Canoga Park Shifts From Aerospace to Retail Hubs

When Vincent Degani opened his jewelry store 44 years ago, Canoga Park was practically a company town.

Back then, this corner of the San Fernando Valley was home to a burgeoning aerospace industry, led by the Rocketdyne engine-manufacturing plant on Victory Boulevard. Other aviation-related companies sprouted up around it, including Litton, Bendix and Marquardt.

Across the Valley, Lockheed built airplanes in Burbank and General Motors produced cars in Panorama City.

Families of line workers, engineers and machinists would visit Degani’s narrow shop on Sherman Way, Canoga Park’s equivalent to Main Street. They would buy pocket watches, rings and necklaces from the skilled jeweler, who learned his trade at the Chicago School of Watchmaking.

“They had money to spend, and they spent it,” said the 84-year-old Degani from behind the counter, where he still repairs jewelry. “Now, I lose about a customer a month.”

Over the last 20 years, much of the Valley’s once-vaunted manufacturing sector has disappeared. One holdout remains: the Rocketdyne plant, now owned by Boeing Co.

Company officials announced plans this month, however, to vacate the property by 2010 and move employees to a new office in Chatsworth.

The economic shifts occurring in Canoga Park reflect broader changes in industry throughout the San Fernando Valley.

“The Valley was really clobbered in the early ‘90s, then it sort of slowed down, and then sped up again” more recently, said Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute in Washington. “There was a massive movement to China of a lot of smaller suppliers to aerospace companies.”

These days, the gray, 1950s-era Rocketdyne building looks out of place amid the splashy electronics stores and fast-food restaurants surrounding it. Across the street is Westfield Shoppingtown Topanga mall, which recently announced a $300-million expansion that will include a Neiman Marcus luxury department store.

The future of the Rocketdyne property remains unclear, though some believe it will be converted to retail space. That prospect worries some economists and longtime residents.

Well-paying aerospace jobs are being replaced by minimum-wage retail positions that don’t provide the kind of salaries that can support a family, experts said.

The shift from heavy industry to retail occurred most recently in nearby Panorama City, where the former GM assembly line was converted into the Plant shopping center.

“The Valley has gone through a number of sea changes from its inception to today,” said Bob Scott, vice president of the San Fernando Valley Economic Alliance. “From farming capital to a bedroom community for the rest of Los Angeles proper, then an aerospace capital.

“No one’s suggesting we bring back those smokestack industries. We need to make room for clean, community-friendly industry. Selling clothes and food to each other is not going to do it.”

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The Canoga Park plant was founded in 1955 as a division of North American Aviation Inc., which later became part of Rockwell International Corp. Boeing acquired the company in 1996.

Rockwell’s engines helped put the first man on the moon in 1969 and powered the NASA space shuttles.

“I remember going to a meeting in Van Nuys when Rocketdyne wanted to build, and the guy held up a little engine and said, ‘We’re going to make these to go to the moon,’ ” said Dale Bergquist, 86, a longtime area resident and owner of Green Thumb Nursery on Sherman Way.

At the peak of the U.S. space race with Russia, the Canoga Park plant employed 22,000 people. The operation was so busy that many workers had to park their cars in a spillover lot across the street. The lot has since been sold and converted to a shopping center.

As the aerospace industry declined, Canoga Park changed. In the blocks of apartments that once housed line workers, Latino immigrants have created a new community.

At the same time, other parts of Canoga Park became more affluent.

In the late 1980s, the community was divided when some residents successfully petitioned to rename a portion of Canoga Park as West Hills.

Critics saw the move as an effort to disassociate the area from the more working-class sections of Canoga Park.

Today, the area around the Topanga mall has the feel of a prosperous suburb, while the Sherman Way shopping district feels more like an old-fashioned business district.

Earlier this month, Sherman Way was lined with electric cable in preparation for several nights of filming a movie based on the television show “Bewitched” on the sidewalks of the old business district.

“There hasn’t been a lot of change,” said Bergquist, who opened his nursery in 1953. “The same mom-and-pop stores are here, maybe with different owners.”

Antiques stores, thrift shops, pet supply stores, a knife shop and Degani’s Canoga Park Jewelers are among the businesses that occupy the storefronts.

Judy Platts lives in Calabasas and often shops at the Topanga mall. She said the shift to more retail in Canoga Park makes sense.

“It’s expanding the opportunities in the immediate area,” said Platts, 62. “It’ll pull in shoppers from the Thousand Oaks area and from Northridge, and it’ll prevent people from the West Valley from driving to Beverly Hills to shop.”

But as officials debate the future of the Rocketdyne property, experts said the impact it and other aerospace plants had on the Valley’s evolution was clear.

Rocketdyne, Litton, Lockheed and other defense contractors provided the economic engine that turned the vast farming valley into a vast suburb, said Valley historian Kevin Roderick.

They created well-paying jobs that allowed families to buy new homes in the subdivisions sprouting up throughout the region.

For that alone, the industry may have served its purpose, Roderick said.

“The plants that are gone were tremendously important to the Valley growing into what it is today,” Roderick said. “These companies gave people good jobs so they could afford new homes. They were extremely important to the creation of the Valley as we know it. Maybe they did what they were supposed to do.”