Los Angeles Central Post Office (Goodyear Airship Factory site) (Los Angeles, California)

USA / California / Florence-Graham / Los Angeles, California / Central Avenue, 7101
 blimp, post office, interesting place
Los Angeles Central Postal Sorting Facility
7101 South Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90001
800 ASK-USPS
usps.whitepages.com/service/post_office/main-office-la-...

This facility within Los Angeles was a large manufacturing complex where the Goodyear company manufactured airships (blimps).
The date of establishment of the Goodyear facility has not been determined.
The earliest depiction of the Goodyear facility which has been located was on the 1937 USGS topo map.
It depicted several large factory buildings in the center of the property,
with open areas (airship fields) on the north & south sides, on the west side of which were several hangars.

The date of at which airship operations came to an end at the L.A. facility has not been determined. It was subsequently reused by Goodyear as a tire re-capping plant,
and later manufacturing operations were moved out of state in an attempt to help clean up the air in L.A.
When it was time to demolish buildings, several groups tried to get at least one hangar listed as a historical building / national landmark, and all attempts failed.

Ironically, the former Goodyear airship factory had some aviation reuse long after it was abandoned.

If you look at the film 'Blue Thunder' [1983], a good portion of the end of the film was shot at the old plant:
it's the chase scene with Schieder & McDowell & their respective helicopters,
and they shoot up the plant pretty good (you can tell in the film that it had been abandoned for quite some time).

Besides sorting facilities buildings contain USPS general warehouses and the Greenmead Station Post Office.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   33°58'41"N   118°15'31"W

Comments

  • My father worked for the Goodyear tire and rubber company in Akron Oh. He was from California and could not take the summer humidity of Ohio while working in a hot environment inside the plant. He started when he was 18 years old (1925) and after two years transferred to the new Los Angeles plant (1927) He worked there 10 years before meeting and marrying my mother(1937). These were the years of the depression and my mom always joked that the reason she married him was because he had a good job. He retired in the summer of 1970 after 43 years, 45 years if you count Akron Oh. It was the only job he ever had.
This article was last modified 10 years ago