Читать книгу The Metropolitan Airport - Nicholas Dagen Bloom - Страница 10

CHAPTER 1

From Idlewild to New York International

Our commercial position has been the foundation of New York’s leadership in many fields…. There have been those elsewhere in the land, and a few here at home, who have been all too ready to believe that New York City had no future. This is a part—only a part—of the answer to the timid, the unimaginative and the doubting Thomases…. We are determined that in the field of aviation, as in other fields of commerce, New York City shall lead the way.

—Joseph McGoldrick, Comptroller of the City of New York, 1945

New York City’s leaders envisioned an immense airport in the marshland of Jamaica Bay to enhance and retain the commercial advantages the city had accrued over hundreds of years. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his team, including Robert Moses, made major progress in achieving that dream in the 1940s. They secured over four thousand acres of land within the city limits, arranged initial financing in the tens of millions, began building major runways and drainage systems, and linked high-speed roadways to the new airport. By the late 1940s, however, it had become clear to most of the city’s financial and political elite that the scale of the airport demanded a broader metropolitan view and the deeper pockets of an institution like the Port Authority. As the decades passed, the metropolitan character of JFK would become even more pronounced.

The fact that New York City’s political and business leaders attempted to dominate the aviation age should not come as much of a surprise. After all, the city’s merchants had been aggressive leaders in trade and technology for centuries. In the 19th century, New York’s global reach resulted not only from its natural advantages as the country’s greatest natural port but as a result of human enterprise. The establishment of the Black Ball packet shipping lines in the early 1800s attracted goods from up and down the Eastern seaboard for shipment across the Atlantic. The building of the Erie Canal from 1817 to 1825 pioneered a waterborne route where no natural one had existed, solidifying New York’s position as the nation’s dominant coastal port. Later in the century, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ruthless consolidation of lines into the New York Central system, the steady multiplication of rail lines and terminals around New Jersey and Manhattan, and ever faster and more advanced steamships for coastal and oceangoing cargo and passengers advanced New York’s formidable lead in America’s global trade.

New York’s long history as an ocean port thus multiplied its advantages in the dawning aviation age. The international travel industry, including sophisticated customs, package brokering, and immigration facilities, had for decades clustered in New York to address the needs of transatlantic cargo and passenger travel. Before World War II, New York still handled approximately 70 percent of overseas passengers and 50 percent of America’s foreign trade (mostly on steamships), even though America’s population center had been moving westward for decades. The New York Times in 1944 predicted only greater success: “The heaviest concentrations of the future, as of the past, may be expected along those routes and at that those terminals where the greatest concentration of business logically arises.”¹

New Yorkers’ interest in aviation was built on a lengthy history. Even before 1920, the New York region housed an impressive share of leading-edge aviation firms. Entrepreneurs and aviators across Long Island in the early twentieth century helped pioneer the future of global aviation systems on makeshift fields and in massive factories standing in the shadow of the world’s largest and richest industrial metropolis.² Queens in 1918 featured no less than fourteen aviation manufacturers at work on a variety of warplanes and associated technology. By the late 1920s, so congenial was Long Island’s confluence of capital and technology that roughly 80 percent of all aviation activity in the United States could be found clustered on Long Island (including Queens and Brooklyn). Queens, for instance, as the “automobile center of the East,” had the skilled workers and infrastructure needed for building airplanes.³

Defense spending for World War I and capital generated by the 1920s bull market expanded the aviation business both in New York and nationally. Glenn Curtis, for instance, established a manufacturing firm in 1917 to build navy seaplanes; Lindbergh’s dramatic transatlantic flight in 1927 originated at Long Island’s Roosevelt Field; and during the 1920s, Leroy Grumman opened an aircraft manufacturing business in Nassau County that would one day become a major player in defense production. Long Island was just one of many places where planes were designed, tested, built, and flown in the interwar period (Boeing and Douglas in the West were early leaders in designing and building new planes), but New York supported a dynamic cluster of creative, high-technology firms that borrowed from one another and innovated in close proximity.⁴

Much like their more modern counterparts in Silicon Valley who depended upon government funds for basic research leading to the Internet and silicon chips, aviation innovators in the New York region and elsewhere benefited from and lobbied for generous long-term government subsidies. The federal government during World War I paid for research into and the design of aircraft and airfields that led directly to postwar commercial aviation, not the least because decommissioned aircraft found their way into civilian hands after the war. But without the first airmail flight, lifting off from the infield at Belmont Park in 1918 and bound for Washington, D.C., there would have been a much more difficult growth curve for the commercial aviation industry in New York and the nation. The government footed the bill for a privately contracted airmail service (formalized in the Kelly Act of 1925) of dubious national necessity—train delivery was very fast at the time—in order to provide an entirely essential subsidy to private aviation companies. This airmail system eventually stretched across the nation and generated new planes, pilots, airlines, air-control facilities, and even airports. Federal subsidies time and again created a steady and healthy underpinning for a high-risk industry, providing everything from the planes to the roadways linking the new airports.⁵

An abundance of adventurous, wealthy residents traveling for business and pleasure, along with many profitable industrial corporations—such as General Electric, U.S. Steel, Union Carbide, and Standard Oil—residing in the city and its hinterlands piled up New York’s golden advantages in commercial aviation’s early years. New York in the 1930s led the way in the number of citizens applying for passports, and New Yorkers (taken as a region) dominated first-class and cabin steamship international travel. Approximately two-thirds of American citizens traveling overseas lived in the northeastern United States, with about 40 percent of those in the states of New York and New Jersey alone. The Northeast, as the most globally oriented region of the country, supported both steamship lines and the pioneering and risky international airplane flights out of New York in the 1930s.⁶

New York entrepreneurs helped create the modern, globally oriented aviation industry. Early investors in American Airways included leading New York financiers Robert Lehman and Averell Harriman. Juan Trippe, the talented and ambitious scion of a rich New York family, gathered a group of New York investors to create Long Island Airways to shuttle the wealthy to the Hamptons in the 1920s. While this effort failed financially, Trippe turned right around and invested in 1927 in Pan American Airways (Pan Am). Applying his obvious organizational and promotional skills and personal connections, he not only secured valuable airmail routes but built up profitable seaplane lines (then based in Miami) to the Caribbean and South America. Trippe forced his way into the New York market by merging with a New York-based competitor (NYRBA, or New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Airline) and seizing control. The ever-expansive Pan Am under Trippe ultimately set a global standard for airborne luxury in the 1930s, monopolized international travel, and became the basis for Pan Am’s dominance of postwar global travel at JFK. Trippe was just one of many entrepreneurs who leveraged New York’s wealthy travelers and lucrative postal contracts to create modern airlines. The dashing World War I pilot, Eddie Rickenbacker, for instance, also used New York as a hub for Eastern Airlines, which eventually dominated air travel on the East Coast.

New York’s power brokers leveraged these advantages to stifle competition in the dawning air age. They demanded that federal officials, for instance, limit the operation of foreign airlines to established centers of trade such as New York. The Port Authority made the dubious claim that “the rapidity of air flight will make it necessary to establish much more rigid inspection of passengers and cargo, and planes themselves, to provide protection against disease.… It would be impossible practically to allow unlimited use by foreign operators of every airport certified for general civil domestic use.” The threat of foreign contamination was partly used to justify the concentration of international service in large seaboard cities and remained in place for decades under the highly regulated air travel of the postwar period.⁷ Regulated air travel, not coincidentally, limited competition for such large airlines as Pan Am and Eastern, with their high capital and labor costs.

These early advantages did not mean that New York would automatically retain its status as a leading city of the air age. A crowded urban center had the market, capital, and commercial tradition, but those legacies would have to be leveraged with technology. The long-term investment in docks, and the lack of convenient open space for airfields, posed substantial obstacles for those seeking to maintain New York City’s lead. Mayor La Guardia made the first major effort to overcome these barriers by abandoning Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s small municipal airport that opened in 1931 on a site in Jamaica Bay not too far from the future site of JFK. Floyd Bennett Field was considered to be too isolated (Robert Moses’s parkways were not yet in place) and too small to function as a major airport for New York.

