Closing Time

"Historically, the employees of Southern California aerospace—the region’s largest private-sector employer from World War II through the end of the Cold War—weren’t just white; they were Southern. According to D.J. Waldie, who chronicled his hometown of Lakewood in his magnificent history-meditation Holy Land, by 1945 600,000 Southerners had moved here to work in the aircraft factories—many of them Steinbeck’s Okies, by way of the San Joaquin Valley. (World War II–era columnist Ernie Pyle called them 'the Aviation Okies.') The biggest of the factories was Douglas Aviation in Long Beach, which employed 50,000 workers during the war and then 100,000 at the height of the Cold War, ranking it alongside Ford’s behemoth River Rouge plant outside Detroit as the largest factory in the nation’s history."

In the LA Weekly, Harold Meyerson charts the end of LA's white working class.

And the Los Angeles Times describes what is happening to the massive aerospace hangers left behind.