‘A parallel Hollywood story’: How L.A.’s oil boom shaped the city we know today

Firefighters lay hoses to protect homes from an oil well fire in Santa Fe Springs in 1928. “Oil, motion pictures and real estate were like the trifecta of forces that were attracting migrants to come west to L.A.,” said Becky Nicolaides, a research affiliate at USC and UCLA. “A lot of the people came to Los Angeles during the big boom 1917 to 1925,” San Diego State history professor Sarah Elkind said, when “there was this enormous series of large strikes in the L.A. Basin.” It was “a bit of a gold rush, and news traveled,” Elkind said, with newspaper coverage of the strikes reaching job seekers across the country. “It’s almost like a parallel Hollywood story because you have plenty of people coming out to become stars.” Many oil industry workers in Oklahoma and Texas made the journey west, joining others migrating from other parts of California and farther-flung states. “The oil industry triggered a series of industrial developments in California, which drove growth right through the 1950s,” Elkind said.