Los Angeles County · Land Surveying
Signal Hill is a city on top of an oil field — incorporated in 1924 during the boom that followed the 1921 Alamitos No. 1 gusher, completely surrounded by Long Beach, and now a hilltop of view homes and redevelopment sites layered over a century of drilling history.
View lot, redevelopment site, or title question — name the parcel and we will plan the survey. Call (213) 787-3342 to talk it through.
After Alamitos No. 1 blew in on June 23, 1921, the hill sprouted so many derricks it was nicknamed Porcupine Hill, and the community incorporated in 1924 to chart its own course rather than be annexed. A century later the derricks have largely given way to hillside homes, townhome communities, and commercial sites — but the parcels beneath them still carry the boom era in their records.
That legacy shows up in surveys as paper, not just history: oil-era easements, small and irregular parcels from leases once measured by the square inch, re-subdivisions from successive waves of redevelopment, and title commitments that run long. Add genuine hilltop terrain with view lots and graded building pads, and Signal Hill work rewards surveyors who read records carefully.
Six services cover the hill's docket — lines and terrain for the homes, documents and mapping for the redevelopment sites:
Much of Signal Hill has been re-subdivided — sometimes more than once — as drilling land converted to residential and commercial use. Modern tracts from those conversions carry good monumentation and clean geometry; the interest lies underneath, where the new maps meet the boom-era parcel fabric they replaced. Retracement means knowing which layer governs and how the layers relate.
Terrain does the rest. Hilltop and slope lots are defined by their pads, and projects — additions, walls, view improvements — routinely need elevations alongside lines. Commercial transactions bring ALTA/NSPS surveys with unusually rich exception lists to plot. Where questions touch former well sites or subsurface conditions, those belong to the state's oil and gas regulators and environmental professionals; we supply the located, mapped surface facts everyone else works from.
The hill's layered records make these especially useful:
We sort the record layers first, confirm scope against the title picture, then field-measure and map. The working sequence is on our how it works page.
Signal Hill requests tend to look like:
We serve property throughout Signal Hill and across Los Angeles County — request a survey quote for any parcel in the area.
What appears is everything recorded and visible: oil-era easements plotted where they fall, surface features located, and your lines retraced through the layered record. Subsurface conditions and well status are the province of state regulators and environmental consultants — the survey gives them, and you, the accurate surface map those assessments start from.
Yes — a topographic survey maps the pads, terraces, slopes, and drainage as they exist, with your boundary overlaid, which shows exactly how much practically usable ground the parcel holds and where it sits. For hilltop lots that picture is frequently the deciding factor in the purchase.
Recording happens at the county, so the maps and deeds governing your boundary are Los Angeles County records regardless of which city surrounds you. The city boundary determines which jurisdiction permits your project — Signal Hill — but it does not change how your property lines are established.
For your lot lines, usually yes — a modern re-subdivision supersedes the older fabric within its limits, and its monuments are fresh and well-documented. The boom-era layer still matters at the tract's edges and for easements that survived the redevelopment, which is why we retrace with both layers on the table.
Setbacks from wells are set by regulators and the city, not by surveyors — but the question always begins with location. We can show mapped well points relative to your lines and proposed footprint so your engineer and the agencies are evaluating the real geometry rather than an approximation.
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 Southern California Land Surveyors at (213) 787-3342 or send the title report through the contact form, and we will scope the survey to the hill's records and your project.