To overcome the lack of buildable land close in to built-up areas of the city, what became LaGuardia Airport (which opened in 1939) rose majestically on fill dumped into the Long Island Sound to give Manhattanites, and potentially those in affluent suburbs nearby, a convenient aerial gateway to the nation and the globe. LaGuardia Airport’s regional success was, in part, the result of generous New Deal work programs, coordinated by Robert Moses, that made possible the creation of the Grand Central Parkway and Triborough Bridge (opened in 1936), both of which provided high-speed links from LaGuardia Airport to both center city and the suburbs.⁸

LaGuardia Airport’s streamlined terminal structure, vast parking fields, and, for its day, runways of great length reflected the vision that Mayor La Guardia brought to so many of his urban redevelopment projects. While the airport’s architecture echoed the leading modernist airports of the era, such as Tempelhof in Berlin and that in Copenhagen, it set a new international standard according to architectural historian Alastair Gordon: “Seen from the air, the 558 acre complex made a single, sweeping gesture, linking up disparate parts—appearing to grow as much from the curves of the Grand Central Parkway as out of the bend of the shoreline—a natural offspring of the city and its infrastructure.” Or was it? The airport lacked a direct connection to the city’s subway system, just as it does today; instead, it was linked to modern auto infrastructure. The federal government, through millions of dollars in Works Progress Administration (WPA) labor, again provided the necessary subsidy to make it all possible. By 1940 the airport’s 250 daily landings and 3,000 daily passengers made it the busiest airport in the world. New Yorkers even paid for access to an observation deck overlooking this futuristic drama.⁹

In spite of the lavish praise for LaGuardia Airport, its limited scale for future air travel was obvious even to the mayor.¹⁰ By 1941 the airport may have been handling one million passengers a year, but the limitations on its physical growth promised long-term challenges. Adding land in the deeper waters of Long Island Sound, for instance, would have been very expensive and technically complicated (even though the airport’s runways were eventually extended over the water after World War II). Seaplanes, also accommodated in the open water astride LaGuardia, were on their way out for commercial aviation. Making matters worse, as the fill it was built on settled, the airport began to sink in the years after it opened, and the runways had to be reconstructed. Finally, houses, businesses, and the Grand Central Parkway hemmed in the airport on the land side. LaGuardia was simply too small to hold New York at the center of a global air network.¹¹

The Regional Plan Association, the city’s powerful planning think tank, had been of the opinion in 1929 that “in the New York region it is practically impossible to obtain any large airport site so central that it would be in immediate touch with the main business activities and the largest groups of populations.”¹² A practical, if unorthodox, solution was found to this problem.

Redefining Jamaica Bay

In retrospect, Jamaica Bay was a likely place to build a grand airport. Long neglected as a natural environment, civic leaders had for decades shifted around for a suitable use of such a large and seemingly vestigial territory. Sewage had flowed from loosely regulated suburban development for much of the twentieth century; the city dumped trash directly into the bay’s waters and lined its edges with unsightly landfills; and improvised fishing camps emptied human excrement directly into the once pure waters. Many considered the filling of marshlands for an airport in the 1940s to be the best possible outcome for this polluted marshland. Robert Moses’s transformation of the Flushing Meadows from ash dump and swamp into park, lakes, and a grand setting for the World’s Fair of 1939 provided a clear precedent for environmental transformation on this scale. As Hugh Quinn, a city councilman from Astoria, remarked on an exploratory visit to the field in 1941, an airport at the site would “eliminate a large area of mosquito-breeding marshlands.”¹³

It could have turned out quite differently if the bay’s environment had been protected earlier. Yachting had once been popular in the 1890s at the Jamaica Bay Yacht Club, a summer spot for Brooklyn’s fashionable set. Families would spend weeks at the clubhouse or come for a weekend by train to enjoy regattas and the salty marsh air. Those rosy days had long passed by the 1930s, however. The poor water quality and industrial development of the bay’s edges spoiled the natural beauty that could still be found in new elite clubs on Long Island’s less developed south and north shores.¹⁴ The Idlewild Park Hotel for decades had also been a fashionable destination for “swank society” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it had long ago fallen out of fashion and was demolished in 1939. The only relic of the fashionable era, and a modest one at that, was the Idlewild Golf Course (from which the colloquial name of the airport derived) and a small, recreational airfield known as Jamaica Sea Airport.¹⁵

Jamaica Bay’s glory days as a productive estuary had also passed. In the early twentieth century, the bay still supported a $5 million-a-year industry that rivaled the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island’s Great South Bay in the quality of oysters and clams drawn from its waters. The shallow waters made harvesting shellfish easy, and the delicate bivalves enjoyed protection from many storms and predators. Approximately 1,500 hearty souls still harvested 750,000 to 1,000,000 bushels of oysters per year from Jamaica Bay in about 1917.¹⁶ Shellfish harvesting ended abruptly, however, in 1921 when the city’s health officials firmly linked a typhoid epidemic to bay shellfish. Alas, diseases of great variety had already traveled from the fetid bay to the urban masses; untreated sewage had been flowing for years from surrounding industries and improvised suburban housing. Illegal harvesting continued in the 1920s even with bans on the shellfish.¹⁷

The salty air and open space in the shadow of a crowded city continued to attract urban adventurers seeking diversion. A few fishermen, precariously lodged in stilt houses, still fished the waters in the 1930s but not on a commercial basis. Small suburban housing developments in the early twentieth century clustered on the edge of the future airport site, including both cottages and “substantial” homes.¹⁸ Failure of other infrastructure projects in the marsh contributed to the desolation. A grandiose plan to turn Jamaica Bay into a great port in the early twentieth century seemed to prove the inaccessibility of the site.¹⁹ New Jersey, plugged directly into continental rail and road routes, stood better positioned than Jamaica Bay for port modernization. New Jersey interests also proved far more aggressive; they successfully convinced the Port Authority to improve Newark Bay for deep-water shipping, a decision that doomed not only the Jamaica Bay port plan but also almost all of New York City’s direct participation in waterborne commerce.²⁰ Robert Moses loved to make fun of the failed plans to make a port in Jamaica Bay because its promoters had believed that such a facility could be “greater than the combined ports of Liverpool, Rotterdam, and Hamburg.”²¹

FIGURE 2. The Broad Channel neighborhood of Jamaica Bay showing hotels, stores, and other development in 1915. Jamaica Bay was once an important source of seafood and a leisure destination for New Yorkers in search of fresh air and warm saltwater for recreation. Queens officials hoped that a port or airport would create a use for the bay as the quality of the water and environment declined in the 1920s and 1930s. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The political and business leaders in Queens, still desperate to bring their borough into the mainstream of the city’s economic life, pivoted in the late 1920s to promoting a transatlantic air terminal in their seemingly forgotten marsh. The Jamaica Chamber of Commerce in 1928 recommended that Mayor Jimmy Walker and the Board of Estimate create an airport at Idlewild. Remoteness and vast open spaces had once been a disadvantage, but in the aviation era, isolation was a distinct advantage for aircraft operations that demanded open air and ground space otherwise in short supply. The new airport could be deliberately tucked away into a huge, still underutilized corner of New York City primarily inhabited by ducks, horseshoe crabs, clams, and “sagging sea-bleached homes.”²² This early airport plan, like the port plan before it, was shelved after Queens business leaders shifted alliances and focused on the more convenient North Beach site for the new airport (what became LaGuardia Airport).²³

The Jamaica Bay site came back into focus as LaGuardia Airport’s physical limitations blurred its future as a massive global airport. Jamaica Bay offered comparatively endless space for growth because the shallow coastal plain could be filled and patched, and its many streams and inlets diverted into culverts, as the airport expanded. Few thought there would ever be much resistance to filling large sections of the bay; in fact, for decades there was not any organized opposition to reshaping the shoreline to suit urbanization of many types. The history of New York City, in fact, can be traced through the construction of artificial shorelines and docks in order to maximize economic returns.²⁴

The regional network of highways and bridges Robert Moses had developed in the 1930s and 1940s also contributed to a reappraisal of the bay’s function. Moses’s Southern State and Belt Parkways eventually intersected near Idlewild and provided high-speed links to Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Long Island. The addition of a highway linking Idlewild Airport to Queens Boulevard (and later Grand Central Parkway) would theoretically whisk air passengers even faster from airport to Midtown Manhattan (twenty-six minutes) by linking the Southern State and Belt Parkways to the Grand Central Parkway that cut in a relatively straight line to Manhattan. The new Triborough and Whitestone Bridges also provided fast links from the Grand Central or Whitestone Parkways to the Bronx and Westchester.²⁵ The New York State Department of Public Works, helped by federal highway funds, created a connector to the Grand Central, what became the Van Wyck Expressway. Moses in 1945 took credit not only for conceiving such a practical link but also for arranging generous state and federal financing: “The City will have to contribute only 50% of the cost of land and nothing for construction.” Again, subsidies proved crucial to the airport. The 26-minute prediction alas proved optimistic for most hours of the day.²⁶

FIGURE 3. JFK’s location astride Moses’s system of parkways. Moses, however, restricted his parkways, such as the Southern State, Shore Belt, and Grand Central Parkways, to passenger vehicles, and these limitations have been preserved today (2015). There remains only one high-speed bus and truck route to JFK (Interstate 678/Van Wyck Expressway). Courtesy of the Regional Plan Association.

