Long Beach’s California Heights neighborhood, the city’s largest historical district, was baptized in oil. The area just north of Signal Hill was once grazing land for Jotham Bixby’s livestock on his family’s Bixby Ranch, later named Rancho Los Cerritos. When oil was discovered on Signal Hill in 1921, Jotham Bixby’s Land Company subdivided the tract and offered individual sites for sale, strongly suggesting that you’d become a wealthy landowner once oil was struck in the lowlands, mere blocks away from the oil-rich hill.