Oil City offers photographic images of Signal Hill, California at an important moment in its history. A new Signal Hill is being created, moment by moment, piece by piece.

Oil City's images invite reflection, if only because Signal Hill's situation is replicated all across the nation by cities that are being forced to move away from (or to build on) pasts in which environment-fouling industries have had a dominant presence. What kinds of new cities can be built under these circumstances? What hold does the past have in constraining possibilities for the design of future neighborhoods?

Signal Hill's current transition began after World War II. The decline of its oil industry left large tracts of land to be redeveloped--plenty of room for new houses, condominiums, and apartments, and plenty of room for big-box stores, fast food franchises, shopping malls, and auto malls. But the land was polluted. Buried pipes that connected abandoned oil wells with processing plants threatened disaster. Many of these pipes were (and still are) unmapped. In 1974, the City designated the entire Signal Hill oil field as a blighted area. Most of the city was included in "Redevelopment Project Area No. 1."

Over the years, Signal Hill has become an entrepreneurial paradise, founded on aggressive tax policies that have been adopted by the city council. Apparently there was just one limit: Redevelopers had to leave producing oil wells alone. First things first. Oil still was king. Ironically, Signal Hill has not depended on the oil industry as a major revenue source. City officials have regarded it as an administrative challenge. They have had, for example, to maintain a staff to enforce the Signal Hill Oil Code. They have had to respond to complaints about oil field activities, noise, and odors.

The redevelopment of Signal Hill has created a city of juxtaposition. When you drive on Signal Hill streets, you get the impression that the city is a collection of segments, each with its own atmosphere and each with its own set of issues. Oil pumps and affluent housing tracts. Historic homes and industrial facilities. Auto malls, strip malls, fast food franchises, and big box stores. The rich and the poor. The old and the new. The manicured and the hard-scrabble. Latinos, Caucasians, African Americans, Asian-Americans, and almost everything else.

My intention has been to create a series of images that artistically portray a moment in the rebuilding of Signal Hill--a third-wave transformation of a thoroughly industrialized place. As one image plays off another (and as text fragments are introduced), I am hoping that a kind of spiritual insight can be generated. Cities, like individuals, have souls, and I want people to recognize that Signal Hill has both a progressive and a conflicted soul. In plotting their strategies, city leaders have had to make compromises. What seems necessary for Signal Hill's financial well-being often constrains the development of coherent, interesting, liveable neighborhoods. These compromises all have to do with the question of how much of the old can and should be incorporated into the new.

Photographing Signal Hill has been a unique experience. The city is located only about ten miles from my home, so it is, as my son says, "haunted by familiarity." The Oil City project has required that I cast new eyes on things that I had ignored. I had often driven on Signal Hill streets. I had often passed the city's housing tracts, industrial facilities, shopping malls, and go-to big box stores. Initially, they didn't seem worth photographing. It took a long time to figure out that I was photographing a civic drama--the building of a new city on acres that, not very long ago, had been regarded as being so polluted that they were virtually uninhabitable.

It took me even longer to figure out that I was photographing a drama with national significance.

The following images are selected from Oil City (John Orr, Blurb.com, 2009).