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Major Airports Take Off

Mayor LaGuardia's complaint leads to an airport; but soon, another was needed

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

Less than 40 years after the Wright brothers got an apparatus that looked like a box kite off the ground at a North Carolina site called Kitty Hawk, New York City opened what was then the world's greatest commercial airport on the marshlands of North Beach in Queens.

LaGuardia Field was dedicated Oct. 15, 1939, by a jubilant Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, whose determination built it. Once occupied by the Gala Amusement Park, the site was transformed in 1929 into a 105-acre private flying field. The field was named Glenn H. Curtiss Airport after the pioneer Long Island aviator and later called North Beach Airport. Until 1939, air travelers from the city or Long Island - like Jean Steward of Sea Cliff, who took her first flight to visit relatives in Louisville, Ky., in 1935 -- had to motor to and from an airfield in Newark, N.J. ``My father wanted me to have the experience of flying,'' Steward said recently.

But LaGuardia himself wanted to be able to land closer to home. The feisty mayor refused to leave a returning plane at Newark, claiming that his ticket read ``destination: New York.''

In 1937, after years of negotiations with the federal government, ground was broken for a new, enlarged airport to be built jointly by the city and the New Deal's Federal Works Progress Administration. The work went quickly, considering it involved filling in 357 acres of marshland and constructing six immense hangars. The field opened to commercial traffic in December, 1939.

Not everyone was as enthusiastic as LaGuardia about the project -- some regarded it as a $40-million boondoggle. But the public thrilled to the prospect of air travel. Families flocked to the airport on weekends just to watch the gleaming silver airliners take off and vanish into the blue or swoop majestically down onto the field. A dime got you through the turnstiles to a crowded observation deck. The turnstile dimes, plus parking fees, soon added up to $285,000, The New York Times reported two years later. With other yearly revenues of $650,000, the LaGuardia ``boondoggle,'' as its opponents dubbed it earlier, soon was operating in the black.

The field also added a new population estimated at more than 10,000 -- pilots, stewardesses, mechanics, other airline personnel -- to Long Island's North Shore. But the war raging in Europe put a damper on plans to make LaGuardia an international airport. The seaplane terminal opened in March, 1940, without its prospective tenants: British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa. Never mind, the four-engine Pan-American Clippers that first took off from a seaport at Port Washington in 1939 were dramatic enough to draw thousands of dimes into the turnstiles as the giant pontoons splashed down in Flushing Bay.

The great international airport was yet to come. With LaGuardia quickly reaching its capacity, construction began in 1942 at the site of the Idlewild Golf Course in southeast Queens. It involved filling in acres of marshy tidelands on Jamaica Bay. Planned at first for 1,000 acres, Idlewild Airport grew to five times that size. It was dedicated in July, 1948, as New York International Airport, rededicated in December, 1963, after the death of the president, as John F. Kennedy International Airport and henceforth known as JFK. But some neighborhood diehards still refer to it as Idlewild.

Though the two Queens airports have been operated since 1947 by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Mayor LaGuardia continued to be their most vociferous promoter.

But even a visionary like LaGuardia could not have foreseen the heights that air travel would reach. In 1945, while he was still mayor and with Idlewild Airport still uncompleted, LaGuardia predicted that someday more than 10 million passengers per year would pass through its gates. Today close to 30 million a year pass through JFK.

He was more on target in predicting that 40,000 men and women would be employed in operation, maintenance, traffic, transportation, sales, food and other airport activity.

LaGuardia died in 1947, a year before his dream of ``the world's finest airport'' was officially opened by President Harry Truman.

LaGuardia Airport also has continued to grow -- mostly as a domestic airport. The Central Terminal Building, opened in 1964 to serve most of the airport's scheduled domestic airlines, twice has been enlarged.

The original airport terminal building, once called the Overseas Terminal, was built close to the bay to accommodate the flying boats that dominated international air travel in the '30s and '40s.

Now called the Marine Air Terminal, it was designated a New York City historic landmark in 1995. Today the terminal is used by commuter airlines, air taxis, private aircraft and a private weather service. It boasts the largest mural created under the New Deal's Work Progress Administration's art program: ``Flight,'' by James Brooks, completed in 1942.

A shuttle service, begun by Pan Am Airways in 1986 and purchased by Delta Air Lines when Pan Am ceased operations in 1991, operates hourly to Boston and Washington.

And it is not unusual for corporate types to commute daily to American cities from LaGuardia Airport or to take weekly hops to foreign cities from JFK. That's a commute Mayor LaGuardia may not have foreseen.