PLANNED COMMUNITY
As industry and population grew rapidly in the early 1900s, South Bay development turned inward and Torrance was born. Jared Sidney Torrance and Associates, who purchased 2,791 acres from the Dominguez Estate Company for $976,850 and 730 acres from Susana Dominguez del Amo for $350 per acre, founded it in May 1911. (See Redondo Beach page for more on the Dominguez family and the Rancho San Pedro.) At its inception, this planned industrial town provided housing for 500 people but by incorporation in 1921 that number had risen to 1,800.
Construction innovator Torrance wanted Torrance to be a model city that proved that when housing and business districts were separated and a worker was given a decent house on his own plot of land, his work contentment and efficiency would increase. Torrance gave the individual home site a minimum width of forty feet, and a depth of a hundred and
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forty feet, which was much larger than most home sites on the East Coast. Specific areas for livery stables, lumberyards, blacksmith shops and similar unsightly plants were set up. Boston’s Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., perhaps the foremost landscape architect at the time, mapped out the new community. On the empty cornfield, he traced the lines of streets and boulevards, marked the business district limits, placed industrial sites away from the prevailing westerly wind, designated sites for city hall, a library, an auditorium, a 30-acre park and laid a broad boulevard through the business center that lead the eye to gaze outward toward the distant snowy peak of Mt. San Antonio. His engineer H.H. Sinclair broke the record for speedy, thorough construction.
Like El Segundo, oil encouraged the city’s initial development and a population explosion. The black gold was discovered and the first well was dug in 1921 and by 1925 there were 582 gushers within city limits. But the wells began to dry up by the late ‘50s. When production slowed to five barrels a day, a 1961 city edict required the wooden derricks be removed. The last one came down in 1963.
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