Читать книгу The Metropolitan Airport - Nicholas Dagen Bloom - Страница 9

Introduction

John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) was and remains one of the most successful and influential of all of New York City’s many modern redevelopment projects. Despite decades of bad press accruing from jammed and confusing roads, epic flight delays, persistent crime, decaying terminals, smelly bathrooms, noise pollution, and abrasive employees, JFK has had far-reaching influence on the shape not just of New York City but also of the metropolitan area’s international prestige, economic vitality, and quality of life.

New Yorkers bound for adventure and business have enjoyed the privilege and advantage of boarding planes headed to the distant corners of the globe. Billions of tourists have flowed back into the city and region through the airport’s enormous, if imperfect, terminals. The air-cargo facilities have enlarged the market and options for the region’s industries, consumers, and service sector. At the same time, the New York metropolitan area—crowded, competitive, wealthy, and outspoken—has influenced distinctive aspects of JFK for both better and worse, defining the airport’s scale, market, and ambience. Postwar New York, both the city and surrounding suburbs, makes little sense without JFK in the frame.¹

JFK opened in 1948 in a city and nation still shaped by railroads, trucks, automobiles, ports, and steamships. Beginning in the 1950s, affluent passengers and high-value cargo shifted from boats to planes for transatlantic travel, lured by the swiftness, comfort, and prestige of air travel. For most of the 1960s, JFK handled approximately 80 percent of all American-bound traffic for Europe, a significant share of national domestic travelers, and a majority of the nation’s air cargo. By the 1960s, and as a result of its importance to so many companies, the airport also served as the hub of globalized airline companies such as Pan Am Airlines.² The airport had achieved the goal of city leaders who, in the 1940s, viewed it as a key to preserving the city’s preeminence in the nation’s trade and travel patterns.

The hectic air and ground activity at JFK dramatically affected the surrounding skies, waters, and neighborhoods on both sides of the citysuburban divide. By the 1960s, JFK International (along with the Port Authority’s other two airports, LaGuardia and Newark International, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal) had helped divert long-distance transportation in New York away from train tracks and waterfronts. Magnificent rail hubs, such as Pennsylvania Station (built in 1910), and the companies behind them lost their central functions in urban life and vanished from the landscape. So too did the steamship docks, thousands of dockworkers, and small manufacturing plants that once filled New York’s industrial districts.

By the 1950s and 1960s, millions of cars, taxis, and heavily loaded trucks every year poured out of the airport into surrounding highways and parkways. Immigrants and tourists from distant lands made their way from the airport to the region’s neighborhoods and attractions. JFK International was a massive construction project that generated billions of dollars in investments. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers found work there and in its related industries, making the airport (with LaGuardia Airport) a leading source of employment in Queens and suburban Nassau County. By dint of its dominant role in international routes at the time, the airport created a competitive advantage for managerial services and air cargo in a deindustrializing city. Today, JFK still generates billions of dollars in regional trade, supports hundreds of thousands of jobs (thirty-six thousand jobs on site), and is a key element in New York’s modern economic and touristic success.

The growing scale of JFK in the 1950s and 1960s helped redefine metropolitan patterns of labor, transportation, and residence, encouraging dispersion of the population to the outer boroughs and suburbs. Living and working miles from railroad stations and ports was no disadvantage for businessmen in the new office parks of Nassau or Westchester County, who could easily drive or take cabs directly to the airport for business trips. Prosperous suburban families, bound for exotic lands, did not have to travel to aging rail or port terminals in a crowded, increasingly minority-dominated city center. High-value freight, such as electronic equipment and pharmaceuticals, did not have to journey to and from the center of the city either, enabling suburban warehouses and factories to send their goods through the airport cargo terminal to the most distant lands overnight. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (in office from 1933 to 1945) may have conceived the airport in 1941 as a guarantor of the city’s leading role in transportation—and as a vast renewal project—but it also encouraged suburbanization by equalizing transportation benefits across the metropolitan area.

FIGURE 1. Passenger numbers sharply increased from 1948 until the late 1960s as the American public discovered air travel. The city’s financial problems, combined with the fuel crisis and recessions, led to a stagnant era at JFK in the 1970s. Deregulation (post-1978) and the expansion of domestic and international service at Newark (including People’s Express) cut into JFK’s regional dominance but did not prevent higher passenger levels at JFK in the 1980s and 1990s when New York City’s economy rebounded. The recent uptick in passengers is strongly connected to JetBlue’s success and the resurgent tourism industry. Courtesy of the Regional Plan Association.

