The Horizontal Spinner
Source: The Centrifugal Casting Company Archives
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As The Company grew, so did the area around it. The undisturbed grasslands of Southern California’s old Rancho Los Cerritos gave way to the Daugherty airfield in 1920, which later doubled in size and was rechristened as the Long Beach Airport. In the 1940s, to meet the demands of the Second World War, the Douglas Aircraft Company purchased 200 acres next to the runways and built 1.4 million square feet of windowless factory space for the wartime production of bombers and cargo planes.1 While Cherry Avenue, along the airport’s western edge, remained clotted with industrial companies serving Signal Hill’s oilfields, the neighborhood northwest of Cherry was neat and nice, featuring fifteen hundred splendid Spanish Revival homes and streets with vintage Battery Park streetlamps. Shops and restaurants sprouted up on nearby Atlantic Avenue, and the area was vibrant enough that some people referred to it as “Uptown Long Beach.” That name didn’t stick, though, and the district eventually assumed a loftier title: California Heights.