The Metropolitan Airport. Nicholas Dagen Bloom
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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,