07-17-2012, 03:32 PM
Another piece of variety would be to think some more about Andrew in Australia's post on the aircraft industry, which does use shoeboxes, though some parts are fairly tall in "high bay" areas. There are/were shoebox aircraft plants in Pico Rivera, Hawthorne, El Segundo, Burbank, Long Beach, and Santa Monica, with smaller subcontractors all over the place. The Pico Rivera plant was a Ford assembly plant earlier, which would give you the option of swapping industries -- until the 1960s, there was a lot of auto assembly in Southern California, too, and it didn't die out completely until about 1990.