Save Moffet Field's Hangar One
BB buddy Todd Lappin says,
Hangar One is Silicon Valley landmark. Towering above Moffett Field, the huge buidling was originally built to shelter the airship USS Macon -- a flying aircraft carrier constructed by the US Navy in the 1930s. The structure is contaminated with PCBs, however, so the Navy is considering clean-up options, including tearing the building down. Thankfully, a group of local aviation buffs have rallied to save the historic structure. The Navy is set to decide the building's fate in November, so the race is on to preserve Hangar One before it disappears forever.Link
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Can a military property be declared an historic landmark in California?
David B.
I attended Cogswell Polytechnical College for four years in Sunnyvale California and often day dreamed about the fantastic flying vehicles that used to journey fourth from this structure. Also, I loved how the huge doors, when opened look like a big vagina.
Google should buy it, put a data center in half of it, and fill the other half with autonomous Google Blimps, which they can use for makeshift cell phone towers for their Google Phone rollout.
And on Wednesdays - hangar badminton!
Is it worth the expense of cleaning up the PCBs to preserve the building? I mean, the USS Macon is neat and all but it didn't exactly change the fate of the nation.
Military sites are given various levels of historic all the time in California.
Hangar one has always been a building that inspires everything that's wonderful about the age of flight. It would be a crime to tear it down, some new destiny should be found for it.
The USS Macon was a "flying aircraft carrier"? How on earth did that work? All I can find is that biplanes were brought on board using a trapeze of some kind.
It's an awesome structure. But it was built in a bygone age, for a bygone purpose.
Unless there is some modern use for this building, I say scrap it.
Z7Q2: Yes! And they should build a really big Tesla Coil.
OK, so who is going to pay for it all? Everyone is in favor of saving this building, but no one wants to pay for it. If I remember correctly, the cost is something like $30 million to clean up the site. Where is that money going to come from?
Right now, it's basically sealed up and no one is allowed into it. Why not just let it stay that way until the Navy and NASA get a plan together that addresses the rest of the base. What is the hurry in addressing just the hanger? There are very big questions about the future use of much of the base as it is. And there are many other areas of the base that are contaminated, too, that need to be addressed.
I used to work at NASA/Ames Research Center, and some of my fondest memories are bringing my lunch into the hangar and just sitting in there, enjoying the space.
The hangar is too big to really comprehend. There are times of year when it generates its own *weather* inside! For example, you go in, there are clouds, and it is raining. Inside.
If there is any way to provide civilian access to the building, they should do the same thing the Tillamook Air Museum did with theirs:
http://tillamookair.com/
MadMolecule:
There was an extendable trapeze that would engage a harness attached to the top of the airplane.
See http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/g440000/g441979.jpg for a good picture.
Obviously it required specialized aircraft, they were mostly for scouting and defense of the mothership.
The planes were lowered through the bottom of the airship through a closeable hole. Rigid airships aren't like blimps, the outer skin does not hold the lifting gas.
Later in use they completely removed the landing gear from the planes(you can also see the hatch the planes are raised up in: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h77000/h77433.jpg
Please look at this article published in the Mountain View Voice about the fabric alternative to save the Hangar presented by Linda Ellis (my spouse) a Mountain View Architect.
Article
http://www.mv-voice.com/story.php?story_id=2930
Presentation
http://www.nuqu.org/20070512/248/
This approach has been endorsed the by Save Hangar One Committee, the most active local organization trying to save the Hangar.
The costs for saving the hangar fall into 3 buckets.
1. Navy Remediation of Toxic Waste
• Removal of the skin containing the PCBs and Lead
-or-
• Continue removing the entire structure after the skin is removed
2. Returning the Hangar to reuse by Re-Skinning
• Fabric Skin & Installation $12 Million Estimate, with a 30 year warranty without maintenance.
• Building code upgrades to return building to Hangar reuse as Hangar (unknown but likely nominal).
3. Alternative use Hangar for other undetermined purposes
• This could include offices, museum, sports facility, etc and could require more dollars to meet other building code requirements beyond the historical and original design use of the building as Hangar.
The building footprint is 8.5 acres with a recovering estimate of $12 Million + dollars and would
1. Save one of the most important historical landmark in Silicon Valley
2. Be the most green approach since it returns 50% less to waste to the environment
3. Be the most economically sound solution since building an 8.5 acres structure for $12 million dollars in today’s dollars is impossible.
I actually come from a small town with airship facilities nearby. Unlike Moffat, there where two airship hangers at Cardington, and they let one go to rot whilst the other was used for a variety of indoors testing purposes. These purposes include - but are not limited to - building the massive sound stages for things like Live Aid, U2 and Rod Stewart.
I've found some pictures of it on Flickr, and if you google Cardington, Bedfordshire, you can see the difference between the two:
Flickr : http://flickr.com/photos/stevemartin/106482478/
@#9
"Where is that money going to come from?"
I would be more than willing to knock 3 hours and twenty minutes off of the Iraq war to cover this. At the current estimate of $100K per minute that is all it would take. Seems like a really good deal to me.
There has been approx $200 million dollars allocated by the Navy to the superfund cleanup at the site. The Fabric solution is both an economically sound and a green solution.
Please understand, its not like there is new money required, its money already budgeted to resolve the serious serious hazardous waste problem at the site.
Having been there a few times as a kid, I have to say it is a pretty remarkable building - you could probably gather enough pigeon crap there to fill a small stadium.
~Oswegan
http://oswegan.blogspot.com
"Save the obscure derelict Hanger!!"