FIGURE 4. This aerial view of the Van Wyck Expressway under construction in 1950 illustrates not only the density of residential neighborhoods near JFK but also the short distance between the airport and express subway and Long Island Rail Road routes (shown at the base of the image). The Port Authority did not establish a rail connection to mass transit from the airport until 2003 for a variety of reasons. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, New York Herald-Tribune Photograph Morgue Collection.

Robert Moses, despite his work to open the marsh to development, maintained a broader ecological vision for Jamaica Bay. Moses began the long and steady process of converting the marsh into a desirable park and wildlife space. During the 1930s, he and the city administration began the hard and thankless task of cleaning up the bay. The city added chlorinating plants for sewage in 1937 to protect swimmers frequently sickened by the polluted waters. Moses also prevented the Department of Sanitation from siting an incinerator and associated ash dump in Jamaica Bay.²⁷ Moses blocked the dump by reminding Mayor La Guardia what Flushing Meadow Park had been before the ash dumps there had been shuttered and the space redesigned as a grand urban park and exposition grounds. Moses’s interventions ringing Jamaica Bay included Jacob Riis Park’s lovely beach, the new Marine Parkway Bridge, Rockaway Beach rehabilitation, and the Shore Parkway (now known as the Belt Parkway). He had big dreams for the combined effect of his action. His ultimate dream was to turn Jamaica Bay into an urban version of the beautiful Great South Bay that he had preserved as a result of the creation of Jones Beach in suburban Nassau County.²⁸

Yet the war deferred and nearly wiped out Moses’s vision of Jamaica Bay as a great urban wetland. Navy bombers, for instance, turned the bay’s marshes into practice bombing fields in 1942. Construction of Idlewild Airport also led to the loss of thousands of acres of productive marshland and a massive trough in the bay where engineers pumped sand to raise the airport site above sea level.²⁹

When Moses surveyed Jamaica Bay after the war, he still, however, saw something quite valuable for the city’s urban masses. Moses affirmed his faith: “There is no other city in the country with an opportunity such as that presently available to the City of New York, to set aside within its corporate limits a large area in its native state as a natural preserve for wild life and for informal recreation, fishing, boating and the like.” He believed that a park adjacent to the airport would aid operation of the airport rather than hinder it because there would be no tall industrial buildings in the way of the flight paths. Moses, an avid and strong swimmer, envisioned fellow city residents swimming and frolicking safely in the waters. He also envisioned birds reestablishing themselves as the dominant residents of the bay. On this prediction he proved entirely correct, much to the chagrin of pilots today.³⁰

FIGURE 5. The transformation of Jamaica Bay through development, including residential expansion, landfills, commercial expansion, and the creation of JFK International. Minna Ninova.

Paying for the Treasure

Mayor La Guardia and other city officials in the 1940s fully realized the significance of a world-class airport to New York City’s economic supremacy in the future. “We are building a great airport at Idlewild in New York City—the finest airport in the world, at a cost of $71 million—not in the hope that someday there will be need for it but because commercial aviation will need it as soon as it is completed.”³¹ Like much of the La Guardia legacy, it is all too easy to dismiss the degree to which his vision cleanly broke with everything that came before.

A sharp-eyed journalist directly linked the projected Idlewild Airport with Moses and La Guardia’s spectacularly successful 1939–40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park. At the fair, the public was captivated by General Motors’ Futurama exhibition that included gleaming cities of the future tied together by high-speed expressways and vast air terminals: “The scene at Idlewild will resemble the famous Futurama come to life. Big land and sea planes will come and go” while visitors would marvel at helicopters that would “jump from one to another of New York’s circling ring of airports.” Air travel would become just another daily luxury for the affluent across the region, who would use “small private landing fields on their home estates” to fly their helicopters to Idlewild’s projected helicopter parking lots.³²

New Yorkers dreamed in aviation Technicolor, but the preeminence of New York in aviation remained less certain. The initial era of flight, when planes made frequent stops for refueling, offered New York advantages in transatlantic air commerce (the city was closer than all but a few American cities to Europe), but it was conceivable that as a result of wartime innovation airlines would dictate where and when they would land. That a remarkable 85 percent of national transatlantic traffic crowded through New York in 1946, mostly on stately ocean liners, did not necessarily guarantee anything. Experts working for the city estimated that by 1955, as a result of airport growth in other cities, New York would retain just 67 percent of transatlantic passengers. The Commerce and Industry Association of New York identified Idlewild as postwar project number-one “insofar as New York’s prestige and commercial supremacy are concerned.”³³

The war proved essential to the new airport’s development. Speedy condemnation of land for Idlewild, for instance, was justified on the basis of the national war emergency. The judge who enabled the condemnation remarked that “great new airfields with long ribbons of runways” would be needed for the war.³⁴ The biggest subsidy of the time came directly from the federal millions that flowed in from the sale of Floyd Bennett Field to the navy. This purchase helped pay for additional land sought for the new airport. A 1941 estimate of the total cost of Idlewild properties was $8.25 million that could conceivably be paid out of the navy’s purchase of Floyd Bennett Field for $9.75 million.³⁵ Federal government officials also provided an initial grant of about $860,000 toward landfill and runway development in the Idlewild area. The federal government even subsidized hangar development and an administration building.³⁶

The commercial aviation business got its biggest boost from federally funded aviation research. The U.S. Postal Service’s airmail service continued to quietly subsidize airlines, but without the war, large-scale postwar commercial aviation would have grown more gradually. The massive bombers pioneered during the war proved easily remodeled for civilian conversion. With the addition of seats and other creature comforts such as bathrooms, they offered dependable commercial air travel. Planes that could safely fly thousands of miles under attack could pretty easily and safely ferry people from one city to another in peacetime. Government construction of extensive airfields in Europe also proved crucial. Seaplanes had been very popular before the war (in spite of high operating costs due to the fact that seawater was terrible for planes) for international travel because many crowded cities abroad lacked sufficient land or capital for runways, “but the exigencies of war made nations forget about expense. Big runways were laid down to support 4 engine bombers and big new land-based transports built for the military.”³⁷ Radar systems developed for expertly detecting airborne enemies also simplified operations in dense urban airspace. By the late 1950s, a radar tower at Idlewild had the capacity to monitor planes at up to thirty thousand feet in the air and up to two hundred miles away.³⁸

Airport construction at Idlewild gained speed as the war wound down. By 1945, 1,100 existing structures had been demolished and the site as a whole included 4,495 acres. Mayor La Guardia had condemned the first Idlewild area on December 30, 1941, and paid $723,000 in condemnation awards.³⁹ These were, in retrospect, modest down payments on a vast enterprise. The other properties condemned from 1941 to 1944 included 3,533 vacant lots and 1,867 improved sites. An estimated 500 acres of the site came directly from Jamaica Bay itself as the city undertook a massive pumping program to raise low marshlands to functional levels, an act of environmental destruction that would be unthinkable today.⁴⁰ Despite the fact that most of the land acquired was unimproved, by 1945 the city had spent about $9 million acquiring property (with a few parcels still desired at a cost of about $3 million more). Even marshland that one day might be filled was valuable in New York City; in fact, city officials rejoiced that they got their thousands of acres “at so modest a cost.” In condemnation letters, the city frequently relied on a “defense” justification despite the remote chance that the airport would actually be brought into service during the war itself.⁴¹

In 1945, Mayor La Guardia boldly predicted that his new airport “will be one of the best investments the city ever made. It will pay for itself.” Yet the dawning realization of just how much infrastructure a modern airport required made the promise of self-financing a more complicated proposition.⁴² The visionary terminal plans favored by La Guardia and designed by architects Delano and Aldrich included “a monumental circular administration building, a three-mile long, two-story arcade, 2 hangars and miscellaneous utility structures.” The price of constructing such a grand edifice, in an era when air travel was not yet profitable, raised serious questions about feasibility. Railroad companies, for instance, had built their own stations on a grand scale (at great cost to themselves), so why should the airlines not shoulder expenses for their airports?⁴³

By 1945 city officials predicted that the total city investment in the field would eventually balloon to $90 million, most of which would have been funded out of long-term city bond sales. The city planned to ask for a federal grant of $25 million; to charge high rents for warehouse facilities, airline buildings, and retail facilities; and to provide concessions (food, shops, and so on) for visitors. But the rapidly escalating upfront costs were a reason for concern. The generous leases granted to the airlines (based on aircraft operations), only agreed to under threat that the airlines would move to Newark if they did not get their way, in no way covered future expenses.

