When it comes to the rise and fall of big manufacturing, few areas in Southern California tell the story as well as the South Bay.

Steel and rubber plants, shipbuilding, oil extraction and refining, aircraft and satellite manufacturing it was all in the South Bay area in the past 100 years.

Today, only some aerospace and oil operations remain. The rest of the region, stretching roughly from Los Angeles International Airport to Long Beach, is dotted by trade-related businesses, auto-related operations, small businesses of every stripe, shopping centers and office space.

“Early on, you had the smokestack industries: steel, rubber, oil,” said Ken Carey, first vice president with CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. “Those industries then gave way in part to the aerospace companies and Japanese automakers. Now, it’s almost all import-export.”

Little of this was envisioned at the beginning of the 20th Century as developers marketed the coastline as a place for the rich to establish beach homes or spend summers in a resort-like atmosphere. These developers had bought portions of the four vast Spanish-era ranchos that covered the area Rancho Centinela, Rancho Sausal Redondo, Rancho Palos Verdes and Rancho San Pedro and were eager to subdivide and develop their holdings.

Coastal resorts sprung up in what would soon become the cities of Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, linked to Los Angeles by the Santa Fe Railroad. In the newly established city of Long Beach, the huge Pike amusement park started in 1902 on what’s now known as Rainbow Harbor.

In 1910, rail and land magnate Henry Huntington ran his Pacific Electric Red Car line down through the region, bringing further development.

Meanwhile, the competing ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were dredged from San Pedro Bay and soon were each home to giant shipbuilding operations like Todd Shipyard.

Plentiful cheap land throughout the South Bay not only brought lots of housing development but also major manufacturing operations, including U.S. Steel, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., and Bethlehem Steel. These were centered close to the rail lines on what’s now 190th Street in the Torrance area.

In 1921, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Co. struck oil on a hill north of Long Beach that became known as Signal Hill. (There had been oil operations in the South Bay prior to that, most notably in El Segundo, which was named in 1910 for Standard Oil’s “second” oil refinery in California.)

Soon, oil derricks coated the entire South Bay region, from Long Beach all the way up to Inglewood. And that in turn spurred further development of the region.

The Signal Hill strike came within months of similar-sized finds in Huntington Beach and Santa Fe Springs.

“For a while in the early 1920s, L.A. was the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of the world, exporting more oil than anywhere else on the planet,” said Nancy Quam-Wickham, professor of history at California State University Long Beach. “L.A. oil fueled some of the industrial development of Japan, for instance.”

What’s more, Quam-Wickham said, the growth of the oil industry in turn spawned an explosion in manufacturing to supply all the derricks, drills, pipelines and other materials needed for oil exploration and transport.

Money from the oil industry also spread into other sectors of the economy.

“Oil money launched a housing boom in Long Beach and also was responsible for building up much of the downtown,” said Julie Bartolotto, executive director of the Historical Society of Long Beach.

Taking off


Then, in 1933, the Newport-Inglewood Fault made itself felt with a major earthquake that leveled much of Long Beach and damaged many structures throughout the South Bay. While the damage was considerable, the rebuilding effort became a major source of jobs during the Depression.

Meanwhile, another industry was beginning to take root in the South Bay: aircraft building. Howard Hughes located his Hughes Aircraft Co. in what’s now Playa Vista, while Santa Monica-based Douglas Aircraft Co. opened up a facility in El Segundo. In 1939, Jack Northrop left Douglas and set up Northrop Aircraft Inc. nearby in El Segundo. All were near Mines Airfield, the precursor to Los Angeles International Airport.

In 1941, with the war in Europe looking likely for the United States, rapidly expanding Douglas Aircraft was searching for a large site to begin manufacturing military aircraft; it built 1.4 million square feet of facilities on vacant land north of the Long Beach municipal airport. Between its Santa Monica, El Segundo and Long Beach sites, Douglas employed 160,000 by 1944, including thousands of women who were recruited by the government’s “Rosie the Riveter” campaign.

The war also brought the U.S. Naval Shipyard to Long Beach; the two ports became the center of shipbuilding on the West Coast.

Indeed, World War II marked the height of manufacturing in the South Bay, with the oil, shipbuilding, aircraft, steel and other industries all running full throttle to support the war effort.

After the war, the aircraft makers continued operating with military contracts and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, turned to the booming space industry. The region became the center for a vast web of subcontractors.

But other industries didn’t fare as well: the oil wells began to peter out; heavy manufacturers such as U.S. Steel and Goodyear Tire and Rubber reduced and ultimately closed their operations as foreign competition took hold, and shipbuilding gradually wound down.

Yet the 1950s was also the heyday for suburban development and the South Bay, with land prices still cheap, was soon blanketed with homes and newly incorporated cities like Lawndale and Gardena.

“In the late 1940s, you could buy a lot on the Strand in Hermosa Beach for $1,500 or $2,000” said Ted Lawson, senior vice president with CB Richard Ellis.

With so many suburbanites, the South Bay retail scene completely transformed in the 1960s. What had once been small mom-and-pop stores along thoroughfares like Hawthorne Boulevard gave way to huge shopping malls, like the Pan Pacific Mall (later renamed the Del Amo Fashion Mall).

Then in the 1970s, the problem of what to do with all the closed-down manufacturing facilities found an answer as the three major Japanese automakers Datsun (later Nissan), Honda and Toyota all opened their U.S. headquarters on old manufacturing sites.

“The smokestack industries became the foreign car company headquarters,” said Carey. “I personally brokered the sale of the former Bethlehem Steel site to Toyota.”

Carey said one reason the auto makers chose that area was the proximity of a major Japanese neighborhood in Gardena.

Last year, Nissan announced it was pulling up stakes and moving to Tennessee but Honda and Toyota remain.

Recent times


While the smokestack industries were disappearing, the 1980s saw the heyday of the South Bay’s aerospace industry, fueled by the defense buildup under President Ronald Reagan and the booming satellite industry which was centered in the El Segundo area.

Indeed, so bullish were local planners on the future of aerospace that the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (the predecessor agency to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority) decided to have the western end of the Green light rail line run south to that area to serve commuting employees instead of north towards Los Angeles International Airport a move now viewed as a colossal mistake.

But even before the first Green Line track was laid, the aerospace industry was beginning to pull back. The trend that started in the late 1980s accelerated into a near-collapse in the early 1990s as the Cold War ended and military orders dried up. Tens of thousands of jobs were slashed at McDonnell Douglas and TRW and other aerospace manufacturers.

In addition, the Long Beach Naval Shipyard was closed in the largest round of base closures to hit California, resulting in thousands more jobs being lost.

This double-whammy hit Long Beach hard, putting an abrupt end to redevelopment of the downtown area. The effects also rippled across the entire South Bay as middle class households left the region to be replaced by more recent immigrants.

But there was still one engine running in the South Bay that would form the basis for the region’s economic turnaround: the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

America’s insatiable appetite for cheap imported goods from Asia fueled an explosion in containerized cargo trade, turning the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach into the largest port complex in the Western Hemisphere. Along with that growth came a huge influx of warehousing and import/export-related businesses that now form the largest component of the South Bay economy.

But this growth has come at a price: some of the nation’s worst pollution from all the diesel operations around the ports and airports. Environmental concerns have also constrained conversion of old oil, manufacturing and aerospace sites for new uses.

As the South Bay economy enters its second century, finding the balance between industry and trade on one side and the environment on the other side will be crucial.