Added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 27, 2017

Before LAX, before the Hollywood Burbank Airport, there was Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale. This was the first airport in the greater LA area where commercial air flight really took off. It was an important one for the growth of airplane manufacturing and how air flight was perceived in popular culture, too. And while it’s been closed to air traffic since 1959, GCAT’s beautiful terminal building – restored by Disney to its near-original condition – is one of the best-preserved emblems of the birth of commercial aviation in Los Angeles.  

In the Hangar

Around the same time that Hollywood was transforming into a mecca for film production, LA was beginning its love affair with flight. The first major airshow in the US took place in 1910 at Dominguez Field, near present-day Carson, with an estimated 226,000 people in attendance. Small private plane manufacturers cropped up in LA during the years before World War I, with major ones like Douglas and Lockheed soon to follow. LA had everything a growing aircraft company could want: mild climate, abundant workforce, venture capitalists and large swaths of flat land. By 1928, some 25 manufacturing plants serving the aviation industry had opened in LA, plus dozens of flight schools. 12 years later, nearly half of LA manufacturing jobs involved making planes, and more southern Californians were employed by the aviation industry than any other industry. 

In its early days, air flight was largely the province of wealthy hobbyists. But things were changing by the mid-’20s. Flight was becoming safer, more commercially viable, and the 1926 Air Commerce Act brought government oversight to the airways. The entertainment industry helped to popularize air flight, too. The WWI film Wings, starring Clara Bow, featured extraordinary scenes of air combat; it won the first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture. Even Mickey Mouse got in on the action. His very first appearance was an animated short called Plane Crazy! released in the spring of 1928 as a silent test screening, a few months before the more famous Steamboat Willie.

On the Runway

Glendale was an early adopter when it came to air flight. In 1921, the city’s most prominent developer Leslie Coombs Brand began hosting “fly-in” parties at his El Miradero estate, open exclusively to guests arriving by air. The following year, Glendale City Council set aside funds to purchase a site near the LA River for a city-owned airport. 

Opened in March of 1923, the Glendale Municipal Airport was a simple thing, with small hangars built of corrugated metal and a relatively short, 1,200-foot runway. But as the prospect of large-scale commercial flight was looming, a syndicate led by a World War I fighter pilot named Captain Charles Spicer bought the Glendale Municipal Airport in 1928. They expanded its footprint to 175 acres, and paved a 3,800-foot-long, 100-foot-wide runway – the first concrete runway west of the Rocky Mountains. 

The airport itself received a major architectural upgrade courtesy of Henry Gogerty, the designer of the Palace Theater (now the Avalon), the Hollywood Toys building and the Yucca-Vine Tower. Up went a two-story Spanish colonial passenger terminal (very a la mode) and a majestic five-story art deco control tower. Gogerty specified colorful Spanish tiles on the outside, and all sorts of cast-concrete decorations, including sentinels on the corners of the control tower, each one holding a propeller. 

The terminal boasted a coffee shop, a restaurant and lounge upstairs, even a barbershop. You could repair to The Cockpit bar, where you could order a cocktail from their in-house mascot “Dr. Dinky.” Aviation promoter Victor Clark proposed the name Grand Central Air Terminal (GCAT); the syndicate unanimously approved. 

When GCAT was dedicated on February 22, 1929, it was still under construction. Only the main waiting room and distinctive, arch-laden south arcade were ready. Yet still, some 12,000+ spectators showed up to the opening, alongside actors Gary Cooper, Dolores del Rio, Jean Harlow and Wallace Beery (who arrived in his own plane). ‘Twas a sure sign of the public’s exponentially expanding interest in flying. 

Takeoff!

Predating both the Los Angeles Municipal Airport (predecessor to LAX) and the United Airport (now the Hollywood Burbank Airport), Grand Central Air Terminal holds the distinction as the first commercial airport in the Los Angeles area. It was chosen as the western terminus of the first cross-country air service, run by a company called Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT). American Airlines also chose GCAT as the end of the line on its cross-country service from New York to LA, which took 20 hours and made nine stops. GCAT soon became the West Coast base for Maddux, PanAm, TWA and more. 