For many onlookers, the airport program thus appeared to be another of La Guardia’s many extravagant public programs. Mayor William O’Dwyer, who succeeded La Guardia in 1946, endorsed Robert Moses’s plan for a City Airport Authority in 1946 out of financial desperation and his obvious admiration for Moses. O’Dwyer had inherited a budget deficit from La Guardia and was eager to both restore financial stability and rebuild the city’s housing and other social infrastructure. The state legislature passed a provision to give the city the power to create its airport authority.

An airport authority promised to solve a number of problems inherent in large and complex public programs from both a managerial and financial perspective. New York was just one of many cities that sought to shift municipal airport management from the city to public authorities. Authorities theoretically circumvented messy political battles and patronage while adding much-needed managerial talent to complex urban functions. Authorities simultaneously created the possibility, as Robert Moses had demonstrated with the Triborough Bridge Authority, for additional long-term financing. Moving airport financing to an authority removed a major liability from the city’s books and meant that the city did not surpass its state limit on borrowing. New York Times editorialists, in thrall of Moses at this time, came out for this airport authority plan in the short term to get the place built. The authors, however, hedged their bets by suggesting that the Port Authority might be the best organization to manage New York’s airports because of its experience in transportation and its regional vision.⁴⁴

Moses’s plans, however, ran into a number of snags. The first was that many people were simply skeptical of giving Moses another set of responsibilities. O’Dwyer had already made him construction coordinator, giving him control over every major postwar project in the New York area, in addition to his continuing roles as parks commissioner, chairman of the Triborough Authority, and many other appointed positions. Even Mayor La Guardia, in a radio address after he left office, came out against Moses’s plan because it was going to give Moses even more power. The second and more pressing issue was that the new City Airport Authority possessed limited borrowing capability because of banker skepticism. While the city signed over millions in airport improvements (estimated at $90 million) at no cost to the new authority, which some objected to as a giveaway, the unknown returns of airport investment meant that Airport Authority bonds were still a risky bet. More risk meant that financiers would demand higher interest. To some, this looked like another gift to the wealthy who would, by buying bonds, consume most of the future airport’s profits.⁴⁵

Moses, in a desperate attempt to bring airport costs in line with the debt capabilities, did make a number of changes in the plans that he thought would mollify critics and maintain the mayor’s support. La Guardia’s elaborate plan for the airport terminal, created by architects Delano and Aldrich, was scrapped with the encouragement of Mayor O’Dwyer. Unfortunately for Moses, the replacement plan was also elaborate: there was simply no inexpensive way to build a major terminal for a world-class airport.⁴⁶

A leading landscape architect, Gilmour Clarke, and architect Wallace K. Harrison designed this new plan, which debuted in late 1946. Clarke was a favorite of Robert Moses and had been responsible for, among other projects, parkway design in the New York region. Harrison was the force behind the iconic Perisphere and Trylon at the 1939 World’s Fair, Rockefeller Center, and would eventually coordinate the design of two of New York’s iconic modernist ensembles: the United Nations and Lincoln Center. The revised airport plan included a streamlined administration (main terminal) building running north to south that connected to the Van Wyck Boulevard access road with escalators to the roadway. The architect’s generous provisions for restaurants, which would benefit from panoramic views of the airport and make money, reflected harder financial realities: concessions were serious business.⁴⁷

The revised plan as a whole for the airport (including terminal, hangars, runways, and so forth), when revealed in late 1946, still failed to reflect the economies necessary to bring the airport in line with the limited borrowing capacity of the City Airport Authority. Not only was the plan still expensive, but now the more modest plans for the airport (and plans for later expansion as revenues improved) as a whole failed to inspire additional support from those, such as airline executives, who still demanded that New York immediately build the best airport in the nation, even though they did not want to pay full freight for those costs.⁴⁸

Moses’s other strategy for funding the airport—raising the landing and other fees to the airlines and making them build their own hangars—also backfired. The airlines, and the oil companies who would fuel planes at the airport, resisted renegotiating their leases even if it was clear to them and everyone else that the revenues under those arrangements were insufficient to support the scale of airport they needed. They threatened to move their operations to Newark and to sue the city, but what they actually did was throw their support behind the Port Authority, which promised to honor their leases by generating the most revenue from other activities on site (for example, a hotel and concessions).

Moses, in the meantime, made trouble by exerting his outsized influence in the internal affairs of the airport authority. The famous aviator, Lieutenant General James Doolittle, had already resigned from the City Airport Authority board as a result of his connection to the fuel companies now up in arms over higher fees. When Harry F. Guggenheim, a prominent member of the airport authority, also resigned out of frustration, Mayor O’Dwyer in 1946 asked the Port Authority to consider taking over the city’s airports.⁴⁹ O’Dwyer still worried about the loss of the city’s investment and “an abject surrender of the city’s planning powers” to an agency whose important actions were subject to the vetoes of the governors of New York and New Jersey, but the scale, cost, and management requirements of the two airports were simply too daunting at the time.⁵⁰ O’Dwyer remained primarily concerned that the capital cost of the airport would drain money from other municipal services, but Moses’s maladroit handling of the negotiations had also spiraled out of control and was undercutting the mayor’s agenda and standing.

Part of the reason for Moses’s loss of control was his failure to view the Port Authority as a serious rival. The Port Authority had been quietly plotting for some years to expand “by invitation” into the potentially profitable aviation business both in Newark and New York City. Created in 1921 as a self-supporting independent agency of New York and New Jersey, and able to develop terminal or transportation facilities within twenty-five miles of the Statue of Liberty, the Port Authority grew over the course of the twentieth century into one of the largest and wealthiest organizations in the region. By the 1940s, the Port Authority was growing rich from tolls it collected at the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, and other toll-producing crossings in the region. Executive director Austin Tobin argued that because the Port Authority operated using a self-supporting business model, and had a large professional staff, they would always perform better than the city government on complex, profit-oriented development projects in the public interest.⁵¹

In the 1940s, the Port Authority already controlled Newark’s docks along with a number of bridges and tunnels. The authority’s leaders realized full well that airports, despite the fact that they were money losers in this period, represented not only the future of passenger travel but also of high-value cargo as well. Even before the authority controlled a single airport, it had made its ambitions public. In 1944, the New York Times had reported that “not long ago the Port of New York authority declared its conviction that New York would remain, by reason of its traffic and of its commercial and financial importance, a major port of entry in the coming air age.”⁵²

Port Authority leaders starting with Tobin were convinced, according to historian and Port Authority expert Jameson Doig, that the city government was not up to the task of airport management: “Could these municipal governments be expected to replace patronage with merit in hiring workers, and could they attract and hold the kind of managerial talent needed to make these air and marine terminals vigorous competitors in the world market?”⁵³ Tobin also disliked the “artificial compartments of county and municipal boundary lines” that prevented metropolitan cooperation.⁵⁴

Port Authority leaders quietly wooed opinion makers, politicians, and businessmen in part by successfully redefining airports as a regional issue that only they could handle. Chairman Howard Cullman and Tobin also offered the most ambitious plan for long-term development without specifying the creation of a very expensive terminal building (as Moses had done) or demanding more from the airlines. When necessary, they openly criticized Moses’s proposals as unworkable from a financial point of view without revealing their own specific plans. Cullman liked to stress the urgency of the situation: “If the port district is to preserve its overseas air traffic against the competition of Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore and Chicago, Idlewild airport must be put in service for overseas carriers as soon as possible.”⁵⁵ Colliers reported that nationally “city fathers know that airports are to aviation what harbors are to shipping, and that only cities with the most ultramodern of airports can hope to become major terminals.”⁵⁶

After a period of study, the Port Authority announced in late 1946 that it desired a ninety-nine-year lease on both LaGuardia and Idlewild Airports. In a major embarrassment for Moses and O’Dwyer, Harry Guggenheim, the former chairman of the City Airport Authority, endorsed the Port Authority plan because the city’s people “are offered airports and service removed from politics and without further debt obligations by the city.” Members of the city’s Board of Estimate, who in this era had the final say on the municipal expenditures, were nevertheless at first “cool” to the proposal and raised questions about honoring the old leases to the airlines. Many wondered, with some justification looking back from the present, about the future profits promised to the city: would they ever be delivered?⁵⁷

The Port Authority, however, benefited from support for the transfer from the airlines, which hoped to retain their sweetheart lease deals at the new airport. Airline administrators, saddled with modest postwar air travel, high operating costs, and uncertainty about the future profitability of air travel, were rightly concerned that an independent airport authority would raise fees, as Moses promised to do, to cover high airport operating costs. The Port Authority leadership promised that the original lease arrangements would endure because they claimed that the additional revenue needed for operations would come from concessions and other commerce at the airport rather than from the airlines directly. The Port Authority could also pay for construction using long-term bonds that would be repaid out of airport revenues or failing that, from its profitable tolls on tunnels and bridges in the region.

