I did some net searches just typing in things and seeing what popped up and I ran across some pics of my old oil field just west of downtown Los Angeles. These are of the jack-line sites.
This site was converted to individual pump jacks just before I started working there. It worked 6 wells. The building stood for about 5 more years and we'd store minor stuff that we didn't care if it got stolen, but basically it was a place for rats and cats to increase their population.
A close-up of one of the pumping jacks.
This next site was operational for about 4 years after I started there. I wish there was a pic of the inside of the power house. Big gears, 6 ft, long flat belt drive system...(insert Tim Allen grunt here).
Next is a plan of the site showing how three wells were run off one power plant. The concentric wheel that drove it always had one well at the top of it's stroke, one at the bottom and one half way. A position and balancing act.
Efficient? Yes, very! The only problem was if you had a problem with one well and had to work on it, the other two were off as you lost your counter balance. Three units down instead of one. We switched to individual pumping units in the mid '80's.
This well is at the corner of Rockwood and Glendale.
You want to know how close to the civic center we were, just MapQuest it...I did it for you here (lazy bastards), just back out one click (-), "A" is the site and the spot that says Los Angeles is city hall.
This is the power house. Wow, looking at it now, we should have slapped a coat of pain on it, but back then to me, it just looked like oil field.
I want to point out that the Queen Anne style house on this site was occupied by an owner. This was the fall back property for the Manleys. They started here and, if times got that bad, would return there. When the Manley member of the family that lived there, for 48 years, died, we rented it to one of our employees for the incredible sum of $180/month. (Kept his wages low...Oh yeah, he was Hispanic.)
In reality, the guy we rented to was the guy right below me in seniority, and made a damn good salary. Wife and three kids, it was a subsidy from a corporation. He got inexpensive rent...we were assured of someone in the area to respond to any oil field problems. A good trade.
This is how the site ended up. I saw it everyday, and didn't notice how crappy it looked, but it was in the middle of a crappy looking neighborhood. We had to put in the chainlink to keep people off the property, the area was getting a little scary and because nobody wanted to see oil wells, we put slats in the fence which gave them an easel to paint on which made the city bitch at us about covering up the graffiti, hence a crappy looking fence.
If this field were still producing, and I had anything to do with it, I would have proved that oil production and people could continue to coexist.
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