From the beginning, the biggest names in aviation flew in and out of Grand Central Air Terminal. Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and the eccentric film producer/aviator Howard Hughes all regularly used it; Earhart even bought her first plane from Kinner Airplane & Motor Corporation, which was housed at GCAT’s original incarnation in the early ‘20s. In 1930, aviator Laura Ingalls set the first women’s transcontinental round trip speed record here, when she flew from Long Island’s Roosevelt Field to GCAT and back again.

GCAT was a major center for flight training and manufacturing in its early years. Soon after its dedication, the owners sold it to the Curtiss-Wright Company, who opened a technical institute in a corner of the terminal building. Douglas Aircraft unveiled their DC-1 there in 1933, and the Hughes Aircraft Company (owned by Howard Hughes) built its first plane in one of the hangars on the property. 

Hollywood favored Grand Central Air Terminal too. Movies like Central Airport (featuring John Wayne’s first on-screen death), the Shirley Temple vehicle Bright Eyes, the Busby Berkeley musical Hollywood Hotel and the disaster flick The High and the Mighty (John Wayne survives in this one) were all shot in part at GCAT. All a warmup for its appearance in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, of course.

Beginning Our Descent

As America mobilized for WWII, GCAT played its part. The US Air Corps contracted with the Grand Central Flight School in 1939, sending a class of 35 cadets for a six week flight training program. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, commercial flights were halted, the buildings were camouflaged green, the runway was extended to allow Lockheed P-38 Lightning warbirds to take off, and GCAT became a military camp for fighter pilots. 

After WWII, the City of Glendale cut back the runway to its pre-war length. But airplane technology was advancing rapidly in the ‘40s, and passenger planes were getting larger. The truncated runway at GCAT meant that the newer commercial planes couldn’t land there. LAX had made some major expansions after the war, and by 1947, the biggest airlines moved their LA operations from Glendale to Westchester. GCAT could now only handle private flights. For a while its manufacturing facilities stayed busy retrofitting warplanes for civilian use, and Air Force mechanics were trained there until the end of the Korean War. But GCAT’s training programs shut down in 1954, and its final flight rolled down the runway in 1959. 

Those original 175 acres were transformed into a light industrial park, and the terminal building became office space. Beginning in 1961, Disney leased several buildings on the former GCAT campus for their Imagineering division. After years of tenancy, Disney purchased the entire office park outright in 1997, and announced a long-term development agreement with the City of Glendale that would turn it into a private creative campus. 

Landing

A 2002 report for the Historic American Buildings Survey found the old Grand Central Air Terminal abandoned and in rough shape: “The interior of the Air Terminal has been significantly altered and partially gutted…Wall supports on the west arcade indicate the building may be in poor structural condition.” First floor windows were boarded up. Tiles were painted over and walls were deteriorating. Several skylights had been removed, and most of the original exterior lighting was long gone.  

Finally in 2012-2015, Disney honored its promise to bring GCAT back to life. They brought on board Frederick Fisher & Partners to perform a forensic investigation of the entire structure. They evaluated what could be restored, what kind of safety measures needed to be addressed, and what needed to be changed to make it functional as a modern office space. Also playing a major role in the project were decorative specialists EverGreene Architectural Arts. 

The restoration team stabilized unreinforced masonry by drilling cores into the walls, and inserting rebar and grout into the cores. They covered the roof in traditional red clay tiles, like it used to have. Replacement windows were installed in the large arched openings on the north and south facades. They replaced deteriorating plaster on the walls, inventoried all the cast concrete ornamentation on the outside, and made molds of intact decorations so they could replace the broken ones. Pendant lights in the interior waiting room were reconstructed, and layers of paint were removed to expose original tiles and colors. Ghost signs emerged, including an old American Airlines logo that once adorned a wall in the waiting room. Not all of the signs could be kept, but they did preserve the old “Curtiss-Wright Technical School of Aeronautics” signage on the landing of the grand staircase inside. They wisely decided not to repaint it, to preserve some of the patina of time.

