The Metropolitan Airport. Nicholas Dagen Bloom
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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