Airport grows from a plane manufacturer to a hub for the rich and famous An airport disguised in sheep’s clothing
Santa Monica may have had its roots firmly planted as a sleepy beach town before the turn of the century, but it wasn’t until it got its own airport that the city really began to take off.
In the early 1900s, the city grew both economically and socially as the patch of grass on the eastside of town developed into a full-fledged airport.
Besides giving Santa Monica economic independence from Los Angeles, jobs at the airport’s aviation plant spurred much of the city’s original single family home development — in Sunset Park and Ocean Park — while also providing the economic necessity to build many of the city’s first apartment complexes.
Today the airport is a self-sufficient, multi-million dollar operation that has, in addition to firms selling airplanes and maintenance shops, attracted many non-aviation uses.
327,“It’s clearly part of the city’s history,” said Councilman Ken Genser, a liaison to the city’s airport commission, “and I think it offers a very useful recreational opportunity for many members of the community.”
And like Santa Monica itself, the people who use the airport have changed. The airport was once fueled by blue collar workers as the site of a plane manufacturer — now it is used by the rich and famous as an alternative to LAX.
An airport disguised in sheep’s clothing
The land now blanketed with concrete, hangers and homes was nothing more than a field used to graze sheep in the 1900s. It was in 1919 that World War I biplanes began using the area as an informal landing strip.
“Back then there was nothing else around,” said Santa Monica Airport Manager Bob Trimborn. “It was just dirt.”
By 1923 the United States Army dedicated the site as Cloverfield — after Graystone Clover, a local pilot who had died in combat during World War I. The military used it to train and maintain its young fleet of pilots and aircraft.
It wasn’t until the following year that the airport was permanently placed on the map. A young aviation engineer, Donald Douglass, designed four “World Cruiser” biplanes that successfully circumnavigated the globe in six months.
The feat drew Douglass several contracts to build planes for the military. To keep him in Santa Monica, the city expanded the operation and over the next two years purchased 225 acres.
By 1929, Douglass had his factory at Santa Monica Airport, turning the city into a blue-collar factory town.
“It changed the demographics of the city forever,” Trimborn said. “Douglass became the largest economic generator in the city — everybody knew somebody who worked at the plant.”
The factory was originally located where Douglass Park on Ocean Park Boulevard now sits.
Over the following decade, hundreds of homes sprung up around the airport — both in West Los Angeles and Santa Monica. The city’s first apartment complexes were built to house the plant’s workers. Many small businesses like “The Airport Pharmacy,” or “The Airport Barber Shop” sprung up to serve the new residents.
During World War II, the federal government took the airport from the city, citing security concerns. Officials wanted to protect Douglass Aircraft, which by that time had become a major defense contractor.
The federal government expanded the airport’s runway and facilities to accommodate the larger military planes being built by Douglass, which had expanded to 44,000 employees and into a 24-hour operation.
Extensive netting was hung over the airport that disguised it from possible enemy bombers flying overhead. When pilots looked down, all they saw were rows of homes. The disguise was so good that when an unfamiliar pilot was flying into the airport, an employee would have to stand at one end of the runway and wave a large flag to signal where to land.
After the war was over, the federal government gave the airport back to the city on April 10, 1948. By that time, it was a far larger operation than when the city had first owned it 10 years earlier.
During the post-war 1950s, Douglass began the production of its DC-7C, which is capable of transporting 110 passengers at speeds up to 400 miles per hour for more than 5,500 miles. It was a major breakthrough for commercial aviation, and more than 338 of those planes were built in Santa Monica.
But commercial aviation carriers wanted larger and faster planes. Douglass found itself competing with jets, especially the Boeing 707. At the end of the 1950s, Douglass began developing plans for its DC-8, a four-engine jet powered craft.
But the runway size needed to be expanded if the new planes were going to fly in and out of Santa Monica. The company proposed to extend the runway from Bundy Avenue across the airport and down a ramp that would have projected over Sunset Park.
The city denied the proposal and Douglass ended up moving its jet operations to the Long Beach Airport, though the company continued some research and development in the Santa Monica.
Douglass chapter ends, Vegas vacations begin
As the airport’s commercial aviation role was coming to a close, its importance as a general aviation airport was only beginning.
Many military pilots from World War II and the Korean War wanted to continue flying after the wars were over, so they purchased their own airplanes and flew in and out of small fields like Santa Monica Airport all over the country.
The numbers of non-military planes taking off and landing at Santa Monica Airport in the late 1960s mushroomed to 356,000 a year, which translated into about 975 a day, or 40 arrivals and 40 departures an hour.
It also was during the late 1960s that the first civilian jets began flying into the airport, which were much louder than the ones today. Making matters worse for nearby residents was that a dealership moved to the airport that sold one of the loudest planes on the market — the Jet Commander.
“To sell these planes, these guys would take their clients out for a night on the town and then after dinner say ‘hey, why don’t we take one of the planes to Vegas,’” Trimborn said. “So they’d go down to the airport and fire up one of these planes at 11 or 12 at night and be in Vegas in 20 minutes. That was the sales pitch — be in Vegas or almost anywhere in under an hour.”
“But that really upset the neighbors,” he added.
In the golden days of Douglass’s plant, neighbors of the airport stomached the noise because many either worked there or at a business that served the company and its workers.
After Douglass left Santa Monica, new residents moving into the neighborhood had little connection to the airport and had far less patience for airplane noise.
“The community attachment was gone,” Trimborn said. “It was just a general aviation airport with few ties to the community.
“That’s when the value of the airport was called into question,” he added.
Legal issues take flight
In 1967, 232 neighbors of the airport filed a lawsuit against the city seeking damages for jet noise, fumes and nuisance. Even though Santa Monica won the lawsuit, for the first time city officials began thinking about closing the airport, or banning jets.
Santa Monica enacted a curfew that prohibited planes from starting their engines from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. That too was challenged in court, this time by a local aircraft operator. The city prevailed and for the first time set the legal standard for curfew laws at general aviation airports across the country.
The city then petitioned the state attorney general to allow it to close the airport. When its request was denied, the city in 1972 moved to ban jets entirely. Signs proclaiming “No Jets” were placed at either end of the airport’s runway.
By 1977, the airport was bulldozed, leaving only a large vacant dirt lot. All that remained was the runway, which remained active.
That same year the Santa Monica Aviation Association sued the city over its jet ban and a preliminary noise ordinance the city set at 100 decibels. In 1979, the courts ruled the city couldn’t ban jets outright, but it could set regulations, like the noise ordinance.
The city lowered the noise level to 85 decibels, which was below even what many propeller planes could meet. A judge later struck down the lower noise ordinance on the grounds it was a disguised jet ban.
During the 1980s, general aviation went through one of its slowest periods in history. The national recession combined with fewer war veterans flying, increased costs of commercial aircraft and a slow-down in the airline industry caused the use of Santa Monica Airport to drop to its lowest point ever.
Because of the slowdown, the city again conducted an economic analysis of the airport that determined the land could be better used if it were closed and turned into a large business park.
In 1980, the city notified its few remaining airport tenants their leases were up in one year, and in 1981 the city council adopted a resolution declaring its intention to close the airport as soon as legally possible.
Fearing Santa Monica would once again set a national precedent, the Federal Aviation Administration sued the city shortly after the resolution was enacted, and the city entered into one of the most bitter court battles of its history. (See related story).
While the lawsuit would eventually be settled two years later, it too would set the stage for how Santa Monica Airport developed into what it has become today.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 22, 2002. Read the original PDF.