This building is the largest hangar on base, built to service the larger B-29 bombers, which arrived in late 1944. The B-29 bomber that was used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was in Wendover for a few weeks during the war, before it went to Tinian, a base in the Pacific Ocean, where it was named the Enola Gay. While it may or may not have ever been inside this hangar, the hangar was dubbed the Enola Gay Hangar by early airport managers, to help promote awareness of the airfield’s use as the primary training ground for crews that would eventually drop the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs on Japan.
The hangar has seen several temporary uses since the airbase’s closure, including as the site of "Project Tesla.” In the early 1980s the hangar was leased to a high energy physicist named Robert Golka, who built large tesla coils and other high voltage apparati to support his research related to free energy distribution. Before Golka could finish his work, he was evicted from the hangar, when the city took over its management. A semi- fictional film about “Project Tesla” was shot onsite at the time, by the legendary photographer Robert Frank, with Golka playing himself, and featuring William Burroughs, Dr. John, and other hipsters of the post-Beat era. The hangar is now used for storage, occasional events, and as a film location (in a curious possible non-coincidence, the hanger was the setting of the desert lab for a visionary physicist in the 2003 movie The Core).
The roof, windows, and exterior walls were recently restored with local and federal support, including from Save America’s Treasures and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.