The commercial development of the area surrounding Los Angeles International Airport exploded in the 1950s as the airport itself grew and changed. Commercial passenger airlines didn’t begin operating at LAX until 1946, and the burgeoning airport didn’t even get its official name until 1949. The airport’s facilities were makeshift for its first few years, but they were soon overwhelmed by the sheer volume of passengers using it.
The north side of Century Boulevard leading to LAX now is carpeted with high-rise hotels, but that didn’t even start to happen until the 1960s, following the redesign of the airport that opened in 1961. Add in a growing concentration of aerospace firms in the area and in El Segundo south of the airport in the 1950s, and the need for infrastructure improvements became glaring. Still, the announcement in October 1957 concerning Hollywood-based hotelier Allan Siegal’s plans to build a $1.
5 million hotel on the west side of Sepulveda Blvd. between Holly and Pine avenues was big news locally, resulting in a front-page banner headline in the El Segundo Herald. A small residential development surrounded by agricultural land had stood on the site previously.
The proposed four-story, 220-room Thunderbird Hotel, to be located about 1.5 miles south of LAX at 525 N. Sepulveda Blvd.
, was the largest such project at that time in the city’s history. Architect Raymond A. Stockdale’s mid-century modern design included plans for a two-story restaurant with.