If the airport was, in fact, one of the premier projects in New York’s postwar redevelopment program, why has it never been recognized as such? First, many observers have treated JFK as a failure because of the airport’s shabby treatment of the public. New Yorkers did not agree about much for the past half century, but most of them shared a low opinion of this airport based upon their visits. During the 1940s and much of the 1950s, for instance, passengers might have expected a futuristic experience, but they actually trundled through a grubby, crowded “temporary” terminal complex. In the decades that followed, passengers in modern terminals continued to encounter a bewildering number of reconstructions, temporary walkways, crowded roadways, miserable food service, and aggressive hustlers. By the 1980s and 1990s, formerly modern terminals remained for too long as faltering airlines, such as Pan Am and Delta, refused to invest in their reconstruction. When terminal reconstruction finally started, passengers had to endure year after year of reconstruction at one terminal after another.

This constant throwing up and tearing down, the restructuring of the entire airline business starting in the 1970s, and the distracted management style of the overextended Port Authority cumulatively rendered the airport’s Terminal City (the central hub of terminals since the 1950s) a mixture of confusing and unpleasant. JFK, for instance, is consistently rated by travelers today as one of the worst airports in the country. While most of the terminals have been modernized since the 1990s or are in a process of renovation, decades of inferior passenger experiences, uneven daily management, and persistent flight and ground delays have blinded most of us to the enduring value of the airport to the region.

The most important reason for the failure to recognize JFK as a major factor in urban affairs is that airports, even those within traditional urban boundaries like JFK, are artifacts of a metropolitan-scale redevelopment program. Metropolitan renewal, rather than a spatially defined, limited urban-renewal program, is harder for both the public and scholars to conceptualize.³ Mayor La Guardia and other civic leaders may have envisioned the airport as part of New York City’s renewal, but the scale of the airport that developed aided not just the city but areas far beyond the city’s boundaries. Publications and statements by both the Port Authority and the Regional Plan Association have over the years tried with little success to explain the metropolitan scale and profound importance of JFK and other airports to New Yorkers. Metropolitan impact, flowing to and from such a vast and complicated institution, is difficult to conceptualize.⁴

Airports have traditionally been treated in urban history as isolated institutions because it is difficult to account for and describe economic, social, or political influence flowing from airport to urban region, and vice versa, over such a large area. While some airports gather office and hotel infrastructure around them, becoming what some now call an aerotropolis, the fact that airplanes fly in and out at great heights from sprawling, seemingly self-contained airport complexes has made it difficult to document their relationship to traditional urban historical patterns, such as urban redevelopment, deindustrialization, suburbanization, neighborhood change, immigration, citizen activism, globalization, and even the most obvious connection, the rise of the tourist city.⁵ That it is difficult to make airport-metropolitan connections, however, does not mean that they do not exist. Airports are in every respect as influential in shaping modern cities as freeways, public housing, redlining, urban renewal, suburban development, and any other of the more familiar and much more studied topics in urban history.⁶

The Master Builders

Airports are often viewed as isolated dimensions of urban life, part of a standardized global system, but just below the surface are distinct characteristics that result from choices made by local leaders. The influence of New York’s outsized urban personalities and the competing institutions they guided have left enduring marks on JFK International that are explored in detail throughout Metropolitan Airport. Three key figures in particular—Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, and Austin Tobin—have helped define the airport that is so famous today.

Mayor La Guardia set the initial scale and ambition for what is today’s JFK. La Guardia’s interest in aviation is permanently linked to the comparatively small and particularly unpleasant airport that bears his name, but JFK International better reflects the global ambition he had for New York City in the coming aviation era. Decades later, Robert Moses, the powerful city administrator who aggressively rebuilt much of New York’s infrastructure from the 1920s to the 1960s, praised the mayor for understanding the future importance of aviation when few others did: “Mayor La Guardia was way ahead of his time and so were his aides. The future of air travel was not dimly apprehended at this time and we were ridiculed for the size of this airport.”⁷ The mayor’s determination that New York lead the region and nation in air travel made it possible to grab such an enormous parcel of land for the airport before an era of environmental regulation. It was well known at the time that JFK was his “pet project” to which he committed substantial city resources, including the talents of Robert Moses, to bring to fruition.

