Airports have traditionally been treated in urban history as isolated institutions because it is difficult to account for and describe economic, social, or political influence flowing from airport to urban region, and vice versa, over such a large area. While some airports gather office and hotel infrastructure around them, becoming what some now call an aerotropolis, the fact that airplanes fly in and out at great heights from sprawling, seemingly self-contained airport complexes has made it difficult to document their relationship to traditional urban historical patterns, such as urban redevelopment, deindustrialization, suburbanization, neighborhood change, immigration, citizen activism, globalization, and even the most obvious connection, the rise of the tourist city.5 That it is difficult to make airport-metropolitan connections, however, does not mean that they do not exist. Airports are in every respect as influential in shaping modern cities as freeways, public housing, redlining, urban renewal, suburban development, and any other of the more familiar and much more studied topics in urban history.6
The Master Builders
Airports are often viewed as isolated dimensions of urban life, part of a standardized global system, but just below the surface are distinct characteristics that result from choices made by local leaders. The influence of New York’s outsized urban personalities and the competing institutions they guided have left enduring marks on JFK International that are explored in detail throughout Metropolitan Airport. Three key figures in particular—Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, and Austin Tobin—have helped define the airport that is so famous today.
Mayor La Guardia set the initial scale and ambition for what is today’s JFK. La Guardia’s interest in aviation is permanently linked to the comparatively small and particularly unpleasant airport that bears his name, but JFK International better reflects the global ambition he had for New York City in the coming aviation era. Decades later, Robert Moses, the powerful city administrator who aggressively rebuilt much of New York’s infrastructure from the 1920s to the 1960s, praised the mayor for understanding the future importance of aviation when few others did: “Mayor La Guardia was way ahead of his time and so were his aides. The future of air travel was not dimly apprehended at this time and we were ridiculed for the size of this airport.”7 The mayor’s determination that New York lead the region and nation in air travel made it possible to grab such an enormous parcel of land for the airport before an era of environmental regulation. It was well known at the time that JFK was his “pet project” to which he committed substantial city resources, including the talents of Robert Moses, to bring to fruition.
La Guardia’s attempts to reform and rebuild so many areas of urban life (housing, schools, hospitals, parks, and so on), and his aim of creating two major airports within just a few miles of each other, made it unlikely that the city he loved would end up managing both airports in the long term. The state-imposed limits on New York City’s debt meant there was not enough capital for the investments needed for vast airfields and terminals. To build a second airport on over four thousand acres at the cost of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars (many billions of dollars in today’s money) led to a crisis of confidence on the part of city officials in the mid-1940s. La Guardia’s successor, Mayor William O’Dwyer (in office from 1946 to 1950), transferred governance of both city airports to the Port Authority of New York in 1947.8
Robert Moses is still infamous for his controversial slum clearance program that made space for modern housing projects, cultural centers, parkways and highways, bridges, and new parks. His name is not, however, often associated with aviation as he failed to keep the airports out of the hands of the Port Authority. It could have turned out differently. In 1946, he convinced the newly elected mayor to spin off the airport into a City Airport Authority so that its development costs could be privately financed and thus left off the books of the city government. The authority would also, not coincidentally, give Moses another source of funds and power. In this instance, however, the notion of Robert Moses as an unstoppable power broker fails to explain his loss of airport control. Moses made a number of strategic errors in the 1940s that allowed the City Airport Authority to slip from his grasp. First, he was far too publicly honest about the enormous costs the airport would entail. Second, he demanded that the airlines renegotiate leases they had signed earlier, thus turning powerful executives against him. Moses’s biggest error, it turned out, was in underestimating the Port Authority. Moses viewed the organization as a barely functional regional entity. In truth, however, executive director Austin Tobin and his staff outfoxed Moses by shaping the opinion of newspaper editors, the mayor, financiers, and the airlines.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Moses’s lack of direct control of the airport equates with lack of influence. Moses was pushed aside at the airport, but he still played a critical role in the creation of the metropolitan infrastructure that made possible the use of Jamaica Bay as an airport site. His determination to build out the regional road system, for instance, brought Jamaica Bay and the Idlewild site into the orbit of Manhattan and the region’s growing suburbs. His decision to build and maintain so many of the metropolitan highways as landscaped parkways for cars, however, in the long term limited the efficiency of the region’s road network in relationship to the airport.
Moses’s vision of Jamaica Bay as a metropolitan-scale park also had significant effects on the shape of the airport we know today. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Moses and park officials proved successful in restoring the natural beauty and even some of the ecological integrity of Jamaica Bay. On the basis of the conservation achievement, activists successfully resisted the Port Authority’s plans for expansion into Jamaica Bay. Moses’s postwar promotion of high-density housing around the bay and in the Rockaways also put tens of thousands of additional people near the airport’s noisy flight paths. Protection of these residents from noise pollution would become a major factor in the creation of limits for JFK operations. Moses, in sum, may not have run the airport, but he powerfully influenced its operations.
The most important figure to shape the airport is also the one least familiar to New Yorkers and scholars. Austin Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority for thirty years (from 1942 to 1972), is New York’s forgotten power broker.9 Moses is usually given most of the credit and blame for the shape of modern New York, as his flamboyant personality, nasty sense of humor, and high-profile projects make for dramatic storytelling. Tobin, however, the low-key grandson of an Irish immigrant, was an equally aggressive empire builder who rivaled Moses in his talent for using a public authority as a tool for radical urban reconstruction. Tobin, as executive director, was given a relatively free hand by Port Authority chairmen, such as Howard Cullman and Donald Love, wealthy civic leaders who were too busy with many other business and charitable activities to meddle deeply in everyday operations run by an obviously competent executive director. Tobin diligently expanded the Port Authority from just three hundred to over eight thousand employees during his long tenure and ended up controlling billions of dollars in assets, including the World Trade Center, tunnels, container ports, bridges, heliports, and the very profitable metropolitan airport system (including JFK International, LaGuardia, and Newark International).
Tobin showed a particular talent for choosing infrastructure projects, including airports, that had the potential to turn a profit. That profitability, in turn, attracted billions in private funding for the Port Authority’s bonds. As with Moses, this business orientation gave the Port Authority a great deal of independence. The Port Authority’s takeover of the region’s airports in the 1940s, including JFK International in 1947, shaped the airport in profound ways. The Port Authority’s ability to negotiate hard with the airlines to secure better rates (even though the authority had initially promised it would honor the original leases), and its ability to borrow vast sums through bond sales, enabled the rapid completion of airports on a grand scale in the New York region. The rapid opening of JFK in 1948 helped secure the city’s early aviation leadership in the United States for global travel.
Tobin’s sponsorship of the Terminal City design for JFK in the 1950s and 1960s, with operations distilled into enormous freestanding unit terminals frequently
