Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 9, 1980

For the first few decades of the 20th century, oil was one of Los Angeles’s top industries, right up there with citrus and the movies. You could find oil derricks interspersed among the houses south of Echo Park in the 1890s, and dotting the hills above Montebello by the late 1910s. Oil was discovered in Long Beach, Santa Fe Springs and Inglewood in the early 1920s, and if you headed to Venice Beach for a swim in the early ‘30s, you’d be sharing the sand with a forest of oil towers.

The hills above Whittier also hid black gold, hundreds of feet below the surface. First tapped in the late 1890s, by 1916 the Whittier Oil Field was generating some $2.5 million worth of oil annually, from wells owned by local wildcatters and major companies. That included the Standard Oil Company – a corporate juggernaut so big that the Supreme Court ruled it was an illegal monopoly in 1911, and forced it to break up into 39 separate companies. One of them was the Standard Oil Company of California, which would later become Chevron.

As early as 1900, the Whittier News was reporting that Standard Oil reps were sniffing around the different producers in Whittier for wells to buy. By 1914, the Standard Oil Company of California had hoovered up the highly productive Murphy Oil Co. operation, and another interest called the Emery lease. These deals represented some of the costliest purchases that Standard had ever made in California. Their corporate team in San Francisco believed enough in the prospects of Whittier that they decided to build a headquarters for its Producing Department there – the first Standard HQ outside of San Francisco. The new office would oversee oil production throughout the entire Southern California region. Today it stands as one of the oldest office buildings in Whittier.

In early 1914, Standard Oil purchased the lot at the northwest corner of Penn Street and Bright Avenue, just a couple miles west of the Whittier Oil Field. They had to raze a house on their new parcel, formerly owned by a local laundryman-turned-realtor named L. Hoyt Denney. Work on the $15,000 new building was well underway by March, under the supervision of local contractor A.J. Davis. The architects were Charles Garstang & Alfred Rea, a long-running firm that gave LA numerous schools, civic buildings and the historic Walter P. Temple Memorial mausoleum at El Campo Santo Cemetery In 1915 they even built an office building and garage for one of Standard’s competitors, the Murphy Oil Company, just blocks away!

Garstang & Rea’s original building from 1914 was made up of two simple, single-story rectangular wings. The main building along Bright Avenue housed four offices, two general purpose rooms and a small telegraph office. Then along Penn Street was a row of garage doors housing Standard Oil’s fleet of cars – some luxury cars to transport executives, others modified coupes intended to bring drilling crews to and from the fields. 

The whole thing was done up in a classic mission revival style, with unadorned white stucco dressing the brick walls, and red clay tiles on the roof. The carved wood brackets holding up the eaves and the globe lamp posts at the main entrance were nice touches. So was the sculpture of the Zerolene bear (part of the logo for Standard Oil’s motor oil) that stood at the entrance for years. 

The entry of Standard Oil was a big deal for Whittier. Incorporated in 1898, the city was still a fairly young one with a small but growing population of just 4,550 as of the 1910 census. Just imagine how exciting it must have been to city boosters to have such an important company choosing Whittier as one of its major centers of operation. The Whittier News tracked every new development in the construction of the new Standard Oil headquarters, calling it “the main one among the business blocks to be erected…” in early March of 1914, and printing an architectural drawing of it a few weeks later. 

Standard Oil had high hopes for its future in Whittier, too. They relocated executives F.H. Hillman (VP and Director of Producing) and J.M. Atwell (General Manager of the Producing Department) from San Francisco to run the new office. Not long after breaking ground on the Standard Oil Building, the company got permission from the city to build a distribution plant with large oil tanks on Magnolia Avenue, with trackage leading to the Southern Pacific railroad line nearby. 

Standard’s faith in the Whittier Oil Field was reflected in the growth of the building on Penn & Bright. In 1918 they added a small one-story building at the northwest corner of the property, with more private offices, a drafting room and a chemist’s lab. By 1922, a second story was added above the garage along Penn Street, with space for clerks and engineers. That same year Standard extended the garage along the alley to the west of the property, and added a catwalk connecting the garage with the 1918 building. Not all of the additions were designed by Garstang & Rea, but in each case they imitated the mission revival vibe of the original buildings.

For over a decade the Standard Oil Building in Whittier operated as both an administrative office for Standard’s interests in Southern California, and also a technical workshop. Staff engineers developed new tools and techniques for drilling in different conditions; chemists could conduct tests on soil samples extracted from new drill sites. 