La Guardia’s attempts to reform and rebuild so many areas of urban life (housing, schools, hospitals, parks, and so on), and his aim of creating two major airports within just a few miles of each other, made it unlikely that the city he loved would end up managing both airports in the long term. The state-imposed limits on New York City’s debt meant there was not enough capital for the investments needed for vast airfields and terminals. To build a second airport on over four thousand acres at the cost of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars (many billions of dollars in today’s money) led to a crisis of confidence on the part of city officials in the mid-1940s. La Guardia’s successor, Mayor William O’Dwyer (in office from 1946 to 1950), transferred governance of both city airports to the Port Authority of New York in 1947.⁸

Robert Moses is still infamous for his controversial slum clearance program that made space for modern housing projects, cultural centers, parkways and highways, bridges, and new parks. His name is not, however, often associated with aviation as he failed to keep the airports out of the hands of the Port Authority. It could have turned out differently. In 1946, he convinced the newly elected mayor to spin off the airport into a City Airport Authority so that its development costs could be privately financed and thus left off the books of the city government. The authority would also, not coincidentally, give Moses another source of funds and power. In this instance, however, the notion of Robert Moses as an unstoppable power broker fails to explain his loss of airport control. Moses made a number of strategic errors in the 1940s that allowed the City Airport Authority to slip from his grasp. First, he was far too publicly honest about the enormous costs the airport would entail. Second, he demanded that the airlines renegotiate leases they had signed earlier, thus turning powerful executives against him. Moses’s biggest error, it turned out, was in underestimating the Port Authority. Moses viewed the organization as a barely functional regional entity. In truth, however, executive director Austin Tobin and his staff outfoxed Moses by shaping the opinion of newspaper editors, the mayor, financiers, and the airlines.

It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Moses’s lack of direct control of the airport equates with lack of influence. Moses was pushed aside at the airport, but he still played a critical role in the creation of the metropolitan infrastructure that made possible the use of Jamaica Bay as an airport site. His determination to build out the regional road system, for instance, brought Jamaica Bay and the Idlewild site into the orbit of Manhattan and the region’s growing suburbs. His decision to build and maintain so many of the metropolitan highways as landscaped parkways for cars, however, in the long term limited the efficiency of the region’s road network in relationship to the airport.

Moses’s vision of Jamaica Bay as a metropolitan-scale park also had significant effects on the shape of the airport we know today. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Moses and park officials proved successful in restoring the natural beauty and even some of the ecological integrity of Jamaica Bay. On the basis of the conservation achievement, activists successfully resisted the Port Authority’s plans for expansion into Jamaica Bay. Moses’s postwar promotion of high-density housing around the bay and in the Rockaways also put tens of thousands of additional people near the airport’s noisy flight paths. Protection of these residents from noise pollution would become a major factor in the creation of limits for JFK operations. Moses, in sum, may not have run the airport, but he powerfully influenced its operations.

The most important figure to shape the airport is also the one least familiar to New Yorkers and scholars. Austin Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority for thirty years (from 1942 to 1972), is New York’s forgotten power broker.⁹ Moses is usually given most of the credit and blame for the shape of modern New York, as his flamboyant personality, nasty sense of humor, and high-profile projects make for dramatic storytelling. Tobin, however, the low-key grandson of an Irish immigrant, was an equally aggressive empire builder who rivaled Moses in his talent for using a public authority as a tool for radical urban reconstruction. Tobin, as executive director, was given a relatively free hand by Port Authority chairmen, such as Howard Cullman and Donald Love, wealthy civic leaders who were too busy with many other business and charitable activities to meddle deeply in everyday operations run by an obviously competent executive director. Tobin diligently expanded the Port Authority from just three hundred to over eight thousand employees during his long tenure and ended up controlling billions of dollars in assets, including the World Trade Center, tunnels, container ports, bridges, heliports, and the very profitable metropolitan airport system (including JFK International, LaGuardia, and Newark International).

Tobin showed a particular talent for choosing infrastructure projects, including airports, that had the potential to turn a profit. That profitability, in turn, attracted billions in private funding for the Port Authority’s bonds. As with Moses, this business orientation gave the Port Authority a great deal of independence. The Port Authority’s takeover of the region’s airports in the 1940s, including JFK International in 1947, shaped the airport in profound ways. The Port Authority’s ability to negotiate hard with the airlines to secure better rates (even though the authority had initially promised it would honor the original leases), and its ability to borrow vast sums through bond sales, enabled the rapid completion of airports on a grand scale in the New York region. The rapid opening of JFK in 1948 helped secure the city’s early aviation leadership in the United States for global travel.

