New Yorkers bound for adventure and business have enjoyed the privilege and advantage of boarding planes headed to the distant corners of the globe. Billions of tourists have flowed back into the city and region through the airport’s enormous, if imperfect, terminals. The air-cargo facilities have enlarged the market and options for the region’s industries, consumers, and service sector. At the same time, the New York metropolitan area—crowded, competitive, wealthy, and outspoken—has influenced distinctive aspects of JFK for both better and worse, defining the airport’s scale, market, and ambience. Postwar New York, both the city and surrounding suburbs, makes little sense without JFK in the frame.1
JFK opened in 1948 in a city and nation still shaped by railroads, trucks, automobiles, ports, and steamships. Beginning in the 1950s, affluent passengers and high-value cargo shifted from boats to planes for transatlantic travel, lured by the swiftness, comfort, and prestige of air travel. For most of the 1960s, JFK handled approximately 80 percent of all American-bound traffic for Europe, a significant share of national domestic travelers, and a majority of the nation’s air cargo. By the 1960s, and as a result of its importance to so many companies, the airport also served as the hub of globalized airline companies such as Pan Am Airlines.2 The airport had achieved the goal of city leaders who, in the 1940s, viewed it as a key to preserving the city’s preeminence in the nation’s trade and travel patterns.
The hectic air and ground activity at JFK dramatically affected the surrounding skies, waters, and neighborhoods on both sides of the citysuburban divide. By the 1960s, JFK International (along with the Port Authority’s other two airports, LaGuardia and Newark International, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal) had helped divert long-distance transportation in New York away from train tracks and waterfronts. Magnificent rail hubs, such as Pennsylvania Station (built in 1910), and the companies behind them lost their central functions in urban life and vanished from the landscape. So too did the steamship docks, thousands of dockworkers, and small manufacturing plants that once filled New York’s industrial districts.
By the 1950s and 1960s, millions of cars, taxis, and heavily loaded trucks every year poured out of the airport into surrounding highways and parkways. Immigrants and tourists from distant lands made their way from the airport to the region’s neighborhoods and attractions. JFK International was a massive construction project that generated billions of dollars in investments. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers found work there and in its related industries, making the airport (with LaGuardia Airport) a leading source of employment in Queens and suburban Nassau County. By dint of its dominant role in international routes at the time, the airport created a competitive advantage for managerial services and air cargo in a deindustrializing city. Today, JFK still generates billions of dollars in regional trade, supports hundreds of thousands of jobs (thirty-six thousand jobs on site), and is a key element in New York’s modern economic and touristic success.
The growing scale of JFK in the 1950s and 1960s helped redefine metropolitan patterns of labor, transportation, and residence, encouraging dispersion of the population to the outer boroughs and suburbs. Living and working miles from railroad stations and ports was no disadvantage for businessmen in the new office parks of Nassau or Westchester County, who could easily drive or take cabs directly to the airport for business trips. Prosperous suburban families, bound for exotic lands, did not have to travel to aging rail or port terminals in a crowded, increasingly minority-dominated city center. High-value freight, such as electronic equipment and pharmaceuticals, did not have to journey to and from the center of the city either, enabling suburban warehouses and factories to send their goods through the airport cargo terminal to the most distant lands overnight. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (in office from 1933 to 1945) may have conceived the airport in 1941 as a guarantor of the city’s leading role in transportation—and as a vast renewal project—but it also encouraged suburbanization by equalizing transportation benefits across the metropolitan area.
FIGURE 1. Passenger numbers sharply increased from 1948 until the late 1960s as the American public discovered air travel. The city’s financial problems, combined with the fuel crisis and recessions, led to a stagnant era at JFK in the 1970s. Deregulation (post-1978) and the expansion of domestic and international service at Newark (including People’s Express) cut into JFK’s regional dominance but did not prevent higher passenger levels at JFK in the 1980s and 1990s when New York City’s economy rebounded. The recent uptick in passengers is strongly connected to JetBlue’s success and the resurgent tourism industry. Courtesy of the Regional Plan Association.
If the airport was, in fact, one of the premier projects in New York’s postwar redevelopment program, why has it never been recognized as such? First, many observers have treated JFK as a failure because of the airport’s shabby treatment of the public. New Yorkers did not agree about much for the past half century, but most of them shared a low opinion of this airport based upon their visits. During the 1940s and much of the 1950s, for instance, passengers might have expected a futuristic experience, but they actually trundled through a grubby, crowded “temporary” terminal complex. In the decades that followed, passengers in modern terminals continued to encounter a bewildering number of reconstructions, temporary walkways, crowded roadways, miserable food service, and aggressive hustlers. By the 1980s and 1990s, formerly modern terminals remained for too long as faltering airlines, such as Pan Am and Delta, refused to invest in their reconstruction. When terminal reconstruction finally started, passengers had to endure year after year of reconstruction at one terminal after another.
This constant throwing up and tearing down, the restructuring of the entire airline business starting in the 1970s, and the distracted management style of the overextended Port Authority cumulatively rendered the airport’s Terminal City (the central hub of terminals since the 1950s) a mixture of confusing and unpleasant. JFK, for instance, is consistently rated by travelers today as one of the worst airports in the country. While most of the terminals have been modernized since the 1990s or are in a process of renovation, decades of inferior passenger experiences, uneven daily management, and persistent flight and ground delays have blinded most of us to the enduring value of the airport to the region.
The most important reason for the failure to recognize JFK as a major factor in urban affairs is that airports, even those within traditional urban boundaries like JFK, are artifacts of a metropolitan-scale redevelopment program. Metropolitan renewal, rather than a spatially defined, limited urban-renewal program, is harder for both the public and scholars to conceptualize.3 Mayor La Guardia and other civic leaders may have envisioned the airport as part of New York City’s renewal, but the scale of the airport that developed aided not just the city but areas far beyond the city’s boundaries. Publications and statements by both the Port Authority and the Regional Plan Association have over the years tried with little success to explain the metropolitan scale and profound importance of JFK and other airports to New Yorkers. Metropolitan impact, flowing to and from such a vast and complicated institution, is difficult to conceptualize.4
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
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