In still another blow to Moses and his plan, the New York Times editorial writers expressed unequivocal support for the Port Authority takeover in early 1947. The newspaper was willing to abandon the City Airport Authority because of the Port Authority’s demonstrated skills and vision: “The Port Authority is an experienced agency, ably staffed, with a background of twenty-five years testing in the handling of large enterprises. It is regional in its outlook, and this is a regional job.” They called the City Airport Authority, on the other hand, “untried” and underfinanced.⁵⁸ The Regional Plan Association and Citizens Union, two of the most powerful nonpartisan public-policy organizations in the city, also endorsed the Port Authority’s plan. The Regional Plan Association, assessing a decade of industrial trends in 1942, had long ago come to the conclusion that “the New York region faces a post-war world with momentum from the past but with no security for the future.”⁵⁹ A massive, well-run airport was essential to a stable future.

Tobin cleverly lined up leading bankers willing to shoot holes in the financial plans presented by the City Airport Authority. He also criticized the construction costs as too low and the lack of nonaviation revenue sources. Not even a late push by Moses to build support for a revised City Airport Authority plan could stop the Board of Estimate (which included the mayor) from making the transfer. On June 1, 1947, the Port Authority assumed control and quickly set to work completing the runways and other airport infrastructure. Port Authority leaders fully understood that any delay might give New York’s competition an edge.⁶⁰

In the final transfer agreement in 1947, the Port Authority agreed to pay the city $72 million over a fifty-year term. The Port Authority estimated that it would have to spend about $191 million on capital expenditures at the two airports, mostly at Idlewild. This figure was roughly double the figure proposed by the City Airport Authority.⁶¹ Even former Mayor La Guardia felt that the O’Dwyer administration’s botching of the process (“criminal negligence and timidity”) justified turning over the airports to the Port Authority. He also thought that if he had been mayor, he would have been able to develop the airports effectively. This lease agreement has been modestly revised in the decades since, but Port Authority control has been maintained nevertheless since 1947. It is hard to figure out how much profit has ever been turned over to the city by the Port Authority; such was the benefit of being an authority.⁶²

Administrators at the Port Authority began the long march away from a central terminal structure serving all airlines. It was inconceivable to designers at the time that one building, especially an affordable one, could accommodate all the gates needed for the new airport and larger airplanes of the postwar period. A new plan by the Port Authority included forty-two plane positions in two large terminal structures (one for domestic and one for international traffic); they were considered to be “the largest and most modern air terminals in the world,” with 1.35 million square feet, ten times the size of LaGuardia Airport. The terminals, positioned at each end of a 160-acre oval central area, were designed to handle the massive traffic of the future. An internal bus system to connect terminals and regional mass transit would also generate revenue.

This ambitious plan, like those before, was never built since the Port Authority, having won control, now appeared to be in no rush to spend the hundreds of millions (today’s billions) necessary to create the world-class airport it had promised. The internal discussions are no longer available, but one imagines that administrators were understandably reluctant to commit to an expensive plan during such a dynamic era of air travel. Whatever the reasons might have been, and however logical, the passengers suffered: a temporary cinder-block building, expanded a number of times to meet growing capacity, served as New York’s primary gateway until the International Arrivals Building opened in 1957.⁶³

The Port Authority’s leaders began to think big about the various functions the airport would fill, in part to envision a way to pay for such enormous facilities without raising rates for the airlines. Cullman predicted that consumer concessions would cover 70 percent of revenue in contrast to 30 percent from landing fees and fuel.⁶⁴ Idlewild “would be modeled after Grand Central terminal, where, he said, ‘you can’t spend 20 min. without buying something.’” The Port Authority, however, offered a description of the airport that sounded suburban in spite of the fact that the airport was located within the city limits.⁶⁵ At the airport, visitors and neighbors would find “a big air-conditioned, soundproofed hotel, huge service garage where your car can be fixed while you’re flying, sports arena, auditorium, department store along with dozens of concession shops, restaurants and bars, as well as an outdoor swimming pool, outdoor movie theater, miniature golf course, tennis and badminton courts…. Bowling alleys, dart throwing, archery facilities and tremendous outdoor dance for playing host of bigname bands.”⁶⁶ Not only would wealthier New Yorkers pay a premium to fly, but also they presumably would have leisure time to play sports such as tennis before and after. The emphasis on automobiles and open-air leisure demanded large areas of open space as one would find in the suburbs or perhaps the outer boroughs like Queens or Staten Island rather than in a crowded, aging city where most New Yorkers still lived. These ambitious and somewhat quirky recreational plans were never realized once the scale of airport operations came into focus in the 1950s, but the suburban flavor remained in the Terminal City that was finally built in the 1950s.⁶⁷

The Port Authority updated and tinkered with plans but also changed the name of the airport. The official name changed from Major General Alexander E. Anderson Airport (so named by the City Council in 1943 after a Queens aviation hero), and known informally as Idlewild, to New York International Airport to “give the city added prestige as a center of airborne traffic.”⁶⁸ The renaming reflected the Port Authority’s vision of the field as part of a regional system of air travel, “a net of airports with each field having a special purpose.” LaGuardia Airport would focus on domestic air service while New York International, with its long runways and planned grand terminal (and projected federal immigration, public health, and customs inspections), took the lead in international air travel. Newark was also slated for major upgrades and already had a strong air-cargo role.⁶⁹ Citizens did not, however, take to the name New York International and continued to refer to the airport as Idlewild until 1963 when the airport was successfully renamed after President John F. Kennedy.

To a visitor arriving soon after the opening in 1948, New York International might have looked rough and unimproved, but the space they had entered was one that had been dramatically reshaped in just a few short years. There had already been at least fifteen design changes to the airport, including shifting runways and various central structures, but in the meantime the city had cleared two thousand structures and a golf course, and had raised the marshy sections an average of eight-and-a-half feet by dredging sand from the depths of Jamaica Bay. Grasses from Montauk Point anchored this new desert to secure the blowing sands now exposed to the blustery Atlantic winds. Over four thousand acres of the airport would eventually be carpeted with beach grass efficiently replanted using a converted tobacco-planting machine. The airport was already nine times larger than LaGuardia, and its central terminal area alone could comfortably fit twenty-five Yankee Stadiums. There was no urban renewal project in New York City that rivaled Idlewild in sheer scale at the time, and it was arguably, as La Guardia had hoped, the finest airfield in the country.⁷⁰

FIGURE 6. Engineers quickly realized that the sand pumped up from Jamaica Bay created sandstorms that would hamper operations. Their solution was to use an adapted tobacco-planting machine to plant beach grass, August 20, 1945. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, New York Herald-Tribune Photograph Morgue Collection.

To further transform marsh to airport, workers created a heroic and mostly hidden infrastructure to urbanize this wild space. Under the guidance of Jay Downer, one of Moses’s favorite engineers, almost $60 million was spent on a complex system of sewers, drainage canals, and electrical conduits. Initial work had started on six reinforced concrete runways (varying from 6,000 to 9,500 feet in length, with two held in reserve) that planners believed to be adequate for future operations. A complex tangential plan for twelve runways, providing a variety of directions for takeoff in changing wind conditions, had already been replaced with a simplified series of parallel runways, preferred by pilots, surrounding the planned but as yet undefined central terminal area. The new runways were designed to handle 300,000-pound airplanes, double the weight of a Stratocruiser, the largest plane in service at the time. They had been carefully designed for drainage and safe operations in even the most harrowing of conditions. New York International even included a grade-separated roadway that dove under a massive airplane taxi lane, a distant nod to Central Park’s once-revolutionary separation of horse and pedestrian traffic. The new airport also included an instrument landing system on Runway C that enabled safe landings in poor weather. A radio beam guided pilots to ground-level rows of synchronized flashing lights, including powerful Krypton bulbs, bolted to a pier in Jamaica Bay. These lights at full power generated 115 billion candlepower.⁷¹

FIGURE 7. Runways on the sand: construction of runway “A” at Idlewild Airport, October 25, 1944. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, New York Herald-Tribune Photograph Morgue Collection.