Tobin’s sponsorship of the Terminal City design for JFK in the 1950s and 1960s, with operations distilled into enormous freestanding unit terminals frequently operated by just one airline, distinguished JFK from many of its peers—and not always for the better. JFK International was not the only airport of its day to employ the terminal unit system (Los Angeles International Airport—LAX—was roughly similar), but JFK was the largest and most ambitious terminal unit airport of its day. This new city, with its distantly separated terminals and sole reliance on highway links to the city center, was a creature of Tobin’s ambitions and values. Like Moses, Tobin largely turned his back on traditional rail and subway lines in order to maximize investments in infrastructure that would deliver future profits. His main emphasis, therefore, was on tunnels, bridges, airports, and other lucrative facilities related to modern transport, including cars, trucks, buses, airplanes, and containerized cargo.¹⁰ The Port Authority thus unfolded a futuristic transportation vision at JFK—making Terminal City entirely dependent on planes, cars, trucks, and buses—as a clear contrast to sweaty and crowded subways, crumbling and corrupt docks, and grimy rail stations of a receding industrial age.

Tobin’s empire building, despite its contribution to modernization of urban infrastructure, undermined JFK’s reputation in a number of key areas. For most of JFK’s history, the Port Authority resisted calls, and even legislation that accompanied those calls, for a mass-transit link to JFK because of the institution’s bias to cars and trucks and because such a system would be a sure money loser. A mass-transit link could have reduced the hassle of terminal transfers within the airport and airport-city connections for many passengers. Yet it was not until 2003 that JFK had an effective mass-transit link or terminal connector. Tobin’s growing focus on realestate development in the 1960s, including the World Trade Center project, by many accounts also distracted Port Authority figures from the efficient management of its many mass transportation facilities. Modernization was expensive, but it is also true that Tobin and his successors, such as Peter Goldmark (executive director from 1977 to 1985), diverted airport profits into the Port Authority’s real estate and other activities rather than reinvesting the money in the airports. The great power wielded by Tobin and subsequent Port Authority leaders meant that changing managers or forcing upgrades in service proved very difficult for unhappy metropolitan political leaders.

This short list of leading personalities necessarily excludes many other important actors and institutions, including airline executives, governors, mayors, Congressmen, local environmentalists, Port Authority civil servants, and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrators who also contributed to the development and management of JFK—and who make appearances in the story that follows. Yet even this brief description of three major personalities provides a glimpse into the complexity of the environment in which New York airports, and JFK in particular, developed. The cumulative impact of strong personalities and the powerful political forces and organizations they represented contributed to a lack of metropolitan cooperation in the long term. Indeed, with so many authorities, departments, jurisdictions, and egos, it is remarkable that the airport works as well as it does. Most American cities suffer from a similar lack of central coordination, but there is no denying that New York, where the scale of any enterprise demands considerable funds and planning, boasts an excess of powerful institutions and agendas that has made metropolitan cooperation and planning difficult.¹¹ A complex web of patronage shaped JFK as a place in specific ways that make it different from other airports, even those in the New York region.

Metropolitan Relationships

The personalities and choices of leaders such as La Guardia, Moses, and Tobin matter a great deal, but the surrounding urban context is just as important to understanding the history of JFK. The story thus returns at different points to a number of themes that situate JFK within the broader history of the New York region in the twentieth century. These themes, taken together and over time, illustrate that there exist powerful and enduring reciprocal relationships between an airport and its surrounding metropolitan area.¹²

In particular, the wealthy and globalized New York metropolitan population played a key role in establishing JFK’s early aviation leadership and dominant postwar firms such as Pan Am and Eastern Airlines. Without the lucrative New York market, and brave souls in a hurry, both American aviation and New York’s air industry would have had a hard time taking off in the 1930s and 1940s. The Port Authority, which took over the airport in 1947, was able to negotiate higher fees with airlines in the late 1940s because the airlines could not abandon a comparatively well-developed and profitable market. These higher rates collected steady revenue that allowed for a massive expansion of airport facilities and a high-quality system not only in New York but also across the country from the 1950s to the present.

This influence of New York as a population center continued to be critical to JFK’s success in the decades that followed. The steady uptick in the airport’s ridership, notwithstanding the airport’s poor reputation for service, cleanliness, and personal safety since the 1960s, reflects the fact that the region’s population continued to grow in size and wealth despite New York City’s well-publicized problems in the postwar period. Widespread housing abandonment, municipal financial troubles, and population loss in the 1970s overshadowed the continuing growth of the metropolitan area as a whole. The success of the massive Boeing 747s in the 1970s and 1980s, and Airbus 380s today, results from the existence of concentrated urban populations like those found only in New York and other massive world cities such as Tokyo, Paris, and London.

