Los Angeles County · Land Surveying
El Segundo — 'the second' — took its name from Standard Oil's second West Coast refinery in 1911 and incorporated in 1917. The company town's bungalow grid still faces the refinery fence, while aerospace campuses fill the east side. Small city, storied parcels.
Bungalow grid or corporate campus, the address and your goal are enough to start scoping. Call (213) 787-3342 to talk it through.
The refinery came first — Standard Oil bought the farmland in 1911, and the town that housed its workers incorporated six years later. Douglas Aircraft's wartime plant brought aerospace, whose successors still build here, and the decades since filled the city's east side with campuses serving aviation, defense, and technology. Chevron's refinery, successor to the founding plant, still anchors the west.
The parcel fabric splits accordingly: a compact residential grid of bungalows and small lots near the historic core, and large institutional, industrial, and campus parcels east and south. The residential docket runs to lines, setbacks, and conversions; the campus docket runs to transactions, as-builts, and the well-papered records that corporate ownership maintains.
The requests that reach us from El Segundo:
The residential grid retraces from the company-town era's plats — early-1900s records with a century of evidence wear, resolved by block-wide research and documented corner restoration. Lots are compact and the community keeps them carefully; the docket is the familiar line-setback-conversion cycle done to tight tolerances.
The campus and industrial side is document-rich: large parcels assembled and re-divided across a century of corporate ownership, with utility corridors, rail history, and refinery-adjacency instruments in the title. ALTA/NSPS surveys plot the locatable record for lenders; as-built and topographic work supports the conversions that keep the east side evolving.
Six services cover both fabrics — grid precision and campus documentation:
Second refinery — Standard Oil's second on the West Coast, built on farmland bought in 1911, after the first at Richmond. The company town that grew beside it incorporated in 1917, and the name stuck. For surveying, that history means a coherent early plat and a century of well-used records.
Early 1910s — the town was platted with the refinery, and the grid's records date to the company-town years. A century of use has worn the field evidence in the usual ways, but the plat is sound and the blocks retrace firmly with proper research.
Transaction and documentation work: ALTA/NSPS surveys when parcels finance or trade, as-built mapping ahead of retrofits, topographic bases for site redesign, and premises exhibits for leases. Corporate parcels come with corporate records, which makes the research reliable and the scopes clean.
Sometimes — pipeline easements, utility corridors, and historic instruments can run near the boundary between town and plant. We plot whatever the record shows against your parcel so adjacency becomes a set of mapped facts rather than a vague question.
At the recorded line — the grid's alleys were platted with the town, and your parcel ends where the plat says, regardless of where pavement or fences sit today. Garage rebuilds against alleys turn on that line, and we mark it so the new structure sits exactly where it is allowed.
Any of these tighten the quote:
Record research, confirmed scope, then fieldwork sized to the parcel — bungalow or campus. The steps are on our how it works page.
We serve property throughout El Segundo and across Los Angeles County — request a survey quote for any parcel in the area.
Survey scope and deliverables depend on title records, site conditions, and what your project requires. Call (213) 787-3342 to discuss the property and the survey you need.
Call (213) 787-3342 with the address and the project, and Southern California Land Surveyors will size the survey to the parcel.