political and business leaders in Queens, still desperate to bring their borough into the mainstream of the city’s economic life, pivoted in the late 1920s to promoting a transatlantic air terminal in their seemingly forgotten marsh. The Jamaica Chamber of Commerce in 1928 recommended that Mayor Jimmy Walker and the Board of Estimate create an airport at Idlewild. Remoteness and vast open spaces had once been a disadvantage, but in the aviation era, isolation was a distinct advantage for aircraft operations that demanded open air and ground space otherwise in short supply. The new airport could be deliberately tucked away into a huge, still underutilized corner of New York City primarily inhabited by ducks, horseshoe crabs, clams, and “sagging sea-bleached homes.”22 This early airport plan, like the port plan before it, was shelved after Queens business leaders shifted alliances and focused on the more convenient North Beach site for the new airport (what became LaGuardia Airport).23
The Jamaica Bay site came back into focus as LaGuardia Airport’s physical limitations blurred its future as a massive global airport. Jamaica Bay offered comparatively endless space for growth because the shallow coastal plain could be filled and patched, and its many streams and inlets diverted into culverts, as the airport expanded. Few thought there would ever be much resistance to filling large sections of the bay; in fact, for decades there was not any organized opposition to reshaping the shoreline to suit urbanization of many types. The history of New York City, in fact, can be traced through the construction of artificial shorelines and docks in order to maximize economic returns.24
The regional network of highways and bridges Robert Moses had developed in the 1930s and 1940s also contributed to a reappraisal of the bay’s function. Moses’s Southern State and Belt Parkways eventually intersected near Idlewild and provided high-speed links to Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Long Island. The addition of a highway linking Idlewild Airport to Queens Boulevard (and later Grand Central Parkway) would theoretically whisk air passengers even faster from airport to Midtown Manhattan (twenty-six minutes) by linking the Southern State and Belt Parkways to the Grand Central Parkway that cut in a relatively straight line to Manhattan. The new Triborough and Whitestone Bridges also provided fast links from the Grand Central or Whitestone Parkways to the Bronx and Westchester.25 The New York State Department of Public Works, helped by federal highway funds, created a connector to the Grand Central, what became the Van Wyck Expressway. Moses in 1945 took credit not only for conceiving such a practical link but also for arranging generous state and federal financing: “The City will have to contribute only 50% of the cost of land and nothing for construction.” Again, subsidies proved crucial to the airport. The 26-minute prediction alas proved optimistic for most hours of the day.26
FIGURE 3. JFK’s location astride Moses’s system of parkways. Moses, however, restricted his parkways, such as the Southern State, Shore Belt, and Grand Central Parkways, to passenger vehicles, and these limitations have been preserved today (2015). There remains only one high-speed bus and truck route to JFK (Interstate 678/Van Wyck Expressway). Courtesy of the Regional Plan Association.
FIGURE 4. This aerial view of the Van Wyck Expressway under construction in 1950 illustrates not only the density of residential neighborhoods near JFK but also the short distance between the airport and express subway and Long Island Rail Road routes (shown at the base of the image). The Port Authority did not establish a rail connection to mass transit from the airport until 2003 for a variety of reasons. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, New York Herald-Tribune Photograph Morgue Collection.
Robert Moses, despite his work to open the marsh to development, maintained a broader ecological vision for Jamaica Bay. Moses began the long and steady process of converting the marsh into a desirable park and wildlife space. During the 1930s, he and the city administration began the hard and thankless task of cleaning up the bay. The city added chlorinating plants for sewage in 1937 to protect swimmers frequently sickened by the polluted waters. Moses also prevented the Department of Sanitation from siting an incinerator and associated ash dump in Jamaica Bay.27 Moses blocked the dump by reminding Mayor La Guardia what Flushing Meadow Park had been before the ash dumps there had been shuttered and the space redesigned as a grand urban park and exposition grounds. Moses’s interventions ringing Jamaica Bay included Jacob Riis Park’s lovely beach, the new Marine Parkway Bridge, Rockaway Beach rehabilitation, and the Shore Parkway (now known as the Belt Parkway). He had big dreams for the combined effect of his action. His ultimate dream was to turn Jamaica Bay into an urban version of the beautiful Great South Bay that he had preserved as a result of the creation of Jones Beach in suburban Nassau County.28
Yet the war deferred and nearly wiped out Moses’s vision of Jamaica Bay as a great urban wetland. Navy bombers, for instance, turned the bay’s marshes into practice bombing fields in 1942. Construction of Idlewild Airport also led to the loss of thousands of acres of productive marshland and a massive trough in the bay where engineers pumped sand to raise the airport site above sea level.29
When Moses surveyed Jamaica Bay after the war, he still, however, saw something quite valuable for the city’s urban masses. Moses affirmed his faith: “There is no other city in the country with an opportunity such as that presently available to the City of New York, to set aside within its corporate limits a large area in its native state as a natural preserve for wild life and for informal recreation, fishing, boating and the like.” He believed that a park adjacent to the airport would aid operation of the airport rather than hinder it because there would be no tall industrial buildings in the way of the flight paths. Moses, an avid and strong swimmer, envisioned fellow city residents swimming and frolicking safely in the waters. He also envisioned birds reestablishing themselves as the dominant residents of the bay. On this prediction he proved entirely correct, much to the chagrin of pilots today.30
FIGURE 5. The transformation of Jamaica Bay through development, including residential expansion, landfills, commercial expansion, and the creation of JFK International. Minna Ninova.
Paying for the Treasure
Mayor La Guardia and other city officials in the 1940s fully realized the significance of a world-class airport to New York City’s economic supremacy in the future. “We are building a great airport at Idlewild in New York City—the finest airport in the world, at a cost of $71 million—not in the hope that someday there will be need for it but because commercial aviation will need it as soon as it is completed.”31 Like much of the La Guardia legacy, it is all too easy to dismiss the degree to which his vision cleanly broke with everything that came before.
A sharp-eyed journalist directly linked the projected Idlewild Airport with Moses and La Guardia’s spectacularly successful 1939–40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park. At the fair, the public was captivated by General Motors’ Futurama exhibition that included gleaming cities of the future tied together by high-speed expressways and vast air terminals: “The scene at Idlewild will resemble the famous Futurama come to life. Big land and sea planes will come and go” while visitors would marvel at helicopters that would “jump from one to another of New York’s circling ring of airports.” Air travel would become just another daily luxury for the affluent across the region, who would use “small private landing fields on their home estates” to fly their helicopters to Idlewild’s projected helicopter parking lots.32
New Yorkers dreamed in aviation Technicolor, but the preeminence of New York in aviation remained less certain. The initial era of flight, when planes made frequent stops for refueling, offered New York advantages in transatlantic air commerce (the city was closer than all but a few American cities to Europe), but it was conceivable that as a result of wartime