New York’s current (2014) metropolitan population of eighteen million people includes such lush suburban counties as Westchester, Nassau, and Fairfield (with their own edge cities such as Stamford and White Plains) that provide a solid base for the airport’s continuing growth even in the face of national competition. The high incomes of this vast suburban belt surrounding New York, filled with affluent and globally oriented residents, generates a steady market for global air travel at JFK; leisure travel, in fact, accounts for three-quarters of JFK’s passenger business. The establishment and rapid success of JetBlue starting in 1999 was and remains as much dependent on the particular travel needs of New Yorkers who journey often to Florida, California, and the Caribbean as it does on the demonstrated business leadership of JetBlue’s founder, David Neeleman. The enormous number of tourists (now topping fifty million visitors per year), many of whom arrive by air, has created an additional transient urban population that sustains international air travel year round and helps keep ticket prices reasonable. The rebirth of New York as an immigrant city has added further to JFK’s market power. The close connections between immigrants and their families in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia make possible a range of daily flights to these regions that surpasses in frequency all but a few other airports in the United States.

The growing density of New York’s metropolitan population surrounding the airport has also affected airport operations. JFK, located in a corner of the city with limited transit connections, has contributed to overloaded highways such as the Van Wyck Expressway. Master builder Robert Moses envisioned that expressway as a double-duty road that would speed both airport traffic (including trucks) and suburban commuters to midtown; at the same time, he made the congestion that much worse by banning truck and bus traffic from his landscaped parkways. As a result of these early decisions, sustained by later politicians, the Van Wyck has never been large enough to handle airport traffic effectively and has a deserved reputation for near-permanent congestion. Above all, the growing density of population surrounding the airport placed limits on the ability of the Port Authority and airlines to operate as they saw fit. Neighborhoods bothered by aircraft operations produced both unlikely metropolitan alliances and unusually affluent activists.

In addition to demographics, neighborhood activism is a key theme influencing JFK’s development. The widespread notion that airports are disconnected from neighborhoods is the result of the lack of historical perspective on community activism related to noise and the environment. That airplanes zoom over houses at hundreds of miles an hour does not mean that aviation does not profoundly affect neighborhood life. Aircraft noise became one of many new sources of pollution in the postwar era—and its impact was not restricted to one side of a city line.

The growing density of housing surrounding JFK in both Queens and Nassau County, and the affluence of many of these residents, had a major impact on the airport’s operations. By failing to limit growth around the airport, as some experts at the time suggested, political leaders created an inevitable conflict between the airport and surrounding neighbors that began in the 1950s and continues today. Center-city neighborhood activists of the 1960s successfully pushed back on the bulldozer technique of urban renewal, and suburban activists discovered their own local environmental causes related to water quality and habitat loss. Airport activists, for their part, found common cause across city-suburban boundaries in opposing a bigger and noisier airport and in preserving Jamaica Bay. The activist spirit of the 1960s dramatically affected airport operations and expansion programs for decades to come.¹³

If Austin Tobin had gotten his way in the 1960s, JFK International today would have doubled in size, filling up much of Jamaica Bay in order to meet the demands of growing traffic and sending many more planes over the surrounding neighborhoods. During the 1940s, for instance, the site that became JFK was expanded to include almost 5,000 acres, which was considered large at the time of the airport’s founding. But other cities have subsequently found even more land for their airports. Chicago’s O’Hare International, for instance, was expanded in the 1950s to include 7,200 acres, allowing for additional facilities, taxiways, and runways. Port Authority leaders failed to expand much at all in New York, however, because an aggrieved citizenry rose up in protest in the 1960s.

Metropolitan activists, on the basis of limiting noise and environmental damage, restricted the growth of runways and additional hours of operation in the 1960s and 1970s that would have allowed for even more planes. Other activists stopped the expansion of the rail and road network at critical moments in the history of the airport. These restrictions improved the quality of life for those living adjacent to roads or rail lines but also damaged the efficiency of travel to and from the airport both in the air and on the ground. Preservationists and leading architects even forced the Port Authority and JetBlue to preserve the largest and most impressive nonfunctional historical building within an airport in the country, the former Trans World Airlines (TWA) terminal, which occupies valuable acres of Terminal City land. That this gorgeous terminal is still standing in 2014, preserved if unused, is a result of metropolitan preservationist sentiment mindful of the heedless destruction of the original Penn Station.

