Defense Plant Surrenders to O.C. Growth : Development: In an age of weapons reductions, the sale of Northrop plant site looks like a better deal.
Nearly a year ago, Northrop Corp. said it would close its electronics facility here--the first major defense plant built in Orange County--and transfer the 1,600 workers elsewhere. Three months ago, the company agreed to sell the 53-acre property to a Japanese firm, raising questions of what would become of the site.
One thing is now clear: Weapons will never again be made there.
As part of the sales agreement, Northrop has agreed to wipe the Electro-Mechanical Division complex off the face of the Earth. And with the $3-million, yearlong demolition that has just begun, another slice of Orange County’s history will be gone.
“I’m going to be sad to see it go,” said Robert L. Loring, an industrial and maintenance electrician who has worked at the Anaheim plant since the day it opened in October, 1951.
The razing represents a rite of passage in the county’s continued growth as it moves from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy. Just as citrus groves gave way to defense and manufacturing plants decades ago, many of these aging facilities are now being cleared for new office, retail and housing projects.
Northrop’s decision to sell and clear the land is also related to the local economy and national and world politics. High land prices made the sale attractive. And the apparent end of the Cold War has brought hard times to many defense contractors.
“The same sort of thing happened right after World War II to a lot of the little feeder plants that sprung up here to build small parts for the aircraft companies in Los Angeles,” said local historian Jim Sleeper. “The war ended, and they went out of business.”
The passing of the county’s first full-fledged aerospace facility “is likely to end up as a historical footnote, not a whole chapter,” Sleeper said, noting that a structure has to exist for 50 years before it can qualify as a state or federal or even local historical landmark. The oldest parts of the Northrop facility are only 39 years old.
While its demolition “is certainly worth mentioning,” he said, “as a historian I was sorrier to hear in the mid-1950s that they’d torn down the first airplane factory in the county. It was built by Glenn Martin around 1911.”
When the demolition is done, the initial Northrop building, a sprawling factory with huge laminated wooden trusses holding up the roof--an anomaly in today’s world of steel beams and precast concrete--will be gone. So will the acres of asphalt parking lots, the landscaping, storage buildings and all additions to the campus, including a three-story, 90,000-square-foot office and computer facility built just five years ago.
At one time, Northrop made the Snark missile, the Hawk missile loading and launching systems, a variety of mechanical, infrared and laser aiming devices and myriad weapons testing systems, including those for the Polaris and Poseidon missiles. The complex provided as many as 4,300 jobs in the early 1960s, the heyday of the county’s aerospace boom.
It is not even clear whether there will be a marker left behind commemorating the spot on which stood the first of the flood of aerospace factories that helped shape Orange County.
The Northrop facility is going because the company--after almost four decades of expansion fueled by the Cold War, the space race and the Korean and Vietnam wars--has been squeezed hard by the new reality of reduced defense spending. And Northrop officials, faced with paying off $1.2 billion in corporate debt in the midst of the defense decline, found a reported $40 million in their Orange County property.
The purchaser, Taiyo Development U.S.A., a subsidiary of one of Japan’s largest builders, made demolition of the entire campus a condition of the acquisition.
Taiyo officials at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Torrance won’t divulge their plans for the acreage, bordered on three sides by Orangethorpe and Raymond avenues and the Riverside Freeway. But the company is a commercial and residential builder, and Anaheim city officials say they expect Taiyo to seek permission for an urban village-type of development that could include a high-density residential core surrounded by commercial and retail buildings.
The razing was demanded by Taiyo for environmental reasons: to make sure the property is not contaminated with asbestos; polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs; leaking underground gasoline tanks, or the byproducts of nearly 40 years of machining, plating and degreasing.
Edvin C. Remund, project manager for Holmes & Narver Inc. in Orange, the design, engineering and construction firm Northrop hired in April to do the demolition, said that a survey of the entire location several years ago found that most of the underground gasoline storage tanks had already been removed and that there was no ground contamination from gasoline or other hazardous or toxic materials. But the buildings, as are most built before the late 1970s, are loaded with asbestos-containing materials that must be specially handled.
“Environmental concerns mean that you just don’t go in with a wrecking ball and knock everything down in a week,” Remund said. “There is an enormous amount of planning and special handling that needs to be done.”
In addition, Remund said, Holmes & Narver has proposed that much of the material, from copper plumbing and electrical wires to asphalt and concrete, be salvaged. That slows demolition but will yield as much as 50,000 cubic yards of ground-up asphalt and concrete that can be sold and reused as base material for streets and highways.
Remund estimated that recycling could recover as much as 75% of the material on the 53-acre site and could fetch as much as $1 million to help offset the costs of the demolition. About 100 workers will be needed for the project.
Meanwhile, Northrop defense work now done in Anaheim, along with the 1,000 remaining workers, will be relocated to Northrop plants in Hawthorne and El Segundo.
Some employees, such as Loring, have decided to retire rather than transfer. In all, about 400 of the Anaheim plant’s workers will retire or take voluntary layoffs.
Loring started with Northrop in 1947 in Hawthorne and moved to Anaheim in 1951, when the air was sweet with fragrance from the orange groves that surrounded the plant. And though the air is now thick with exhaust fumes from the congested Riverside Freeway, his memories of his career there are warm ones.
The plant provided Loring, now 71, a good living, he said, and enabled him to move from Downey to Brea, where he and his wife raised two sons.
“I’ve been in this business a long time and seen a lot of ups and downs, but this looks like the biggest crunch, because of the government spending cuts,” he said.
“This plant is heavily dependent on government contracts. It always has been, so it is just good business sense to consolidate the work. There’s no use doing the same job in two different places.”
But the demise of the complex doesn’t wipe away the Northrop presence in Orange County. Dozens of smaller companies scattered all over the county continue to produce parts for Northrop under various subcontracts.
And a Northrop Electro-Mechanical Division unit, housed in a leased facility across Orangethorpe Avenue from the main campus, will continue in operation. Its 200 employes are producing parts for a 747 jumbo jet under a subcontract from Boeing Aircraft Corp.
BUILDING: 1 PENED: 1951 PRINCIPAL USE: Manufacturing, laboratory, warehousing. SIZE: 293,000 sq. ft. BUILDING: 2 OPENED: 1953 PRINCIPAL USE: Offices, manufacturing, laboratory. SIZE: 104,400 sq. ft. BUILDING: 3 OPENED: 1961 PRINCIPAL USE: Offices SIZE: 119,000 sq. ft. BUILDING: 4 OPENED: 1984 PRINCIPAL USE: Offices, computer facility. SIZE: 90,000 sq. ft.