FIGURE 8. New York International Airport, where the most advanced transportation systems of the era, planes and automobiles, coexisted in harmony, 1949. Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

A temporary terminal and administration building was in place by spring 1947, as were three runways. The temporary terminal, a rough amalgam of concrete block and linoleum tile with just a bit of World’s Fair flair, was already larger than the once cutting-edge terminal at LaGuardia; the runways were also longer than those at LaGuardia. In spite of the rough condition, the airport’s scale impressed its main audience: aviation experts. Airlines were unanimous that “Idlewild is far superior … to facilities available at London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam or other big foreign centers.”⁷² Such remarkable facilities were expensive to build and maintain. With Tobin’s Port Authority now fully in charge of the most valuable air market in the world, the airlines had no choice but to pay the bill.

The Port Authority’s leaders had initially promised it would honor the original and very generous leases to airlines negotiated by Mayor La Guardia by generating most of its operating revenue from other sources, but there was no chance the new owner would honor these deals. The leases appeared to many at the time as an awful arrangement, and permitted anticompetitive practices such as volume rebates for the biggest operators that would limit competition. Mayor La Guardia had only signed these rates as a result of the airlines’ threat that airline operations would decamp to Newark if the city’s terms were unfavorable. The terms would have been equally bad for the Port Authority. Authority leaders claimed they were not fully aware of the financial implications of the leases when they made the case for assumption of the airports; Austin Tobin even claimed to feel deceived after the fact. Yet the unfavorable rates had been a matter of public record and had to have been known to Port Authority officials as well. Clearly, Tobin was determined to renegotiate rates after grabbing the airports.⁷³

FIGURE 9. Temporary terminal and parking lot, July 30, 1948. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, New York Herald-Tribune Photograph Morgue Collection.

Austin Tobin now had the upper hand with the airlines. In fall 1948 the Port Authority dug in its heels, claiming that the leases signed with the airlines by the La Guardia administration would destroy aviation in the region and even the nation. It was the authority’s contention, and that of other airport operators who joined it in a new national association to defend their interests (the Airport Operators Council), that the airlines unfairly burdened airports with capital and operating costs that were unsustainable in the long term. The airlines in New York threatened to move elsewhere unless they could pay very low fees. But they were bluffing. The Port Authority had the upper hand as a result of its control of the three regional airports. New York was the number-one air market in the country, and the authority’s airport monopoly now established there could not be ignored. There was little time to waste, however, either for the airlines or the Port Authority. The new and more comfortable Stratocruisers, adapted from the B-29s of the war years, that the airlines wanted to use exceeded the weight limits for LaGuardia Airport. The Port Authority, on the other side, labored under the accumulated construction costs of $110 million at a barely utilized airfield.⁷⁴

While the standoff included the Port Authority’s tricky gambit of allowing airlines to land aircraft but not let passengers use the terminal, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York (and future presidential candidate) quickly settled the lease issue with the major airlines (including Pan Am, American, Northwest, and British Overseas Airways Corporation, or BOAC, forerunner of British Airways), and the Port Authority. The settlement included a major increase in fees that figured in weight of planes and the costs of hangar construction. The new fee structure from the airlines in 1950 already generated 15 percent of the cost of aviation operations at Idlewild for the Port Authority and set a national standard for airport fees—a bitter pill for the airlines but one they had to accept. By 1951 the Port Authority reported that Idlewild, not including the millions required annually for construction or the related debt service, generated over $900,000 in excess revenues from operations.⁷⁵

New York City and its uniquely powerful authorities and market power thus influenced the shape of aviation by raising costs for all airlines. The Port Authority had set a national precedent by balancing public and private capital in airport operation. The deal actually proved valuable in the long term for airlines and the aviation industry by encouraging long-term investments in much larger and more modern airports throughout the nation because of the lucrative fees municipalities could expect from airlines in exchange for their major financial commitments. By 1957 the Port Authority, for instance, had invested $167,100,000 in Idlewild alone; such largesse was only possible owing to the proceeds of a blend of higher fees and lucrative concessions.⁷⁶

Crowded Skies and Highways

LaGuardia Airport seemed far from Idlewild by land, at least measured in crowded highway and street miles. For pilots at the controls of a Douglas DC3, a popular commercial craft at the time that traveled up to two hundred miles per hour, the descent into New York looked quite different. The airports actually crowded uncomfortably close together because the limited air-traffic guidance technology of the era demanded that such fast-moving planes remain tens of miles apart in the air in order to avoid any chance of midair collision. The new instrument runway added by the Port Authority in its 1946 plan eliminated a dangerous intersection of planes en route to Idlewild and LaGuardia, but three airports (including Newark) in such close proximity generated complexity.⁷⁷

The total number of aircraft movements in the 1950s at Idlewild was still low compared with the crowded future, but the limited technological capacity then available meant that many precautions had to be taken over New York’s airspace. Pilots had to constantly radio their altitude speed and heading to ground installations, which then relayed the positions to traffic control centers. Directions to pilots from the control centers had to be sent through the same ground installations. What this meant in practice was overloaded radio frequencies that limited accurate position information. For this reason, controllers had to keep at least ten minutes (or about sixty miles) between arriving planes in New York until the mid-1950s to maintain safety. Competition between commercial and military sponsors of new air-traffic control systems delayed the implementation of a new and better system. Further complicating the situation was the unregulated air force of small general aviation aircraft in the New York region that had a free run (at low cost) at the city’s major airports. New York was quickly suffering as a result of the inadequate technology and lax regulation. In 1954, for instance, there was so much instrument traffic in the New York area that flights backed up, and during that year, 45,000 passengers experienced major delays.⁷⁸

Federal officials installed new radar systems in 1955 to reduce backups and permit a reduced five-mile separation. Air control for the Northeast and much of the mid-Atlantic area shifted from LaGuardia to Idlewild in 1956, taking up residence in a cutting-edge air-control facility boasting the latest radar. Continuing congestion in the skies over Idlewild and other busy airports, and a head-on plane collision in the West in 1956, galvanized federal officials in the late 1950s to adopt an expensive program of flight-control modernization, including extensive long-range radar systems. The Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA, the forerunner of today’s FAA that regulated air control and safety) also established instrument-controlled transcontinental routes (essentially high-altitude, high-speed highways of the skies) in order to regulate what had been informal, often chaotic use of airspace by commercial, private, and military pilots using their eyes as guides. Airlines benefited from this process by, among other things, making transcontinental routes faster, safer, and more dependable—and ready for the jet age.⁷⁹

As pilots closed in on Idlewild, there was still danger when landing over the marshes and through Atlantic fogs. In 1955 the Port Authority installed a flasher system on runway 4 on a dock that extended into Jamaica Bay. Pilots would be able to see the runway approach sooner, improving the chances of making a safe landing.⁸⁰ By the late 1950s the Port Authority was busily extending runways, enhancing lighting, and laying out highspeed taxiway exits. The capacity crisis sparked and encouraged technological innovation. Idlewild was one of the first commercial airports in the country, for instance, to feature advanced instrumentation for landing. Instrumentation boosted capacity because it minimized the amount of circling airplanes had to do under visual navigation in poor weather conditions.