Citizen impact on aviation is also visible by looking at New York’s powerful legislative team, which, spurred on by activists in the region, pressured the Port Authority and worked tirelessly with other legislators from similarly unhappy communities in other states to get national noise-control standards in place. That continuous pressure, in turn, has ushered in an era of quieter, and in some cases larger, aircraft such as 747s and 757s as well as changes in operations to reduce noise during landing and takeoff. Conflict and context have ultimately been limiting factors in New York’s aviation business, making the notion of restoring JFK as the world’s leading global airport no more than a pipe dream. At the same time, activists’ concerns have generated some creative fixes for the airport and airlines, such as quieter aircraft and carefully selected flight paths over parks and highways.

The history of crime at JFK speaks as well to the metropolitan context. The guardians of JFK International have been unable to isolate the airport from the region’s criminal masterminds and desperate underclass. Criminals from surrounding neighborhoods, in fact, quickly found their way to the airport in the 1950s on the convenient and speedy highways. JFK has thus been subject to various forms of criminal behavior, including opportunistic cabbies, aggressive panhandling, theft, and extensive mob hijacking. Isolating the airport has proven to be a difficult task for the Port Authority; only the security crackdown after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States (known as 9/11), and the closing of terminals to all but ticketed passengers have finally cut back on much of this irregularity. Yet JFK may still have the worst reputation in the country for passenger safety on the ground.

JFK International has taken its knocks as a result of its context, but it has also benefited from the shifting but comparatively resilient commercial fortunes of the New York metropolitan area. The willingness of business travelers to risk personal safety for speed made LaGuardia Airport and JFK successful in the 1940s and 1950s when air travel was far more dangerous. The airport received another boost in the postwar era from the New York region’s high-value manufacturing sector that used air cargo to send goods to Europe for postwar reconstruction. JFK also profited from the early, tightly regulated government control of aviation. Rules governing routes and prices, promoted by traditional port cities like New York, limited airport and airline competition until the 1970s. These restrictions, on international routes, for instance, also gave global corporations such as Pan Am and their unionized workers enormous advantages at the expense, from our contemporary perspective in a deregulated system, of consumer value and choice. Airline corporations paid their workers well and established major maintenance and executive functions in the New York region because they were reliably profitable.

Federal deregulation of airline routes and prices, decentralization (both to suburbs and the Sunbelt), and deindustrialization appeared set to destroy JFK’s commercial importance. Indeed, after 1978 these factors initially undercut JFK’s national leadership as so-called legacy lines such as Pan Am either collapsed or restructured to limit their exposure to New York’s high labor costs. Many workers lost their well-paid positions to lower-cost contract, nonunionized workers; many executive and maintenance functions simply disappeared or shifted to lower-cost areas of the country.¹⁴

The resilience of New York as a global financial and tourist center, however, has proven to be a key aspect of JFK’s continuing health. While many predicted that business would abandon older cities like New York—and many corporations did seek greener suburban pastures—the confluence of capital, luxury neighborhoods, social connections, and specific skills made New York City’s business districts, and its regional belt of edge cities and suburban office parks, key players in increasingly complex financial dealings of the finance, insurance, and real-estate sector. Rapid travel to any point on the globe, even with a delay getting to the airport, was still a great advantage for New York over cities such as Cleveland or Detroit that offered limited or no direct daily service to Shanghai or São Paulo. While the majority of travel at JFK shifted to nonbusiness travelers over the decades, a quarter of travelers (of a growing total number at JFK) are still in business sectors that pay a premium to be able to jump onto a plane going anywhere in the world.

The history of JFK International reveals that airports are more than just generic sets of buildings and runways cut off from their surrounding urban contexts. The choices Mayor La Guardia made about scale, Robert Moses about parkways, and Austin Tobin about terminal planning still influence the contemporary airport. The character of the metropolitan area has also defined key elements of the place that travelers still encountered in 2014. Some of the influences on an airport such as JFK are subtle, such as the metropolitan economy and noise regulation, while others are more obvious, such as crime and traffic. Knowledge of the actual history of JFK in its context—as opposed to one’s subjective airport experience or the Port Authority’s sanitized public relations—is more than just a matter of historical curiosity. The story of the real place and its context reveals many of the genuine limits and opportunities that must be taken into account when it comes to future planning for aviation in the New York metropolitan area. It was, in fact, a refusal to acknowledge the character of New York City and its environs, in areas such as mass transit, that led to many planning errors at JFK in the 1940s and 1950s—fateful decisions that New York still wrestles with today.