new plan, which debuted in late 1946. Clarke was a favorite of Robert Moses and had been responsible for, among other projects, parkway design in the New York region. Harrison was the force behind the iconic Perisphere and Trylon at the 1939 World’s Fair, Rockefeller Center, and would eventually coordinate the design of two of New York’s iconic modernist ensembles: the United Nations and Lincoln Center. The revised airport plan included a streamlined administration (main terminal) building running north to south that connected to the Van Wyck Boulevard access road with escalators to the roadway. The architect’s generous provisions for restaurants, which would benefit from panoramic views of the airport and make money, reflected harder financial realities: concessions were serious business.47
The revised plan as a whole for the airport (including terminal, hangars, runways, and so forth), when revealed in late 1946, still failed to reflect the economies necessary to bring the airport in line with the limited borrowing capacity of the City Airport Authority. Not only was the plan still expensive, but now the more modest plans for the airport (and plans for later expansion as revenues improved) as a whole failed to inspire additional support from those, such as airline executives, who still demanded that New York immediately build the best airport in the nation, even though they did not want to pay full freight for those costs.48
Moses’s other strategy for funding the airport—raising the landing and other fees to the airlines and making them build their own hangars—also backfired. The airlines, and the oil companies who would fuel planes at the airport, resisted renegotiating their leases even if it was clear to them and everyone else that the revenues under those arrangements were insufficient to support the scale of airport they needed. They threatened to move their operations to Newark and to sue the city, but what they actually did was throw their support behind the Port Authority, which promised to honor their leases by generating the most revenue from other activities on site (for example, a hotel and concessions).
Moses, in the meantime, made trouble by exerting his outsized influence in the internal affairs of the airport authority. The famous aviator, Lieutenant General James Doolittle, had already resigned from the City Airport Authority board as a result of his connection to the fuel companies now up in arms over higher fees. When Harry F. Guggenheim, a prominent member of the airport authority, also resigned out of frustration, Mayor O’Dwyer in 1946 asked the Port Authority to consider taking over the city’s airports.49 O’Dwyer still worried about the loss of the city’s investment and “an abject surrender of the city’s planning powers” to an agency whose important actions were subject to the vetoes of the governors of New York and New Jersey, but the scale, 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