The Port Authority benefited from continuing federal subsidy as it made these upgrades. President Harry Truman authorized $500 million in 1946 for national airport construction and development that would lead to 3,000 new airports and improvement of 1,600 more. New York City was not the only city that benefited, but federal aid was essential to the development of the airport program nationally. Already by 1949 the federal government had spent approximately $200 million on airport development,⁸¹ and by 1965 that figure had reached $900 million. While New York’s airports received a relatively small share of this money (of $500 million spent on New York City area airports by 1965, only about 5 percent could be directly linked to federal aid), the creation of a truly national system would have been impossible without federal subsidy.⁸²

Idlewild’s record growth positioned it during the 1950s as the second busiest airport in the country for all operations after Chicago’s O’Hare International and the leading American airport for international travel. The growth in operations was driven by the growing popularity of faster and more comfortable air travel.⁸³ The level of service offered by the major airline companies aimed to turn flying into a predictable, comfortable, and luxurious service that would justify high fares. Most airlines suffered from an overcapacity problem in the postwar era because the growing size and speed of aircraft outpaced the market for seats on many routes. The big companies thus used government regulations to push out the smaller airlines that threatened to make overcapacity an even bigger problem. The government endorsed the objectively anticompetitive protection of the biggest firms, not only because of formidable lobbying by the most powerful airlines but because the government viewed an advanced, large, stable aviation industry (a Civil Air Reserve fleet) as a potential partner in military operations during times of crisis. Government officials wanted the best aircraft, and lots of them, for their troops in the future and were not necessarily worried about supporting what was most profitable.⁸⁴

Under the regulated system, airfares remained comparatively high for most American travelers throughout the 1950s. TWA, for instance, in the immediate postwar era still prepared entire planes for sleeper service across the Atlantic. Men and women dressed formally and dined on expertly prepared meals. The Lockheed Super Constellations also offered deluxe sleeper-plane service on domestic routes between Idlewild and Los Angeles. A twelve-hour luxurious New York-Paris direct flight added profits in the luxury trade for Air France in 1953. In the early era of flight, wealthy passengers even rode on their own planes with amenities such as separate lounges. Fatality rates from flying dropped so dramatically in the postwar era that plane travel became an acceptable risk even for families.⁸⁵

At the same time, fares became more reasonable over the course of the 1950s because federal regulators held prices steady (while wages improved), and airlines realized that they could expand the market for international travel beyond the elite.⁸⁶ Tourist service thus outpaced luxury service by the late 1950s. Tourist-class flights (made possible by cheap fuel, faster planes, and greater capacity) introduced by Pan Am in 1952 between New York and London catalyzed the expansion of lower-fare transatlantic service to the most popular foreign travel destinations.⁸⁷ Tourist service proved so popular that it accounted for three-quarters of air travelers by 1957. Once airlines realized that planes with mixed levels of seating and higher seat density did not discourage travelers and actually encouraged business, economy (or coach) class was introduced in 1958 in order to crowd even more passengers on planes. A New York-London round trip in first class was very expensive in 1950: $385 ($3,607 in 2012 dollars). By 1960, however, that same trip in a more comfortable and faster jet was more reasonable at $350 ($2,710 in 2012 dollars) and a far better value in terms of time, comfort, and safety. Most jets, in fact, included both first-class and coach seating in order to achieve more efficient operations; by 1960, airlines actually designated half of their seats as coach.⁸⁸

Flying was not yet for everyman, but by 1960 it was becoming a settled upper-middle-class phenomenon and a necessity for many business managers. In 1960 Idlewild alone handled 248,686 plane movements that shuttled 8.8 million passengers through the airport. Approximately 85 percent of the nation’s transatlantic passengers came through Idlewild that year, a reduced percentage from the immediate postwar years but still impressive for one airport. Perhaps even more impressive was that Idlewild handled approximately half of all of the nation’s international airline traffic that year. Airports, and Idlewild in particular, had been built optimistically, but rapid democratization of air travel quickly tested even those generous boundaries. The fact that Pan Am led the world’s international travel market, for instance, meant that Idlewild was already crowded.⁸⁹

From Water Ports to Air Ports

The booming consumer society of the postwar years also swelled air-cargo operations at Idlewild. Air cargo boosted Idlewild’s competitive advantages by subsidizing many otherwise unprofitable or under-capacity international routes (air cargo could be stowed in the holds of passenger planes), helping Idlewild remain at the center of global air travel. Air cargo seemed financially promising because, as promoters noted in 1945, the New York metro region was already “one of the great centers of high-class package freight, which is the type most likely to use airplanes in overseas transport.”⁹⁰ The region’s wealth and extensive trade were key to creating Idlewild’s early lead in the air-cargo industry.

The Port Authority leadership closely calculated the future of trade in the region and the nation. After the war, the Port Authority adopted additional new technologies for the maintenance of the port’s supremacy. These investments, planned by the authority’s able team of economists and engineers, proved crucial to the region’s future health. At the docks, this would mean in the 1950s the creation of a modern, containerized shipping facility in Newark-Elizabeth. These new facilities, made possible in part by generous deals to protect current longshoremen, in the long term eliminated the raison d’être for much of the aging port infrastructure and unionized staff on New York’s waterfront. Air cargo was also a new frontier. The service may have been expensive compared with traditional means of shipping (almost one-third more expensive), but the high value or time sensitivity of the cargo more than compensated for the additional costs. In addition, combining passenger flights and cargo flights kept many routes relatively profitable for airlines.

New York built on its leadership of oceangoing trade as it entered the modern air-cargo era. Freight forwarders of the maritime era, who handled paperwork for international shipping, made a successful transition from ocean vessels to airplanes because they realized that planes represented just another way to move goods faster and over greater distances. They understood that “forwarding is a complex, many faceted service,” and they had to be “expert in paperwork that covers the spectrum of U.S. and foreign government regulations; and had to be capable of performing a full range of ground services between the shipper and the airline.”⁹¹ New York’s history as a global center of commerce gave it a significant advantage and helped secure the city as an early leader in air cargo.

The defense industry also played a role in inspiring and subsidizing this service. The Berlin airlift is frequently cited as a key demonstration of the potential for airfreight in the postwar period because a city’s basic needs were sustained by air cargo alone for months. Just as important were the surplus aircraft sold off at war’s end. New Yorkers quickly jumped into this profitable game. New York was, after all, in its last years as the nation’s leading industrial region and still produced many high-value industrial products, such as machine parts and business machines. Sperry’s vast electronics plant in Lake Success on Long Island was just one of many Long Island enterprises that benefited from the transition of wartime contracts to both Cold War defense spending and the rise in commercial aviation.

Seaboard and Western Airlines, for instance, started with one air freighter in May 1947 and operated solely in the freight business between New York and European points. The founders of the company had been part of the Air Transport Command during the war, which distinguished itself by flying almost anything anywhere under almost any conditions, and they also had experience in aviation insurance before the war. About 40 percent of the company’s tonnage was in wearing apparel, accessories, and textiles, not just high-value industrial items like machine parts. By 1948, the company had five planes in constant rotation and, in fact, got a profitable bump from the contract it secured during the Berlin airlift.⁹²

It did not hurt the development of aviation in the region that Long Island was, by the end of World War II and during the height of the Cold War, one of the nation’s aviation hubs, with massive plants and operations of Grumman, Republic, Fairchild, and Sperry driving industrial growth. So important was aviation on Long Island that in 1954, for instance, the industry accounted for 45.4 percent of Nassau-Suffolk’s total manufacturing employment. The contracts generated by the Korean War mainlined federal cash to these booming suburbs. Even though this high level of aircraft employment was not maintained in the long term, the importing and exporting of advanced electronics, machine tools, and other materials needed for the aviation business boosted Idlewild’s air-cargo industry for decades.⁹³

The postwar defense industrial complex provided key subsidies for the emerging air-cargo business. Not only was the technology for air-cargo planes pioneered during the war and after (Hercules turboprop C-130s easily became cargo carriers), but also “propping up the airfreight business were fat contracts channeled to the carriers by the government and the Defense Department. In fiscal 1956, the Pentagon spent a whopping $67.5 million to ship goods and personnel by commercial carriers.” The Flying Tiger line alone received almost $3 million in contracts from the military air transportation service.⁹⁴ The Eisenhower administration also promoted air cargo by encouraging federal agencies to use civil cargo airlift. Volume reduced costs and improved systems for everyone, not just the military.⁹⁵

The air-cargo center at Idlewild, dedicated in 1956, was its own Terminal City for cargo. The four warehouses and five buildings provided space where the freight forwarders, customs inspection, and quarantine could all be conducted. Separate hangars of ever-increasing size and complexity sheltered planes that carried this complex and popular trade. New York’s cargo companies were also able to leverage the growing number of passenger routes by including cargos in the holds of these frequently scheduled flights. By 1960, the Port Authority realized that even though the cargo facility was by their account the largest air-cargo center in the world, it was already far too small to preserve its leadership; administrators initiated an expansion that doubled its size in the early 1960s.

