Hancock Park-La Brea

Asphalt has been seeping up here for tens of thousands of years, and Tongva people worked it long before anyone called it a fossil site, sealing baskets and plank canoes with it. The 1828 grant of Rancho La Brea let anyone from the pueblo take asphalt for their own use. Bones came out commercially first, then scientifically after 1913, when two years of digging produced some 750,000 specimens. George Allan Hancock gave the county twenty-three acres in 1924 on condition the fossils be shown. The bronze on the boulder is not the state's; Native Daughters set it in 1940.

What the plaque says

Hancock Park La Brea Pits Presented to the citizens of Los Angeles County in December 1916 by Captain Allan Hancock with a request that the scientific features be preserved First historic reference to the tar pools recorded in the diary of Gaspar de Portolá in August 3, 1769 Originally a portion of the Rancho La Brea granted by Governor Alvarado 1840 Marked by Californiana Parlor 247 Native Daughters of the Golden West April 28, 1940

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Campo de Cahuenga — 5.3 mi
  The treaty that ended the fighting in California was signed on this ground, and the building it was signed in is now under the boulevard.
• Chavez Ravine — 6.6 mi
  Three Mexican American neighborhoods cleared for public housing that was never built, then traded to a ballclub.
• Santa Monica Pier — 9.0 mi
  Where the Mother Road runs out of continent, and where the End of the Trail sign gives the drive somewhere to finish.
• Los Encinos State Historic Park — 11 mi
  A spring that never stopped running, the village it fed for thousands of years, and the rancho that took the ground away.

More markers nearby

• Portolá Trail Campsite (2) — 1.2 mi
• Freeman House — 3.1 mi
• Cecil B. DeMille Studio Barn — 3.3 mi
• Harold Lloyd Estate (Greenacres) — 4.4 mi