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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