I haven’t been able to establish where this photo was taken other than it was somewhere in Los Angeles. To my mind, the location is beside the point. What’s striking about this image is the contrast between the sprawling, luxurious mansion set up on a hill with statues bordering the front steps, and the six (that we can see) oil wells surrounding it. I’ve never been up close to oil wells, but I assume they’re noisy and smelly and not the sort of thing you’d want in your backyard – even if they’re what funded the mansion you live in.

**UPDATE** – Mystery solved! The Facebook hive mind found it pretty quickly. This is a page from a book called “Signal Hill” by Ken Davis and the Signal Hill Historical Society, published by Arcadia Publishing in 2006.