But by the late 1920s, the Producing Department was growing larger, and new departments devoted to petroleum engineering, geology and pipeline were growing and needed more space. So in 1930 the Production Department moved from Whittier to downtown Los Angeles, where the Standard Oil Company had constructed a new nine-story high-rise at 10th (now Olympic) and Hope Streets. The old mission revival headquarters stood largely vacant in the 1930s, aside from a WPA sewing project that happened there during the Depression years. In 1942, Standard sold the building to Whittier College for $5,000.

Whittier College transformed the offices into dorms, and renamed the complex Newlin Hall, after former college president Thomas Newlin. For a couple decades it housed male students; in the ‘60s and ‘70s it was all offices and storage space. 

There was some talk in the late 1970s about the City of Whittier purchasing the Standard Oil Building and repurposing it as a municipal museum. That never happened, but in 1980 Whittier College sold it to a developer called Mission Hill Properties, who converted this once-utilitarian space into a charming office, retail and restaurant complex called Mission Court. Working with architect Charles Hall Page, they added a north wall to almost fully enclose the inner court and installed a Spanish-style fountain. Small shop owners moved in, including a chocolatier called Entiche du Chocolate, specializing in truffles, turtles and pralines.

The Whittier Narrows earthquake in 1987 complicated everything. Built out of unreinforced masonry, the Standard Oil Building sustained major damage and was condemned for years. According to a 1989 Los Angeles Times story, Entiche du Chocolate’s owner Mary Yoon had to abandon her shop because she couldn’t find the financing to make repairs. She ended up declaring personal bankruptcy. 

Eventually the entire structure was rehabilitated and reinforced, and it returned to its post-’70s life as a small-scale commercial complex. When I visited, diners were eating plates of pasta al fresco at a nice Italian joint. I saw signage for a law office on the east wing where Standard Oil execs once plotted their next gusher; and a hair salon inside one of the old garage bays where mechanics used to fix up the boss’s 1918 Packard. 

The Standard Oil Building of today is a nice mix of old and new. The globe lamp posts are gone, though the entrance otherwise looks nearly identical to old pictures. The garage doors have been replaced by windows, and at some point a hole was knocked through the south wall to allow entry into the interior court from Penn Street. But the mission revival theme remains as mission revival-y as it ever was, arguably even more so in the courtyard.

This building was commissioned by an oil company that has (quite literally) fueled California’s economy for over a century. And it’s continued to contribute to Whittier’s economy in more modest ways. The Standard Oil Building is a good example of how historic preservation is about more than just maintaining buildings. It’s about continually finding new ways for old buildings to serve their communities’ needs.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “A Brief History of Whittier to 1970” (Cityofwhittier.org)

+ “Building Boom Starts; Many Permits Are Issued” (The Whittier News, March 3, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Building Shows Steady Gain in Local Field” (The Whittier News, June 2, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Chocolate of all kinds is available at store” (Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1986 – via ProQuest)

+ City of Whittier: “Ordinances No. 289” (The Whittier News, April 19, 1914)

+ “Dignified and Substantial” (Standard Oil Bulletin, March 1916 – via HathiTrust)

+ Fulton, Mary Lou: “Rocky Recovery: Small Businesses Find Life After Quake Tough, if Not Impossible” (Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1989 – via ProQuest)

+ “General Population by City, Los Angeles County.” Los Angeles Almanac. © 1998-2026 Given Place Media, publishing as Los Angeles Almanac. Accessed January 7, 2026.

+ Grey, Elmer: “Fifth Annual Architectural Exhibit at Los Angeles” (Architect & Engineer of California, March, 1916 – via USModernist.org)

+ Kaplan, Sam Hall: “Recycling of Buildings Growing in Popularity” (Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1982 – via ProQuest)

+ Kaplan, Sam Hall: “Substantial Advantages: Recycling of Buildings Growing in Popularity (Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1982 – via ProQuest)

+ “Millions in Oil Taken from the Earth” (The Whittier News, Annual Edition 1916 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “New College Dorm Named” (The Whittier News, September 2, 1942 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Offices Going Up” (The Whittier News, March 2, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Prepare for Building” (The Whittier News, January 23, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Standard Official Buys Fine Home (The Whittier News, July 29, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Standard Oil Building’s NRHP nomination form, author unknown 

+ Standard Will Rush Work on New Offices (The Whittier News, February 6, 1914)

+ Takahashi, Keith: “Whittier Spurs Proposal for Municipal Museum” (Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1978 – via ProQuest)

+ “Whittier College Buys New Dorm” (Whittier Star Review, June 18, 1942  – via California Digital Newspaper Collection)

+ “Whittier Holds Third Place on Pacific Coast (The Whittier News, March 24, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Whittier Oil: Is the Standard After the Product of Our Wells?” (The Whittier News, April 6, 1900 – via Newspapers.com)