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 discussions are no longer available, but one imagines that 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