The air-cargo center on its own stood little chance of replacing New York City’s once crowded docks as a source of employment or commerce. The labor-saving system of containerized shipping at the Port Authority’s new Newark-Elizabeth waterfront doomed New York’s waterfront culture and economy. At the same time, the air-cargo center, for certain types of high-value items, proved to be an important element in the maintenance of the New York metropolitan area as a central point in global trade routes as it had been for centuries. Until the 1970s, in fact, Idlewild’s air-cargo operations surpassed in scale any other airport in the United States.

New York Congestion

By the 1940s, the New York metropolitan area had the most advanced and integrated system of high-speed parkways and bridges in the nation. This system was the result of decades of steady road building under the leadership of Robert Moses, the Regional Plan Association, and political leaders in both the city and surrounding counties. The growth of the parkway network, beginning in the 1920s, had set in motion an era of decentralization of population with long-term grave consequences for New York City—not to mention gridlock. In the 1940s, however, New York’s leaders viewed the connection to these road networks as a positive element of modernization. While Mayor La Guardia saved the subways in 1940, mass transit was a notorious financial drain and, in many respects, a legacy of an earlier age. It should come as little surprise then that city leaders across the board placed a premium on automobile connections to the new airport. This singular dependence on automobile, truck, and bus travel to and from the airport, however, meant that all increases in number of passengers would lead to a greater flood of vehicles.⁹⁶ Foreshadowing decades of delays, the first scheduled outbound flight from Idlewild in 1948, bound for Chile, “took off 31 min. late yesterday because of the delay in the arrival of the coach carrying passengers from Manhattan.”⁹⁷

As a rule, airports across the nation lacked mass-transit connections to their new airports until the 1980s and 1990s. Most large postwar airports (Dulles, O’Hare, LAX) rose on vast parcels of distant land, far away from established urban neighborhoods: older mass-transit lines were in short supply or absent in these open spaces and new systems probably uneconomical in light of the suburban boom and the American preference for private cars. The United States heavily subsidized new highways, as opposed to mass transit; so highways, paid for by federal dollars, usually become modern airport connectors.

But New York faced a different situation from other cities in the 1940s. While motorcars had become very popular as a result of Moses’s highway systems, the congestion on these roads was growing in tandem with their popularity. Depending on packed roads for shuttling passengers to timed departures was rolling the dice. The city itself, despite suburbanization, was also still the most densely populated in the nation, with the nation’s most comprehensive mass-transit service including buses and streetcars. La Guardia’s plan for public ownership saved the subway system in 1940 from the bankruptcy and dissolution that ruined so many other transit systems. Idlewild was located close enough to existing mass transit (both subways and commuter rail) to make transit a legitimate option.

The original site committee of city councilmen, in fact, found in 1941 that the only deficiency of the site was the lack of transit and rail connections.⁹⁸ Some early observers saw, however, that a connection to the Rockaway Branch line could potentially get passengers to Penn Station in as little as twenty minutes. An extension of the subway (the new IND line in Queens) to the airport was also discussed at the time.⁹⁹ A reporter from Colliers predicted that in the future airport “newly built railroads, subways and highways will converge on this former wilderness,” but someone would have had to show some leadership for this to happen.¹⁰⁰ In spite of serious discussion of an extension of the Rockaway Beach line of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) for passenger and freight travel to Idlewild in the 1940s, political leaders failed to create an efficient mass-transit system between city and airport.¹⁰¹

Mayor La Guardia was a great advocate for aviation and highways, but new mass transit to the airport was not his priority. On a tour of the airport site in 1945, the mayor made excuses by pointing out the difficulties of linking the LIRR to the airport: “We’ve been negotiating for 2 and half years to build a spur right into the airport. Life is short and so are the terms of a Mayor, so we’re going to build the airport up to the end of the railroad.” The man who rebuilt a city couldn’t get this done? Then again, the privately held and financially troubled LIRR had no incentive to work collaboratively on a transit link.¹⁰² In 1948, eight leading citywide civic organizations mourned the lack of connectivity between Idlewild and the subway. The express lines of the IND Queens Boulevard (now the E and F subway lines) could have been extended along the Van Wyck, thus “the opportunity of constructing an open cut subway as a part of this express highway at greatly reduced cost is now apparently lost because the highway project was blueprinted without consideration of the airport’s full requirements.”¹⁰³

Without a fixed rail connection, every passenger who came to Idlewild would have to ride on rubber wheels or helicopters (see below). And those rubber wheels had to thread a crowded city only partly relieved by the parkways and highways Robert Moses had spread across the city. This was just the beginning of decades of bad connections. Robert Moses bragged in 1935 that “you can ride from 92nd Street and the East River all the way to Kew Gardens and east on a genuine parkway without crossings or lights,” but it was a different challenge entirely to link Kew Gardens in central Queens to Jamaica Bay.¹⁰⁴

Moses extended what eventually became the Van Wyck Expressway, paid for by a combination of state and federal funds, from Queens Boulevard-Grand Central Parkway to the airport after the war. The new highway was designed both as a connector to the airport and “to serve Queens as a whole, with traffic separations planned to reduce congestion in the Jamaica area.” In retrospect, this dual use was a major error. In practice, the Van Wyck would never serve as a dependable, fast route to the airport.¹⁰⁵ The Van Wyck Expressway when it first opened in 1950 had six lanes and two parallel service roads, which counted as a large highway for its day. Officials predicted a 20 percent reduction in city-to-airport trip time for both cars and buses … on a good day.¹⁰⁶ Robert Caro colorfully describes how Moses ignored dire traffic predictions for the Van Wyck and refused to even carve out a future right of way for transit down the Van Wyck, despite the ease and comparative low cost for transit on such a route.¹⁰⁷

Access to Idlewild also suffered from a local quirk in the regional road network. On paper, Robert Moses appeared to have created a fairly even distribution of highways linking Nassau County and Queens; Moses had essentially built out much of the system projected in the late 1920s by the Regional Plan Association. Yet Moses refused to abandon the parkway ideal, of leisure drives through green parks, when the parkways had by and large become commuter routes through emerging suburban areas. As a result, Moses made traffic worse on the Van Wyck and limited efficiency in bus and truck service to the airport by banning buses and commercial vehicles from most of his parkways, including the Southern State (which connects both to the Van Wyck and the Belt), Belt Parkway, and the Grand Central. The Van Wyck Expressway, as the only highway to the airport that accommodated trucks and buses, developed a reputation in the 1950s for gridlock. The Belt Parkway also connected to Idlewild, but the Belt was a long, twisting, and dangerous connector to Manhattan that Robert Moses stitched together along the edge of Brooklyn marshes, waterfronts, and neighborhoods; it proved to be poorly designed as a dependable high-speed expressway. Many Nassau County commuters also realized that the shortest way from the South Shore of Long Island to Manhattan and the Bronx was to head north on the Van Wyck to the Grand Central rather than fight their way west on the Belt Parkway. Truckers loading up cargo had to find their way to their destinations either by slow surface roads or, like everyone else, by crowding the Van Wyck Expressway.¹⁰⁸

Port Authority leaders were not deaf to the criticism and requested that Moses alter his policies. Port Authority chairman Cullman in 1947 made clear that “an outstanding need of a smooth functioning airport system was permission from the city to operate buses over the Belt Parkway. Robert Moses … has opposed airport traffic over parkways.”¹⁰⁹ Moses, however, still viewed his parkways as “ribbon or shoe-string parks” whose aesthetic qualities would be destroyed should buses be allowed on them. He explained his resistance to the privately run Carey bus service to Idlewild by irrationally predicting worse congestion from buses than cars: “You can understand the difficult traffic problems that would arise if regularly scheduled trips at intervals of a few minutes were permitted over the parkway system to Idlewild Airport.”¹¹⁰ Yet tens of thousands of individual cars and taxis nevertheless congested parkways to and from the airport, and their numbers rose in tandem with explosive increases in aviation traffic.¹¹¹

The airport’s negative reputation for difficult access and egress solidified during the 1950s as more and more travelers found themselves stuck in traffic: “During the past few years many travelers have noticed that at times it has taken longer to drive from New York International Airport, at Idlewild, in Queens, into Manhattan than it has to make the flight from Boston to New York City.” Carey passenger buses remained banned from the Grand Central Parkway, for instance, thus making their journey to the airport painfully slow on regular city streets like Woodhaven Boulevard.¹¹² The Whitestone Expressway, the interstate connection to the Van Wyck that finally allowed trucks and buses direct access from the airport to the regional road system, including the Long Island Expressway and the Whitestone Bridge, was not built until the 1960s as part of preparations for Moses’s 1964–65 World’s Fair.