Marine Corps Would Leave Behind Giant Hangars for Old Times’ Sake : Hangars: The largest wood-frame structures in the world were built to house dirigibles on submarine patrol duty. The landmarks are likely to stay if the base closes.

They are testaments to a brief but unforgettable slice of military aviation--two towering caverns that for decades have remained landmarks in a region where little else stayed the same.

And perhaps because of their sheer constancy, the slate-gray Hangars 1 and 2 at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station are, to many, symbols of an easier, more bucolic Orange County.

“I think they’re beautiful,” Tustin Mayor Richard B. Edgar said.

Artist Paul Gavin, who grew up in Tustin, said the hangars, 178 feet high, 300 feet wide and 1,000 feet long, are “awe inspiring.”

“It’s like Stonehenge,” said Gavin, 37, who portrayed the structures in a 1988 watercolor. “They’re like dinosaurs out there. At night, when the lights come on inside, they glow.”

The hangars, which occasionally form their own interior weather conditions, are “the largest wood-frame structures in the world,” Assistant City Manager Christine A. Shingleton said.

Tova Griffin, executive manager of the Tustin Chamber of Commerce, said: “They’re wonderful. If you’ve never been in one, you can’t believe it. I’d hate to see them go.”

But Defense Secretary Dick Cheney included the Tustin air station among the facilities he would like to close, to cut costs.

What then, is to come of the hangars? A definitive answer may not be known for months or years, although Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said Friday that Marine officials have assured him that the buildings will not be dismantled under any circumstance.

“We’ve been talking to the Marine Corps,” said Cox, who added that the fate of the hangars “was the first thing I asked about at 7 o’clock this morning.”

Cox said he was told that even if the hangars are no longer used by the military, they are inviolable because of their placement some years ago on the National Register of Historic Places.

“They are going to remain,” Cox said, “. . . whether in the midst of parkland or as part of (a) development. They’re national historic structures. It would not be the province of a new owner to tear them down.”

Tearing them down was not something being proposed openly by anyone Friday. Even one of the biggest local critics of the Tustin air station said Friday that he wants to keep the hangars. Retired Marine Brig. Gen. William A. (Art) Bloomer, who won a seat on the Irvine City Council last year while pledging to work to shut down noisy helicopter operations at Tustin, said the hangars should stay.

“I would like very much to see those things preserved as museum-type pieces,” said Bloomer, a former commander of the El Toro Marine Air Corps Station.

Henry Cord Meyer, an author and retired professor at UC Irvine who is steeped in the history of dirigibles, said that residents’ romanticism of Hangars 1 and 2 at Tustin is real and not surprising.

Meyer attributed those sentiments--including the placing of the hangars on the National Register of Historic Places--to “that psychological factor of giganticism: People said, ‘Gee, they ought to be remembered.’ ”

According to Meyer, matching hangars were built at Tustin and six other locations “around the perimeter of the (continental) United States” in the late 1930s and early ‘40s.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the only other site in California where such a hangar exists is at Moffett Field Naval Air Station in Mountain View--another facility targeted for closure Friday by Cheney.

Meyer said the hangars were built to house immense dirigibles that could patrol vast stretches of ocean, with deployable scout planes in their bellies. But with the relatively quick extinction of dirigibles as viable military tools, the hangars never fully realized their original purpose--although they have sheltered up to six blimps at one time.

Since 1952, the hangars have housed “the full Marine inventory” of helicopters, according to Col. Paul S. Johnston, the Tustin base commander.

Bloomer, the retired general, said he has been told that the Marine Corps would like to shift the helicopter operations from Tustin to Twentynine Palms, in the high desert.

For now, uncertainty over the future of the Tustin base and its two much-loved hangars has some Marines displeased, including Gunnery Sgt. Patrick Patterson.

“It’s a good base. I’d like to see it stay open,” Patterson said Friday, while waiting to use a base pay phone.

Patterson, who said he returned recently from a seven-month posting in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, spoke with a sense of reverence about the hangars.

Each, he said, is “a big, humongous building,” Patterson said. “Sometimes, on a cloudy night, it will form its own little rain clouds in there and start raining.”