Los Angeles Municipal Airport - A History of Flight

In SimCity 4, there are two types of ports; seaport and airport. The main goal of the game is to expand your population with a proper balance of residential, commercial, and industrial zones. Roads and electricity are necessary for these spaces to develop, but city planners will also run into growth caps without building cap busters. Essentially, everything that isn't a zone or a road is a cap buster.

The seaport should be attached to an industrial zone, farmland being the cheapest industrial zone to build. I've already written about the building of LA's seaport, and one of the county's biggest agricultural exports. The seaport also needs to be placed partially on water, and not just on any grade of beach. In my LA Harbor article I talk about the money that went into preparing San Pedro, before building any of the structures. Between the Southern Pacific freight trains and the freighters docking at the Port of Los Angeles, tons of oranges and other goods were shipped around the country.

In the SimCity model, industrial areas (farms and factories) produce goods that need to be shipped. Trucks are the least efficient, and clog traffic. Trains and seaports can handle higher volumes of goods, wish will inspires more industry to move in.

Commercial areas (retail areas and office buildings) operate the exact opposite way. Whereas goods need to be shipped as quickly and as efficiently as possible, commercial areas form at the places where traffic is clogged. Not gridlock, but retail only works if there are plenty of customers to lure into your shop.

At the turn of the century, Los Angeles underwent an extreme real estate boom. Culver City, Huntington Beach, wealthy men developed former farmland and sold off houses by the lot. With a real estate boom comes the need for more jobs, and the farms need to turn to factories while the retail shops turn to offices.

The transition from farms to factories is fairly simple. The factories can provide more jobs and churn out more goods, and with the air pollution caused by factories the city instantly becomes undesirable for farmers.

With retail shops and offices, it's a bit more complicated. Your city needs middle class citizens before it can offer middle class jobs, which requires an education system amongst other things.

Once you have an office center set up, the accoutrements that come with being a commercial center start to come all at once, as it did in Los Angeles. In 1921 Los Angeles got it's first radio station, KQL which could send out programming to the masses paid for by companies wishing to get their advertising to the masses.

Of course, if you wanted to sell your company's goods in other cities, you needed to be able to take meetings in other cities. Passenger train stations had been present in LA since the 1880s, but after the first World War passenger air travel became the desirable way for executives to travel.

The land where the airport would be built was originally a land grant known as Rancho Sausal Redondo. Much of the land was used for cattle and sheep grazing, and later for wheat and barley. In the 1920s, a small portion of the land was made into a makeshift airstrip for pioneer aviators. In 1927 a group of Inglewood citizens pushed for the development of a major airport, lead by Harry Culver (who developed Culver City) as well as others.

In July of 1927, real estate agent William Mines, representing the owner of the ranch, offered 640 acres to be turned into an airport for the city. This airport was known as Mines Field, and Charles Lindberg flew in the first passenger plane with Will Rodgers as a passenger.

In 1928 the Los Angeles City Council approved the site as the official airport of Los Angeles, and on 1929 the airport opened Hangar one, and on June 7th 1930 the whole airport was officially dedicated.

Los Angeles Airport dedication, photo credit LAPL

Hangar one still stands, as it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The building cost the city $35,000 and was leased to Curtis Wright Flying Service. You can see the crowd that gathered for the dedication getting a flyover from a fleet of biplanes.

Earlier photo of the dedication, photo credit LAPL

 Los Angeles Municipal Airport, as it was then named, hosted the National Air Races. The 1933 race was won by James R. Wendell in the Wendell-Williams "44". The model 44 was featured in the 1939 movie Tail Spin produced by 20th Century Fox starring Alice Feye, Constance Bennett, and Nancy Kelly as female aviators.

The city purchased the airport in 1937, making a rectangle of land twenty miles from downtown part of Los Angeles. Commercial flights would not begin until 1946. In the meantime, it was a significant airstrip in a city which had the likes of Howard Hughes developing aircraft.

Los Angeles International Airport is now one of the busiest in the world, but in 1928 it was just a site for hobbyists to get together and dream of a world where flight was commonplace.