By failing to limit growth around the airport, as some experts at the time suggested, political leaders created an inevitable conflict between the airport and surrounding neighbors that began in the 1950s and continues today. Center-city neighborhood activists of the 1960s successfully pushed back on the bulldozer technique of urban renewal, and suburban activists discovered their own local environmental causes related to water quality and habitat loss. Airport activists, for their part, found common cause across city-suburban boundaries in opposing a bigger and noisier airport and in preserving Jamaica Bay. The activist spirit of the 1960s dramatically affected airport operations and expansion programs for decades to come.13
If Austin Tobin had gotten his way in the 1960s, JFK International today would have doubled in size, filling up much of Jamaica Bay in order to meet the demands of growing traffic and sending many more planes over the surrounding neighborhoods. During the 1940s, for instance, the site that became JFK was expanded to include almost 5,000 acres, which was considered large at the time of the airport’s founding. But other cities have subsequently found even more land for their airports. Chicago’s O’Hare International, for instance, was expanded in the 1950s to include 7,200 acres, allowing for additional facilities, taxiways, and runways. Port Authority leaders failed to expand much at all in New York, however, because an aggrieved citizenry rose up in protest in the 1960s.
Metropolitan activists, on the basis of limiting noise and environmental damage, restricted the growth of runways and additional hours of operation in the 1960s and 1970s that would have allowed for even more planes. Other activists stopped the expansion of the rail and road network at critical moments in the history of the airport. These restrictions improved the quality of life for those living adjacent to roads or rail lines but also damaged the efficiency of travel to and from the airport both in the air and on the ground. Preservationists and leading architects even forced the Port Authority and JetBlue to preserve the largest and most impressive nonfunctional historical building within an airport in the country, the former Trans World Airlines (TWA) terminal, which occupies valuable acres of Terminal City land. That this gorgeous terminal is still standing in 2014, preserved if unused, is a result of metropolitan preservationist sentiment mindful of the heedless destruction of the original Penn Station.
Citizen impact on aviation is also visible by looking at New York’s powerful legislative team, which, spurred on by activists in the region, pressured the Port Authority and worked tirelessly with other legislators from similarly unhappy communities in other states to get national noise-control standards in place. That continuous pressure, in turn, has ushered in an era of quieter, and in some cases larger, aircraft such as 747s and 757s as well as changes in operations to reduce noise during landing and takeoff. Conflict and context have ultimately been limiting factors in New York’s aviation business, making the notion of restoring JFK as the world’s leading global airport no more than a pipe dream. At the same time, activists’ concerns have generated some creative fixes for the airport and airlines, such as quieter aircraft and carefully selected flight paths over parks and highways.
The history of crime at JFK speaks as well to the metropolitan context. The guardians of JFK International have been unable to isolate the airport from the region’s criminal masterminds and desperate underclass. Criminals from surrounding neighborhoods, in fact, quickly found their way to the airport in the 1950s on the convenient and speedy highways. JFK has thus been subject to various forms of criminal behavior, including opportunistic cabbies, aggressive panhandling, theft, and extensive mob hijacking. Isolating the airport has proven to be a difficult task for the Port Authority; only the security crackdown after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States (known as 9/11), and the closing of terminals to all but ticketed passengers have finally cut back on much of this irregularity. Yet JFK may still have the worst reputation in the country for passenger safety on the ground.
JFK International has taken its knocks as a result of its context, but it has also benefited from the shifting but comparatively resilient commercial fortunes of the New York metropolitan area. The willingness of business travelers to risk personal safety for speed made LaGuardia Airport and JFK successful in the 1940s and 1950s when air travel was far more dangerous. The airport received another boost in the postwar era from the New York region’s high-value manufacturing sector that used air cargo to send goods to Europe for postwar reconstruction. JFK also profited from the early, tightly regulated government control of aviation. Rules governing routes and prices, promoted by traditional port cities like New York, limited airport and airline competition until the 1970s. These restrictions, on international routes, for instance, also gave global corporations such as Pan Am and their unionized workers enormous advantages at the expense, from our contemporary perspective in a deregulated system, of consumer value and choice. Airline corporations paid their workers well and established major maintenance and executive functions in the New York region because they were reliably profitable.
Federal deregulation of airline routes and prices, decentralization (both to suburbs and the Sunbelt), and deindustrialization appeared set to destroy JFK’s commercial importance. Indeed, after 1978 these factors initially undercut JFK’s national leadership as so-called legacy lines such as Pan Am either collapsed or restructured to limit their exposure to New York’s high labor costs. Many workers lost their well-paid positions to lower-cost contract, nonunionized workers; many executive and maintenance functions simply disappeared or shifted to lower-cost areas of the country.14
The resilience of New York as a global financial and tourist center, however, has proven to be a key aspect of JFK’s continuing health. While many predicted that business would abandon older cities like New York—and many corporations did seek greener suburban pastures—the confluence of capital, luxury neighborhoods, social connections, and specific skills made New York City’s business districts, and its regional belt of edge cities and suburban office parks, key players in increasingly complex financial dealings of the finance, insurance, and real-estate sector. Rapid travel to any point on the globe, even with a delay getting to the airport, was still a great advantage for New York over cities such as Cleveland or Detroit that offered limited or no direct daily service to Shanghai or São Paulo. While the majority of travel at JFK shifted to nonbusiness travelers over the decades, a quarter of travelers (of a growing total number at JFK) are still in business sectors that pay a premium to be able to jump onto a plane going anywhere in the world.
The history of JFK International reveals that airports are more than just generic sets of buildings and runways cut off from their surrounding urban contexts. The choices Mayor La Guardia made about scale, Robert Moses about parkways, and Austin Tobin about terminal planning still influence the contemporary airport. The character of the metropolitan area has also defined key elements of the place that travelers still encountered in 2014. Some of the influences on an airport such as JFK are subtle, such as the metropolitan economy and noise regulation, while others are more obvious, such as crime and traffic. Knowledge of the actual history of JFK in its context—as opposed to one’s subjective airport experience or the Port Authority’s sanitized public relations—is more than just a matter of historical curiosity. The story of the real place and its context reveals many of the genuine limits and opportunities that must be taken into account when it comes to future planning for aviation in the New York metropolitan area. It was, in fact, a refusal to acknowledge the character of New York City and its environs, in areas such as mass transit, that led to many planning errors at JFK in the 1940s and 1950s—fateful decisions that New York still wrestles with today.
CHAPTER 1
From Idlewild to New York International
Our commercial position has been the foundation of New York’s leadership in many fields…. There have been those elsewhere in the land, and a few here at home, who have been all too ready to believe that New York City had no future. This is a part—only a part—of the answer to the timid, the unimaginative and the doubting Thomases…. We are determined that in the field of aviation, as in other fields of commerce, New York City shall lead the way.
—Joseph
