North American Aviation Mines Field Site, California

Like most large airports in the USA, LAX started out as a military airfield in WWII. A site on the southeast corner of the airport, now an air cargo area, used to be the location of a large North American Aviation plant, built during WWII, that dominated the original airport here, known then as Mines Field. The plant built B-25s for the war, and continued to be an important enough facility to be called Air Force Plant 9, one of the 85 production facilities designated as critical by the Air Force up till the 1960s, when they ceased using this designation. Though it was torn down when LAX was expanded, it was at the north end of what became one of the largest clusters of aerospace sites in the country, near LAX in El Segundo.