Full of History, but Not Historic

Too often, pieces of the past end up under the treads of bulldozers as yesterday gets flattened to make way for tomorrow. But sometimes old is just old, not historic. That’s the case in Burbank, where a federal preservation council has recommended against knocking down old Lockheed buildings until they can be studied further.

When Lockheed pulled out of Burbank in the early 1990s, it left behind a complex of giant manufacturing buildings--the shops where much of modern aviation was born and the weapons of the Cold War were produced. The elegant flying machines conceived and designed in these awkward behemoths kept the peace and pushed the limits of how fast, how high, how far man could go.

Already, the state’s Historic Preservation Office has ruled that the Lockheed property is not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. But the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, charged with ensuring federal agencies follow proper preservation procedure, wants further study before the Federal Aviation Administration helps pay for demolition to make way for a new Burbank Airport terminal.

The buildings ought to go. Their historic value has been studied as part of the airport’s expansion plans. Clearly, what came out of these buildings represents some of the finest works of the human mind--planes that could travel faster than sound or be invisible to radar--and they are appropriately ensconced in museums, or even still in use. The what in this case is incidental to the where, which really is just a bunch of tumble-down old buildings.