This is one of those things that people care about only after someone popular tells you that you should care about it.
The same problem is occurring with respect to the two huge blimp hangars in Tustin, CA. These are truly astounding structures the like of which may never be seen again.
Tustin Hangars while very noble are a bit different.
First they are made of wood which will make them harder to save. The Moffett Field structure is made of steel!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lellis_sjca/495709258/in/set-72157600231347674/
Second the hangars at Tustin are far smaller than the structure in Mountain View.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lellis_sjca/495737809/in/set-72157600231347674/
The Macon which was housed in the hangar at Moffett Field was one of the largest aircraft that ever flew in the sky. It carried 5 biplanes on its belly that launched while it was airborne to do coastal search. The Macon was larger than two football fields in size. My father as a boy saw it once fly over his head in sky at low altitude as it blocked out the sky. Its a sight that remains indellible in his memory to this day. Flash Gordon while SciFi had its huge spaceships rooted in this very airship.
Also many people don't know, but the property that the base is on was purchased by the citizens of South Bay for approx $750,000 during the depression for the purposes of locating the base and the structure here. All that Save Hangar One Committee is asking the Navy to do is return assets, not a hole in the ground with an outline of the facility on the ground.
While the Airship was the first significant thing to happen at the base, much followed it. Stanford relocated its wind tunnel research that developed the most efficient propeller designs during World War II.
Subsequent to propeller designs, many of the military and NASA programs out of Moffett field gave birth to the likes of Fairchild, HP, Tandem, and Silicon Graphics to fullfill their program needs.
Silicon Valley has an anchor to its history and the transition from a sleepy farm valley to the mightest technology centers in the world. It all started with the citizens during the depression and the Macon.
Mythbusters went to Moffet Hanger to get a wind-free environment for their Helium Football episode, in which they tested the myth that a football filled with helium will fly farther than one filled with air (it didn't). Great shots of the inside of the hangar, with astonished commentary from Adam: "This is crazy! It's the largest building I've ever seen!"
http://www.tv.com/mythbusters/helium-football/episode/554050/summary.html
Hangars are very cool structures that can be re-utilized for thousands of purposes. For example, the hangars in Alameda are home to a dozen or more small businesses, with more to come. People forget that a hangar isn't some difficult to use, chopped up building; it's a huge, open, very structurally overbuilt shell with no columns. You can literally do anything inside a hanger. Well, let me restate: if it can be done, and it needs to be inside, you can do it in a hanger.
Given that the remediation needs done anyway, and the funds are there, it seems like a no-brainer to save the hangar. I don't know the area, but almost anyone would pay $12mm for a building that size around here.
And that's just the practical side of the equation: the building's history and distinctive architecture make it even more attractive for conservation and reuse. So do it!!
To all the naysayers: you need to develop an appreciation for historical structures and educate youself as to their adaptive reuse before chiming in to a discussion like this. So many cities have destroyed so much of their history that they look like suburban hell from border to border. A reused (or even vacant) WWII era blimp hangar looks a hell of a lot nicer than a vacant Builder's Square rotting on the edge of town. It also looks a damn sight better than a weed-encrusted broken-up concrete pad, which is probably the alternative here.
larry?
sergey?
we know you're reading this...
we know you want it...
@#20
nice photos indeed... but i get only this :(
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Why not preserve the memory and the style of the building rather than the structure? By this I mean that we should allow the Navy to tear down the building, but only after requiring any developer (whether it be for business or housing) to erect a new building with the same footprint and style of the building.
This would allow a modern use for the site, while still preserving a piece of history.
Just a thought.
@Joe: Because that would be immensely more expensive. Building a structure of that size would be a major construction project, whereas replacing the skin of the existing structure would be a minor project and probably not more expensive than tearing it down.
It is a *spectacular* structure, and would be a stunning event venue, if nothing else. At the Moffett airshows, they used to fly hot air balloons *inside*.
Hangar One is deserving of landmark status, just like its sister hangar at the Goodyear Airdock in Akron. (Hangar One in Lakehurst is already a landmark, but was of a very different design, and not nearly as pretty)
I'm in favor of saving everything... whales, hangars, spare change. That said, have you ever been inside one of these things? I was in one near Tilamook OR and it was wild. They are so big they totally warp any sense of perspective you might have. For that reason alone it should be saved. [Insert obligatory "if we can spend $X billion a month in Iraq why can't we spend X% of that on something useful or fun" comment here.]
Why not use it to build Airships? It's about time the luxury leviathans of the sky made a come back.
I had the privilege, years ago, of attending monthly sessions inside hangar one to fly model airplanes. The Oakland Cloud Dusters and the San Francisco Vultures were involved. I could go on for pages, but the upshot is that when the PCB contamination was discovered, the whole thing ended abruptly. Sad...
The Navy announced by email that their report on Hangar One will be delayed until at least January, 2008, to give the Navy time to conduct a “structural analysis of the hangar’s steel frame.” The full message appears below.
I take this as a good sign. It signals that retaining the steel frame may be one of the alternatives to be considered in detail in the Navy’s report. The community has long argued that the hangar should be preserved, but the Navy has never explicitly listed the alternatives under consideration.
Read more here
http://www.nuqu.org/20071210/272/
National Trust for Historic Preservation just placed the Hangar on the list of the nations 11 most endangered historic places.
http://blogs.nationaltrust.org/preservationnation/?p=588
This is very significant news!
The Navy is also still evaluating their choices, given that they were going to orginally issue their report in December, this means that they are taking a serious look at the alternatives to demolishing this significant Silicon Valley Landmark.
Go NAVY!