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Making Modern L.A.: When the City Was Lit by Gas

Two vignette illustrations stand side-by-side. The illustration on the left features a woman operating a sewing machine, her workspace lit by a hanging light fixture above. The illustration on the right depicts a family gathered around a table, illuminated by a light fixture hanging above. A man sits on a large armchair, reading a newspaper. A young girl is at the table drawing while a woman appears to be knitting or mending textiles while seated.
Gas lighting extended the workday into the evening hours, but the relatively high cost of fixtures and gas meant even wealthy homes had only a few lighted rooms. | Courtesy of Science History Institute
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More than any other city the West, Los Angeles in the 19th century was dependent on new forms of energy to transition from a rural backwater to an up-to-date metropolis. Something as commonplace as street lighting took an enormous effort. Illuminating gas provided the first light in the 1880s. The city's oil fields delivered natural gas to light streets and homes in the following decades.

But making Los Angeles more modern made the city more dependent on burning a fossil fuel. The first era of gas gave Los Angeles light and heat, but at an environmental cost today's Angelenos may no longer be able or willing to pay.

To slow (if we can) the acceleration of climate change, the gas stoves and gas heaters that have been fixtures of Southern California homes may become as obsolete as the ornate gas lights that brightened Victorian Los Angeles.

There was a time, however, in the 1860s when gaslight was new.

More Light

An old, Sepia-toned image of a late 1800s street with unpaved roads. A gas lamp stands just off the side of the road.
San Pedro Street at 2nd Street in 1870. A gas street lights stands at the edge of the unpaved road. | Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library

Los Angeles came late to the gaslight era. Baltimore had gas street lights in 1817. New York's Broadway was fully lighted with manufactured gas by 1825. Gas street lights glowed in San Francisco in 1854.

Memoirist Harris Newmark remembered that in 1854 the streets of Los Angeles were entirely unlighted except for the "illumination from the few lanterns suspended in front of barrooms and stores. … In those nights of dark streets and still darker tragedies, people rarely went out unless equipped with candle-burning lanterns."

To lighten the gloom, the city council in 1860 granted two local entrepreneurs an exclusive franchise to establish a gas works and lay distribution lines. Like so many early attempts to modernize Los Angeles, the plan withered for a lack of capital and the high cost of raw materials. Illuminating gas was manufactured from coal, yielding a toxic, low-energy product called "coal gas." Coal was either a continent away in Pennsylvania or across the Pacific in Australia in 1860. Los Angeles did have asphalt — lots of it — except distilling asphalt yielded a poor-quality gas that was nauseatingly smelly.

A photo of an electricity receipt. Across the top it reads: "Terms cash, to be paid in U.S. gold coin, or currency at its market value." In large, bold lettering it reads, "To Los Angles Gas Co." Below that, "All bills or parts thereof remaining unpaid after thirty days from the time the work is done or Stock furnished. Two per cent, interest per month will be added thereto." Two items are listed below on a grid, handwritten. The first item is listed as $412.50 and the second one $2.50. The total at the end indicates $415.
Receipt from Los Angeles Gas Company for supplying gas to 56 street lamps for the month of December 1869. The city was billed $415 (equivalent to $9,300 in 2022). | Historical Photo Collection of the Department of Water and Power, City of Los Angeles

Finally in 1867, a newly franchised Los Angeles Gas Company began supplying gas to light city streets and some homes and businesses. By 1869, Los Angeles had 56 gas street lights, all within a few hundred yards of the gas works across from the Bella Union and Pico House hotels, both lighted throughout with gas. The rest of Los Angeles remained in the dark.

Modernity by gaslight was expensive. The gas company charged the city $415 in January 1870 for a month's supply gas, about $9,300 today. Individual consumers paid $7.50 per thousand cubic feet of gas in 1876 or about $165. (The same amount today costs $18.) Gas was a luxury. Ordinary Angelenos made do with kerosene lamps and tallow candles.

The gas company blamed the high price of gas on the cost of shipping coal from Australia. Angelenos blamed the gas company and agitated for lower rates, which were reduced to $6.75 per thousand cubic feet. The city council took the gas company's graft.

