GM Return a Hopeful Sign
The return of General Motors Corp. to the San Fernando Valley is welcome news, and not just for the jobs it brings. The new GM design center slated for North Hollywood is a symbol of the evolving economy--and confirmation that the Valley is finding a niche in these changing times.
GM was a symbol of its time back in 1947 when it opened its Van Nuys assembly plant, producing Chevrolet trucks, the Bel Air, Impala and Del Ray cars and later, the Chevrolet Nova, Chevy Camaro and Pontiac Firebird.
The plant, at more than 1 million square feet, helped make the Valley a manufacturing center, which in turn fueled the Valley’s postwar growth. The plant provided well-paying jobs, more than 5,000 at its peak in 1979. It manufactured the very product--the automobile--that made the booming suburbs possible.
But times changed. Bust followed boom. In 1992, GM shuttered its plant, moving the work to a more modern production facility in Canada. It was one more blow to an already recession-wracked Valley.
The new advanced design center, which top GM officials and Mayor Richard Riordan announced at a gala earlier this month, does not signal a return to the Valley’s manufacturing days. The design center will employ about 30 to 35 people, not thousands. They will work not in a huge plant but in a renovated, 50,000-square-foot former bakery complex on Biloxi Avenue between Magnolia and Chandler boulevards.
But the jobs are for highly skilled, highly paid workers and will generate spinoff business as well. They are new jobs, for a new economy.
What manufacturing was for the middle of the century, information is for this new age. Information fuels the new economy, and information, ideas, imagination are what the design center is about.
Where the GM of 1947 was looking for enough space to build a sprawling manufacturing plant and found it in a Valley still covered by citrus groves, the GM of 2000 was looking for an already established infrastructure for digital design, model building, electronics and computer animation. Such supply and service centers, along with Hollywood-trained computer animation and effects specialists, can be found in the southeast Valley’s entertainment industry.
The selection of North Hollywood, long struggling for revival, over tonier communities such as Pasadena is a hopeful sign that the economic boom experienced in 1999 will carry over not only into a new year but into new neighborhoods that greatly need this kind of boost.