GCAT’s restorers did introduce a few modern innovations. Most obvious is the wing-shaped bridge stretching across the two second-story sections of the building, so workers can walk across without disturbing anyone in the old waiting room. One of the industrial buildings just south of the terminal was demolished, to make room for a parking lot and provide open space for a “view corridor.” There’s now a lawn where the tarmac used to be, and in the sidewalk below that, large letters spell out “AIR TERMINAL” – a clever callback to the “GRAND CENTRAL AIR TERMINAL GLENDALE” wording that was once visible on the runway. Frederick Fisher & Partners pitched the idea of displaying an actual airplane outside on the lawn, to return some of the original context. Too bad that never happened. 

Nowadays, the former restaurant is filled with Disney cubicles, and the main waiting area is rented out for corporate events. In between PowerPoint presentations, you can get a drink at the bar where passengers once purchased plane tickets, and the old coffee shop is taken up by a wonderful small exhibit about the history of GCAT. There’s a case full of objects recovered during the restoration, including a spotlight from the control tower, and decades-old pilot log sheets.

Years ago, Disney offered public tours of the Grand Central Air Terminal, but they stopped at some point during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now your best bet is to A) Get a job at Disney or B) Start a company and rent it out for your next all-staff meeting. Even if you aren’t able to see the inside though, there’s plenty to gawk at from the two streetsides. Especially now that it’s surrounded by nondescript warehouses and industrial buildings, the restored Grand Central Air Terminal stands out as both an exceptional work of architecture, and a rare, extant connection to the early days of LA aviation history. 

Thank you to Steve Spiegel of Walt Disney Imagineering for confirming that my pictures weren’t objectionable to Disney. Also thanks to the Art Deco Society of LA for coordinating the tour and lecture of the Grand Central Air Terminal where most of the photos/videos included in this post were taken. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “A Brief History of the FAA” (FAA.gov, updated November 15, 2021)

+ Bricker, Tom: “Grand Central Air Terminal Tour” (DisneyTouristBlog.com) 

+ Dickson, J. Ron: “A Journey Back in Time Grand Central Air Terminal” (AirportJournals.com, July 1, 2014)

+ Eberhardt, Thomas and Fritz Coleman: “When Glendale Ruled the Skies” parts 1-3 (VIDEO –  City of Glendale, 1999 – via @coolayttak on YouTube)

+ EverGreene Architectural Arts: “Grand Central Air Terminal” (evergreene.com)

+ Frederick Fisher and Partners: “Grand Central Air Terminal” (fisherpartners.net)

+ Goodnow, Marc N: “Architectural Aspects of Pacific Airports (PDF – The Architect and Engineer, vol. 103 no. 2, November 1930 – via USModernist)

+ Grand Central Air Terminal – Glendale, California (Photo album by Flickr user Thom-293, 2014-2016)

+ Gurr, Bob: “DESIGN: Those Were The Times No.5 – 1937 Grand Central Air Terminal, the Original WDI Creative Campus” (Micechat.com, March 6, 2013)

+ Hemmerlein, Sandi: “Photo Essay: Inside The Last Remnant of the Glendale Airport” (AvoidingRegret.com, February 14, 2016)

+ KCET: “Before LAX, There Was Grand Central Terminal | Things That Aren’t Here Anymore | KCET” (VIDEO – PBS SoCal on YouTube, July 31, 2023)

+ LoCascio, John, AIA, Historic Resources Group: Grand Central Air Terminal’s NRHP nomination form 

+ LSA Associates, Inc. & Chattel: “SurveyLA Los Angeles Citywide Historic Context Statement: Industrial Development, 1850-1980” (PDF – Los Angeles City Planning, rev. 2018)

+ Medina, Victor: “Grand Central Air Terminal” (moviesites.org)

+ Ostashay, Janet, PCR Services Corporation: “Historic American Buildings Survey: Grand Central Air Terminal” (PDF – Library of Congress, 2002)

+ Pitt, Leonard and Dale: Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (University of California Press, 1997)

+ William-Ross, Lindsay: “LAistory: Grand Central Air Terminal” (LAist.com, June 13, 2008)

+ Yamada, Katherine: “VERDUGO VIEWS: Remembering Amelia Earhart’s ties here” (Glendale News-Press, July 6, 2007)