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? Then again, the privately held and financially troubled LIRR had no incentive to work collaboratively on a transit link.102 In 1948, eight leading citywide civic organizations mourned the lack of connectivity between Idlewild and the subway. The express lines of the IND Queens Boulevard (now the E and F subway lines) could have been extended along the Van Wyck, thus “the opportunity of constructing an open cut subway as a part of this express highway at greatly reduced cost is now apparently lost because the highway project was blueprinted without consideration of the airport’s full requirements.”103
Without a fixed rail connection, every passenger who came to Idlewild would have to ride on rubber wheels or helicopters (see below). And those rubber wheels had to thread a crowded city only partly relieved by the parkways and highways Robert Moses had spread across the city. This was just the beginning of decades of bad connections. Robert Moses bragged in 1935 that “you can ride from 92nd Street and the East River all the way to Kew Gardens and east on a genuine parkway without crossings or lights,” but it was a different challenge entirely to link Kew Gardens in central Queens to Jamaica Bay.104
Moses extended what eventually became the Van Wyck Expressway, paid for by a combination of state and federal funds, from Queens Boulevard-Grand Central Parkway to the airport after the war. The new highway was designed both as a connector to the airport and “to serve Queens as a whole, with traffic separations planned to reduce congestion in the Jamaica area.” In retrospect, this dual use was a major error. In practice, the Van Wyck would never serve as a dependable, fast route to the airport.105 The Van Wyck Expressway when it first opened in 1950 had six lanes and two parallel service roads, which counted as a large highway for its day. Officials predicted a 20 percent reduction in city-to-airport trip time for both cars and buses … on a good day.106 Robert Caro colorfully describes how Moses ignored dire traffic predictions for the Van Wyck and refused to even carve out a future right of way for transit down the Van Wyck, despite the ease and comparative low cost for transit on such a route.107
Access to Idlewild also suffered from a local quirk in the regional road network. On paper, Robert Moses appeared to have created a fairly even distribution of highways linking Nassau County and Queens; Moses had essentially built out much of the system projected in the late 1920s by the Regional Plan Association. Yet Moses refused to abandon the parkway ideal, of leisure drives through green parks, when the parkways had by and large become commuter routes through emerging suburban areas. As a result, Moses made traffic worse on the Van Wyck and limited efficiency in bus and truck service to the airport by banning buses and commercial vehicles from most of his parkways, including the Southern State (which connects both to the Van Wyck and the Belt), Belt Parkway, and the Grand Central. The Van Wyck Expressway, as the only highway to the airport that accommodated trucks and buses, developed a reputation in the 1950s for gridlock. The Belt Parkway also connected to Idlewild, but the Belt was a long, twisting, and dangerous connector to Manhattan that Robert Moses stitched together along the edge of Brooklyn marshes, waterfronts, and neighborhoods; it proved to be poorly designed as a dependable high-speed expressway. Many Nassau County commuters also realized that the shortest way from the South Shore of Long Island to Manhattan and the Bronx was to head north on the Van Wyck to the Grand Central rather than fight their way west on the Belt Parkway. Truckers loading up cargo had to find their way to their destinations either by slow surface roads or, like everyone else, by crowding the Van Wyck Expressway.108
Port Authority leaders were not deaf to the criticism and requested that Moses alter his policies. Port Authority chairman Cullman in 1947 made clear that “an outstanding need of a smooth functioning airport system was permission from the city to