GM Plant Revved Up Valley Growth

In 1945, when the San Fernando Valley was still largely populated by citrus groves, General Motors purchased land from the Panorama Ranch Co., to serve as the future home for a major auto production plant.

That move, and similar actions by some of the biggest names in manufacturing, helped create a Valley region that would eventually be defined by the products it produced--cars, warplanes, even beer.

On Dec. 1, 1947, General Motors’ Van Nuys Assembly Plant began operating in a $12-million facility surrounded by open fields. A parade, and Hollywood-style Klieg lights, marked the occasion.

The plant, which measured more than 1 million square feet in its early days, turned out Chevrolet trucks and the Bel Air, Impala and Del Ray cars, and transformed the Valley overnight into an important automobile manufacturing center.

“It grew the north Valley,” said David W. Fleming, chairman of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley. “It really created Panorama City. That community grew up around the plant.”

Even before the automaker’s arrival, the Valley was developing an industrial core.

Lockheed Aircraft Corp. had opened a major production plant in Burbank in 1928.

Other manufacturing giants arrived in the 1950s--the Anheuser Busch brewery, Litton Industries and a host of industrial titans.

But the GM plant, while not the largest manufacturing plant in the Valley, was among the most symbolic.

In the booming postwar economy, the nation’s romance with the automobile was blossoming and that development helped grow suburban enclaves like the Valley.

The GM factory provided the good-paying jobs that enabled people to live and buy homes in the rapidly expanding region.

The Valley was making cars, and cars helped make the Valley.

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In the 1970s, the Van Nuys plant began turning out the popular Chevrolet Nova and Monte Carlo lines, helping to boost employment in 1979 to about 5,130 workers--the plant’s peak. In the 1980s, the assembly lines poured out sporty Chevy Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds.

“If you take that 5,000 jobs and add the multiplier factor, all of the support services for the employees and the plant--it probably [helped create] six or seven times that many jobs,” said Stu Solomon, a real estate expert who has lived in the Valley for 53 years.

But the heady times would not last. In October 1988, less than 10 years after the plant reached its employment peak, GM announced it would end Camaro and Firebird production in Van Nuys, transferring the work to a more modern production facility in Ste. Therese, Quebec, Canada.

With so many of the automaker’s parts suppliers located east of the Rockies, and with newer production facilities available, the Van Nuys plant faced an uphill battle in its struggle to survive.

On July 18, 1991, the world’s largest automaker ended the slim hope that new work might be found for the Van Nuys plant and announced plans to shut it down.

On Aug. 27, 1992, after operating nearly 45 years, a flame-red Chevrolet Camaro rolled off the assembly line, becoming the last of 6.2 million vehicles to be produced at the Van Nuys plant.