The Metropolitan Airport. Nicholas Dagen Bloom
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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