A once-proud blimp hangar – still awe-inspiring from a distance – today languishes idle and abandoned. Damaged during a windstorm six years ago, the Tustin icon has become an orphaned albatross.
Known as the north hangar, the gargantuan structure off Armstrong Avenue peers across a desolate field at its identical twin – both remnants of the former Marine Corps Air Station shuttered in 1999.
Still owned by the U.S. Navy, the north hangar awaits its long-promised adoption by the County of Orange. But complications stalled the transfer, once slated for 2008, leaving the hangar and its 85-acre backyard in a sort of no-man’s zone.
“Neither the Navy nor the county is giving the north hangar or its surrounding property the maintenance and security it needs,” Tustin City Manager Matt West said.
That gap in oversight, Tustin officials complain, has left the city in charge of patrolling federal land.
“In the past eight months, several life-threatening incidents have occurred on the site, including a helicopter rescue from the top of the hangar,” West said. “It has attracted trespassers who have shown little regard for the law.”
In February, a teenager who scaled the 180-foot-tall half-cylinder had to be airlifted off. And in July, a man allegedly armed with a metal object was shot and wounded nearby by a Tustin Police officer.
Charles Perry, a base closure manager for the Navy, said the agency will step up its periodic monitoring of the site.
“The Navy will be providing more routine security patrols and vegetation management to increase the line of sight for the Tustin Police Department’s patrols of the area,” Perry said.
After the north hangar’s roof partially collapsed in 2013, the county balked at taking on such an expensive fixer-upper. The Navy stabilized the roof with steel towers and cabling at a cost of more than $3 million.
But the bigger time-drain has been removal of environmental contamination from land earmarked by the county for a regional park.
Meanwhile, the mirror hangar across the way enjoys a completely different existence thanks to its doting guardian – the city.
In 2002, the Navy conveyed much its 1,600-acre base to Tustin for a multi-use development called Tustin Legacy – where the city is busily adding roads, office buildings, homes and parks.
Although the Navy still owns the south hangar, as it does the north, Tustin leases it and at some point will take ownership.
The city holds community events inside its otherworldly monolith – including an annual half-marathon that treats runners to a peek inside. It even rents out the hangar for filming television commercials.
But in recent years, Tustin has unwillingly become warden of the north hangar, too.
Tustin announced last week that, due to “deferred federal caretaker activities,” it will beef up police presence around the north hangar to clear “trespassers and secure buildings that pose health and safety risks.”
Tustin has asked the Department of the Navy to provide funding for that objective, West said.
Commissioned in 1942, the hangars housed blimps and other aircraft during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. They are some of the world’s largest freestanding wooden structures.
Despite their beauty and historic value, both hangars have proved a dilemma for all three entities involved – Tustin, the Navy and the county.
In 2007, Tustin City Council members rejected proposals to re-purpose the south hangar, predicting that the space could never be made profitable. Instead, they talked about tearing it down.
But today, Tustin officials are investigating ways to save the landmark. “Nothing is set in stone,” West said. “However, the city is still exploring possible future uses of the south hangar.”
For its part, the federal government wants to relinquish the north hangar’s property but first must finish cleaning it up – an ongoing project that seems to have no end in sight.
“They have recently identified additional contaminants that they are working to address,” county spokeswoman Molly Nichelson said.
Until then, the north hangar’s future remains a stubborn question mark.
“As the Navy is completing its due diligence,” Nichelson said, “the county continues to examine scenarios that will generate revenue to support those costs of the hangar and uses for it.”
