Longtime Neighbors Cling to Past in Face of Future

The Grand Central Industrial Park doesn’t look much like a repository of collective memory, and it’s certainly not very grand or central, for that matter.

Like so many other areas in Southern California, it has boxy warehouses, nondescript office buildings and straight-edge roads studded with more telephone poles than trees.

So when my editor suggested I write something about the DreamWorks SKG animation studio that was recently built there, I figured it would be a simple story of contrasts--a posh postmodern palace constructed in the middle of an industrial wasteland.

To my surprise, I found something more: A little-known neighborhood snuggled alongside the Ventura Freeway, where couples still sit on their flag-draped porches to watch the sun go down and wave at strangers driving past. Thick-trunked walnut and magnolia trees shade streets where children play.

Some people here still live in the same houses their grandparents bought in the 1930s and 1940s when Hollywood stars, pioneering aviators and U.S. Army Air Corps P-38s (built at the nearby Lockheed factory in Burbank) lit upon the Glendale airport runway that now lies under the industrial park.

Now the area is a hodgepodge of medical offices, computer software outlets and aerospace firms. Disney, which owns most of the land, has installed many of its Imagineering units here.

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To get to DreamWorks, one must pass under a mesh of power lines connected to the nearby Glendale Steam Electric Plant. There is also an old Lockheed facility, which along with Disney and ITT Corp. soured nearby ground water with decades of industrial solvents, according to the government. (A few years ago the government ordered the companies to construct the treatment plant that now sits about 100 yards from DreamWorks.)

A recycling plant next door sparkles with mounds of glass. And behind DreamWorks flows the concrete-bedded waters of the Los Angeles River and a much larger asphalt river--a freeway coursing with rubber and metal.

“Welcome to DreamWorks,” says a chirpy security guard during a visit last week.

I am ushered inside DreamWorks, where the freeway sounds become a rainy hush dominated by a gushing fountain at the heart of the campus. Stucco walls shut out the bleak landscape and enclose me in a faux Italian village.

It is just after lunchtime, but no one seems very hurried. DreamWorks employees, few wearing suits or ties, stroll across the stonework or sit at outdoor tables talking to each other or reading. I could be at my neighborhood Starbucks--but it can’t be, because none of these folks are looking out onto a parking lot.

My guide is an old studio hand named David Mannix. He says the building was designed to attract animators from all over the world.

Mannix leads us through a series of lobbies, decked out in earth tones and overstuffed chairs. In addition to the main fountain, there are at least three others in smaller courtyards, which ensure animators will have natural light wherever they work.

There is also a man-made brook, which looks much less man-made than the Los Angeles River, running past wildflowers behind the property.

Like the factories of the Industrial Age, the studio is self-contained, built for maximum productivity. But where New England’s textile mills were built to dominate the will and subdue the imagination, DreamWorks wants its workplaces to engender fantasy.

On another day, I am checking out the real world outside DreamWorks’ walls when I stumble into a village of low-lying bungalows adjacent to the industrial park. Here again the Ventura Freeway is muted, this time by a high embankment.

Three people stare at me as I park on the street. In Los Angeles one becomes used to being a stranger among strangers. Here, I am a stranger among natives. But restless these natives are not.

Now in their 70s, Jim and Carol Smith have lived here since they were children.

“I used to walk up Elm with my .22 rifle and hunt rabbits,” says Jim Smith, who retired from Glendale’s police force in 1966 after injuring his back chasing a fleet-footed peeping tom.

Reclining in his easy chair and basking in the glow of his wide-screen television, Smith harkened back to the early days of Grand Central Air Terminal. Unlike today’s terminals, with floors pocked with chewing gum and cigarette burns, airports were classy affairs in their dawning days.

Attending the Glendale airport’s opening in 1929 were Hollywood celebs Gary Cooper, Jean Harlow, Hoot Gibson and others--some piloting themselves in for the party. The historic air tower still looms above the industrial park.

Pioneering aviators and aerospace entrepreneurs such as Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes also flew out of the airport.

As children, Jim Smith and his buddies had the run of the place. At night they would often look out over the runway from the miniature golf course on top of the nearby Grand Central Market. Smith’s uncle, who flew charter flights out of the airport, even told him about the pilots’ clubhouse that used to stand next to the present site of DreamWorks.

“The pilots used to have . . . you know . . .”--he glances over at his wife lounging in her armchair across the room--”. . . rooms for women.”

The clubhouse also had a secret tunnel that led to the river bank, Smith said, so customers could escape during occasional raids by Glendale coppers.

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John Pera, 33, lives a couple of houses down and directly across from the Disney offices--the former site of the airstrip. He says his father used to be the designated flier for drunken stars.

Pera, who says he earns his living maintaining Jay Leno’s fleet of cars (“about a 100, I don’t know exactly”), believes the neighborhood is doomed. Twice residents have fought off developers who sought to rezone the six blocks of homes, but the oldest residents are dying or moving out.

He suspects it’s just a matter of time before someone tries to replace homes with studios. “Progress is progress, I guess,” he says.

One street down, I talk to Jim and Lynette Eklund, who are practicing the lost art of sunset gazing from their front porch. When his grandparents lived here, before companies were so worried about industrial espionage, Jim Eklund used to run along the railroad tracks and sneak peeks at new Disney rides being constructed nearby. He and his wife, Lynette, recently bought the house from his mother and are raising yet another generation of Eklunds here.

“We’re in a little time warp here,” Lynette says. “Don’t tell anyone about us.”