The Big Badminton Birdie! It’s back!

Let’s see if this local link works or if the paywall gets in the way. Wikipedia with more history, here.

There’s an immense hangar down the freeway–I mean, how many buildings have their own weather, naturally?–that was military, then NASA, then a decrepit environmental disaster leaking asbestos and more towards the Bay. Years and years of arguments: why do we need to preserve a massive WWII wind tunnel? Who are we hiding planes from these days? Who wants to pay for the Superfund cleanup?

There was the Golden Eagle nest at the top of the building that got left alone, until it didn’t. The shell of the building got removed and then the skeleton was left to rust in the elements. For years.

Meanwhile, Google’s founders had an idea to get around the distance and restrictions on nighttime flights at San Jose airport: they wouldn’t own the hangar, which was next to their headquarters, they would just fix it and lease it and after 60 years the Feds could take it back. Deal?

Yeah no, said lots of people.

Heck yeah, said lots of other people for whom this was an iconic landmark.

Why? wondered some of us.

My dad’s old high school buddy was one of if not the (I think the) first woman to be a boss at NASA Ames. Loved her and her husband, they had us over several times when my folks were in town and it was a hoot to listen to her and Dad catching up. Her funeral in a lovely old Catholic church is where I learned that Morning Is Broken was not, in fact, strictly a Cat Stevens song. I did quite the double take at the time.

Where my husband started a PhD, the head of the department quit when offered head of, yup, NASA Ames across the country, and I’ve wondered from time to time if the guy still lives around here or if he went back to his home state when it closed. I don’t know how he was as a boss there–but I can tell you that when he left his university and they announced the new head, half the faculty in his department quit, too, as fast as they could find other jobs, a fact that changed the entire trajectory of our lives and landed us in New Hampshire and then, eventually–here.

So yeah I guess we have a bit of history with the newly restored place, too. Who would have guessed.