Rancho La Brea's Two Parks

The La Brea Tar Pits (foreground) with the Pavilion for Japanese Art beyond, in Hancock Park, in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district. Photo by Joe Mabel  

The City of Los Angeles boasts many ritzy districts. One of them is a genteel, affluent residential neighborhood developed in the 1920s, about six miles east of today’s downtown skyscrapers; a neighborhood of luxurious homes featuring sundry distinctive architectural styles. Historically, its well-preserved mansions sit on grounds that were once part of a Mexican land grant named Rancho La Brea.

This charming residential enclave is named Hancock Park for its developer George Allen Hancock, the scion of a notable family, who—by the 1920s—was building his own personal fortune while managing, and expanding, the business his late father Henry Hancock started years earlier.

Major Henry Hancock had arrived in San Francisco in September 1849, in the thick of the gold-fever chaos. He was 27, Harvard-educated, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, already experienced in two professions: surveying, and the law. He opened a law office in the city by the Bay, and, it is said, did a little mining in the upcountry gold regions. Perhaps neither venture proved satisfactory, because the following year he moved south, where his fortunes took an upturn when the City of Los Angeles hired him as a surveyor.  

His work led to other opportunities. In the early 1850s, landowners who had received land grants during the years Spain and Mexico owned California, were required to prove their ownership to the new American government by filing claims with a U.S. Senate-created Land Commission. In addition to paperwork and court appearances, the process involved having the property surveyed and mapped by local government-employed surveyors—and by 1857, Henry Hancock was a U.S. Deputy Surveyor. Two of the several properties he surveyed in this official capacity were Rancho San Pedro for the Dominguez family, and Rancho San Francisco for the Del Valles.

In 1854 Henry purchased, in partnership with another American, Maria Rita Valdez’s El Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas for $4,000, later to become part of Beverly Hills. However, it was his efforts as a private lawyer that eventually brought him even more real estate. Henry Hancock represented the Rocha family in their efforts to prove their claim to Rancho La Brea (Spanish for “Tar Ranch”), a 4,439-acre, Mexican land grant whose boundaries encompassed the “Miracle Mile,” Hollywood, and parts of West Hollywood in today’s Los Angeles. Modern Wilshire Boulevard was its southern boundary; and it contained, in its southern sections, pools of thick, black, bubbling, smelly bitumen seeping up from layers below the ground. 

The Rocha family won their claim; for them, a pyrrhic victory. The grant was finally patented to them in 1873, but like so many others, they were forced to sell because their legal expenses left them bankrupted ... and they still owed legal fees to Henry Hancock. In 1860, while the costly and protracted validation process was still ongoing, Jose Rocha, the original grantee’s son, deeded a large portion of Rancho La Brea to Henry and his brother John. Later, the brothers purchased the rest of the rancho, only to face obstacles to receiving clear title to the property. Needing more powerful resources, they hired attorney and US statesman Senator Cornelius Cole. Success, yes; but they lacked sufficient funds to pay him. It was an ironic twist indeed that, in lieu of legal fees, they gave Cole a piece of the ranch and thereby lost 500 acres of the Rancho La Brea.   

From the start, though, Henry actively engaged in the commercial development of the molten asphaltum, promoting its use for sidewalk and paving materials. Unhappily for his family, Henry, only 61, died in 1883, leaving his widow, Ida, in charge of ranch operations on a barely profitable property. Son George was only eight when his father died. Henry’s brother John committed suicide in 1892, leaving Ida completely on her own, although George probably began helping with the estate’s operations in his late teens. Occasionally, ranch workmen found strange animal bones in the bubbling bitumen pools; but these, presumed to be from relatively recent past decades, drew little interest.  

Then, in 1892, an astonishing and dramatic excitement: Edward Doheny and Charles Canfield discovered oil in Southern California, triggering a major oil boom in the region, and Rancho La Brea was one of the localities where it was found. In 1902, Ida Hancock granted a lease of 1,000 acres to Salt Lake Oil Company, whereupon George, now twenty-five, persuaded his mother to give him enough capital to sink a well of his own on the property.

Both ventures struck black gold. By 1910, Salt Lake Oil Company’s 250 wells were producing over 3.8 million barrels of oil a year, putting an end to Ida Hancock’s years-long struggle to stay afloat financially. Of the 71 wells George drilled near the family’s ranch house in the southern sections of the estate, every one of them produced oil, which led to the creation of George Hancock’s Rancho La Brea Oil Company. The Hancocks were now one of the wealthiest families in Los Angeles.  

In the years that followed, George—now styling himself as G. Allan Hancock—was a prominent oilman, businessman, entrepreneur, railroad owner, cellist with the Los Angeles Symphony, philanthropist, and more. Two residential subdivisions for LA’s elite had been established on Rancho La Brea’s southeast sections: Windsor Square, and Fremont Place. Trying his hand at subdivision in 1919, G. Allan began developing the Hancock Park residential area, also on the southeastern portion of his rancho.

A bit further down on Wilshire Boulevard from Hancock Park the residential community, stands the “other” Hancock Park—the landmark, world-famous La Brea Tar Pits. In 1916, three years after his mother’s death, G. Allan Hancock donated thirty-five acres around the tar pits to Los Angeles County, provided that the land be used as a scientific monument and park, dedicated to the memory of his parents.

Since 1901, paleontologists have excavated some 500,000 fossils of many prehistoric life forms from the thick pools of molten asphalt that still bubble up on the former Rancho La Brea.