End of An Era: Hughes to Vacate Posh Corporate Headquarters
In a symbolic milestone in the Southland aerospace bust, Hughes Aircraft announced Tuesday that it will vacate its posh corporate headquarters along a Pacific Ocean bluff--built just seven years ago on the profits of the Reagan Administration defense buildup.
The company plans to relocate its headquarters to an existing company facility in the Los Angeles area. It did not specify the exact location of the new headquarters or say when the move would be made.
The imposing granite edifice in Los Angeles cost $90 million and was completed in 1985, a peak time for Pentagon spending and optimism among defense contractors for future sales.
Responding to a dreary outlook for defense spending, Hughes announced plans last June to slash 9,000 workers by the end of 1993, including several hundred jobs at its corporate headquarters.
“This building is really too much, too large for our needs for the smaller corporate staff,” Hughes spokesman Richard Dore said.
Hughes, a unit of General Motors, said it hired the commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield to help find new tenants for its current headquarters. A Cushman spokesman said the company would market the building as a potential corporate headquarters, citing its unusual “open space” design in vogue during the 1980s.
The building has 500,000 square feet, about equivalent to a typical 30-story office building, the Cushman spokesman said. The Hughes building, however, is just three stories tall but extends the length of three football fields along the ocean bluff.
