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 to Antonio Jose Rocha carried a condition that anyone from the pueblo could 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.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• Colorado Street Bridge — 12 mi
  Beaux-Arts concrete arches curving 150 feet above the Arroyo Seco, opened in 1913 and later a link in Route 66.
• Mission San Gabriel Arcangel — 14 mi
  The fourth Alta California mission, built on Tongva land with Tongva labor, rebuilt after arson and now telling that story straight.

More markers nearby

• Portolá Trail Campsite (2) — 1.2 mi
• Freeman House — 3.1 mi
• Harold Lloyd Estate (Greenacres) — 4.4 mi
• Black Cat Tavern — 4.8 mi