A black and white photo of an unpaved, dirt street. Buildings line the street on either side and electrical lines line the sides of the road, propped up by poles. A gas holder, which resembles a silo, looms over the scene in the distance. Pedestrians walk on the sidewalk, near the buildings.
A gas holder (also called a gasometer) looms over downtown in 1913. The largest of these was over 300 feet tall. | Dick Whittington Photography Collection, University of Southern California Libraries

Exclusive franchises entangled Los Angeles politics and utility companies in ways that persisted for the next 50 years. The city council could demand service changes, set rates and revoke right-of-way privileges. The utilities countered by corrupting the city council. As historian Robert Fogelson noted, "Between 1865 and 1900 … the water, gas, and electric companies, the street railway lines, and the Southern Pacific Railroad were the most influential participants in Los Angeles politics."

More Natural

The first gas lights were hardly more than a brass tube, a tap to turn on the gas and an open flame that sputtered and flared from the tube's upturned end. By the 1890s, better gas fixtures produced a brighter and more even glow that extended work and leisure into the evening hours. But even in the filigreed Victorians of Bunker Hill and Angeleno Heights, rooms were only dimly lighted with gas, although its cost had fallen and its quality had improved.

By then, gas had a competitor. Electric arc lights, so powerful they had to be hoisted on 150-foot-tall masts to keep from blinding pedestrians, first rose over Los Angeles in 1882. Seven of these "moonlight towers" (because they cast about as much light as a full moon) illuminated the downtown business district. The first conventional street lights (called electroliers) lighted Broadway in 1905.

Competition from electric lighting drove the gas company to diversify, encouraging homeowners to replace wood and coal stoves with gas ranges and coal fired furnaces and water heaters with gas appliances. The gas company also went into the electrical generating and distribution business, fueling their steam boilers with gas distilled from oil.

Natural gas — a colorless, odorless gas drawn from oil fields — began replacing manufactured gas with the discovery of the Buena Vista oil field in Kern County in 1909. The gas company rapidly converted its system to cleaner burning natural gas and laid transmission pipelines from the oil fields to the old gas works on Center Street. Because gas use fluctuated with the weather and the time of day, the company began to store gas in large holding tanks; one was over 300 feet tall. These gas holders were the city's only skyline for decades.

Competition with electric utilities also led to consolidation. Pacific Lighting, a holding company, bought several small gas manufacturing and distribution companies, including the Los Angeles Gas Company, in 1890. These companies ultimately became the Southern California Gas Company, which remains the region's largest gas supplier.

A black and white photo of Fort Moore Hill overlooking a plaza in 1875. Also in view is the Los Angeles Gas Company’s storage tanks and gas containers.
View from Fort Moore Hill overlooking the plaza in 1875. The Los Angeles Gas Company’s storage tanks and gas works are opposite the Pico House hotel, which was lighted by the company’s "coal gas." | Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library
The Southern California Gas Company logo. The logo is circular, with the words, "California Gas Company" encompassing an illustration of a gas holder and two buildings in the middle. Above the illustration reads, "Dependable service gas."
Southern California Gas Company logo from 1930. The tall gas holder flanked by the smoking “gas works” are reminders that the company began in the city’s gaslight era. | Courtesy of Southern California Gastorical

The creation of a regional holding company also gave the utility greater political leverage. Cheaper natural gas, adept lobbying of the Los Angeles City Council and skillful public relations shielded the gas company when turn-of-the-century Socialists and Progressives campaigned for public ownership of water, gas and electrical utilities.

Era's End

The soft glow of gas lighting faded in Los Angeles during World War I. But natural gas in vast quantities was about to flow, along with hydropower from the Owens Valley Aqueduct and petroleum from the region's oil fields. Los Angeles finally had the energy needed to propel rapid industrialization, becoming by the end of World War II the most industrialized county in America.

Seven decades later, the second era of gas — from 1950 to today — may be coming to an end.

Sources

Fogelson, Robert. "The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930." Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Newmark, Harris. "Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913." New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1916.

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