every morning,  

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