a global center of commerce gave it a significant advantage and helped secure the city as an early leader in air cargo.
The defense industry also played a role in inspiring and subsidizing this service. The Berlin airlift is frequently cited as a key demonstration of the potential for airfreight in the postwar period because a city’s basic needs were sustained by air cargo alone for months. Just as important were the surplus aircraft sold off at war’s end. New Yorkers quickly jumped into this profitable game. New York was, after all, in its last years as the nation’s leading industrial region and still produced many high-value industrial products, such as machine parts and business machines. Sperry’s vast electronics plant in Lake Success on Long Island was just one of many Long Island enterprises that benefited from the transition of wartime contracts to both Cold War defense spending and the rise in commercial aviation.
Seaboard and Western Airlines, for instance, started with one air freighter in May 1947 and operated solely in the freight business between New York and European points. The founders of the company had been part of the Air Transport Command during the war, which distinguished itself by flying almost anything anywhere under almost any conditions, and they also had experience in aviation insurance before the war. About 40 percent of the company’s tonnage was in wearing apparel, accessories, and textiles, not just high-value industrial items like machine parts. By 1948, the company had five planes in constant rotation and, in fact, got a profitable bump from the contract it secured during the Berlin airlift.92
It did not hurt the development of aviation in the region that Long Island was, by the end of World War II and during the height of the Cold War, one of the nation’s aviation hubs, with massive plants and operations of Grumman, Republic, Fairchild, and Sperry driving industrial growth. So important was aviation on Long Island that in 1954, for instance, the industry accounted for 45.4 percent of Nassau-Suffolk’s total manufacturing employment. The contracts generated by the Korean War mainlined federal cash to these booming suburbs. Even though this high level of aircraft employment was not maintained in the long term, the importing and exporting of advanced electronics, machine tools, and other materials needed for the aviation business boosted Idlewild’s air-cargo industry for decades.93
The postwar defense industrial complex provided key subsidies for the emerging air-cargo business. Not only was the technology for air-cargo planes pioneered during the war and after (Hercules turboprop C-130s easily became cargo carriers), but also “propping up the airfreight business were fat contracts channeled to the carriers by the government and the Defense Department. In fiscal 1956, the Pentagon spent a whopping $67.5 million to ship goods and personnel by commercial carriers.” The Flying Tiger line alone received almost $3 million in contracts from the military air transportation service.94 The Eisenhower administration also promoted air cargo by encouraging federal agencies to use civil cargo airlift. Volume reduced costs and improved systems for everyone, not just the military.95
The air-cargo center at Idlewild, dedicated in 1956, was its own Terminal City for cargo. The four warehouses and five buildings provided space where the freight forwarders, customs inspection, and quarantine could all be conducted. Separate hangars of ever-increasing size and complexity sheltered planes that carried this complex and popular trade. New York’s cargo companies were also able to leverage the growing number of passenger routes by including cargos in the holds of these frequently scheduled flights. By 1960, the Port Authority realized that even though the cargo facility was by their account the largest air-cargo center in the world, it was already far too small to preserve its leadership; administrators initiated an expansion that doubled its size in the early 1960s.
The air-cargo center on its own stood little chance of replacing New York City’s once crowded docks as a source of employment or commerce. The labor-saving system of containerized shipping at the Port Authority’s new Newark-Elizabeth waterfront doomed New York’s waterfront culture and economy. At the same time, the air-cargo center, for certain types of high-value items, proved to be an important element in the maintenance of the New York metropolitan area as a central point in global trade routes as it had been for centuries. Until the 1970s, in fact, Idlewild’s air-cargo operations surpassed in scale any other airport in the United States.
New York Congestion
By the 1940s, the New York metropolitan area had the most advanced and integrated system of high-speed parkways and bridges in the nation. This system was the result of decades of steady road building under the leadership of Robert Moses, the Regional Plan Association, and political leaders in both the city and surrounding counties. The growth of the parkway network, beginning in the 1920s, had set in motion an era of decentralization of population with long-term grave consequences for New York City—not to mention gridlock. In the 1940s, however, New York’s leaders viewed the connection to these road networks as a positive element of modernization. While Mayor La Guardia saved the subways in 1940, mass transit was a notorious financial drain and, in many respects, a legacy of an earlier age. It should come as little surprise then that city leaders across the board placed a premium on automobile connections to the new airport. This singular dependence on automobile, truck, and bus travel to and from the airport, however, meant that all increases in number of passengers would lead to a greater flood of vehicles.96 Foreshadowing decades of delays, the first scheduled outbound flight from Idlewild in 1948, bound for Chile, “took off 31 min. late yesterday because of the delay in the arrival of the coach carrying passengers from Manhattan.”97
As a rule, airports across the nation lacked mass-transit connections to their new airports until the 1980s and 1990s. Most large postwar airports (Dulles, O’Hare, LAX) rose on vast parcels of distant land, far away from established urban neighborhoods: older mass-transit lines were in short supply or absent in these open spaces and new systems probably uneconomical in light of the suburban boom and the American preference for private cars. The United States heavily subsidized new highways, as opposed to mass transit; so highways, paid for by federal dollars, usually become modern airport connectors.
But New York faced a different situation from other cities in the 1940s. While motorcars had become very popular as a result of Moses’s highway systems, the congestion on these roads was growing in tandem with their popularity. Depending on packed roads for shuttling passengers to timed departures was rolling the dice. The city itself, despite suburbanization, was also still the most densely populated in the nation, with the nation’s most comprehensive mass-transit service including buses and streetcars. La Guardia’s plan for public ownership saved the subway system in 1940 from the bankruptcy and dissolution that ruined so many other transit systems. Idlewild was located close enough to existing mass transit (both subways and commuter rail) to make transit a legitimate option.
The original site committee of city councilmen, in fact, found in 1941 that the only deficiency of the site was the lack of transit and rail connections.98 Some early observers saw, however, that a connection to the Rockaway Branch line could potentially get passengers to Penn Station in as little as twenty minutes. An extension of the subway (the new IND line in Queens) to the airport was also discussed at the time.99 A reporter from Colliers predicted that in the future airport “newly built railroads, subways and highways will converge on this former wilderness,” but someone would have had to show some leadership for this to happen.100 In spite of serious discussion of an extension of the Rockaway Beach line of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) for passenger and freight travel to Idlewild in the 1940s, political leaders failed to create an efficient mass-transit system between city and airport.101
Mayor La Guardia was a great advocate for aviation and highways, but new mass transit to the airport was not his priority. On a tour of the airport site in 1945, the mayor made excuses by pointing out the difficulties of linking the LIRR to the airport: “We’ve been negotiating for 2 and half years to build a spur right into the airport. Life is short and so are the terms of a Mayor, so we’re going to build the airport up to the end of the railroad.” The man who rebuilt a city couldn’t get this done?
