This short list of leading personalities necessarily excludes many other important actors and institutions, including airline executives, governors, mayors, Congressmen, local environmentalists, Port Authority civil servants, and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrators who also contributed to the development and management of JFK—and who make appearances in the story that follows. Yet even this brief description of three major personalities provides a glimpse into the complexity of the environment in which New York airports, and JFK in particular, developed. The cumulative impact of strong personalities and the powerful political forces and organizations they represented contributed to a lack of metropolitan cooperation in the long term. Indeed, with so many authorities, departments, jurisdictions, and egos, it is remarkable that the airport works as well as it does. Most American cities suffer from a similar lack of central coordination, but there is no denying that New York, where the scale of any enterprise demands considerable funds and planning, boasts an excess of powerful institutions and agendas that has made metropolitan cooperation and planning difficult.11 A complex web of patronage shaped JFK as a place in specific ways that make it different from other airports, even those in the New York region.
Metropolitan Relationships
The personalities and choices of leaders such as La Guardia, Moses, and Tobin matter a great deal, but the surrounding urban context is just as important to understanding the history of JFK. The story thus returns at different points to a number of themes that situate JFK within the broader history of the New York region in the twentieth century. These themes, taken together and over time, illustrate that there exist powerful and enduring reciprocal relationships between an airport and its surrounding metropolitan area.12
In particular, the wealthy and globalized New York metropolitan population played a key role in establishing JFK’s early aviation leadership and dominant postwar firms such as Pan Am and Eastern Airlines. Without the lucrative New York market, and brave souls in a hurry, both American aviation and New York’s air industry would have had a hard time taking off in the 1930s and 1940s. The Port Authority, which took over the airport in 1947, was able to negotiate higher fees with airlines in the late 1940s because the airlines could not abandon a comparatively well-developed and profitable market. These higher rates collected steady revenue that allowed for a massive expansion of airport facilities and a high-quality system not only in New York but also across the country from the 1950s to the present.
This influence of New York as a population center continued to be critical to JFK’s success in the decades that followed. The steady uptick in the airport’s ridership, notwithstanding the airport’s poor reputation for service, cleanliness, and personal safety since the 1960s, reflects the fact that the region’s population continued to grow in size and wealth despite New York City’s well-publicized problems in the postwar period. Widespread housing abandonment, municipal financial troubles, and population loss in the 1970s overshadowed the continuing growth of the metropolitan area as a whole. The success of the massive Boeing 747s in the 1970s and 1980s, and Airbus 380s today, results from the existence of concentrated urban populations like those found only in New York and other massive world cities such as Tokyo, Paris, and London.
New York’s current (2014) metropolitan population of eighteen million people includes such lush suburban counties as Westchester, Nassau, and Fairfield (with their own edge cities such as Stamford and White Plains) that provide a solid base for the airport’s continuing growth even in the face of national competition. The high incomes of this vast suburban belt surrounding New York, filled with affluent and globally oriented residents, generates a steady market for global air travel at JFK; leisure travel, in fact, accounts for three-quarters of JFK’s passenger business. The establishment and rapid success of JetBlue starting in 1999 was and remains as much dependent on the particular travel needs of New Yorkers who journey often to Florida, California, and the Caribbean as it does on the demonstrated business leadership of JetBlue’s founder, David Neeleman. The enormous number of tourists (now topping fifty million visitors per year), many of whom arrive by air, has created an additional transient urban population that sustains international air travel year round and helps keep ticket prices reasonable. The rebirth of New York as an immigrant city has added further to JFK’s market power. The close connections between immigrants and their families in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia make possible a range of daily flights to these regions that surpasses in frequency all but a few other airports in the United States.
The growing density of New York’s metropolitan population surrounding the airport has also affected airport operations. JFK, located in a corner of the city with limited transit connections, has contributed to overloaded highways such as the Van Wyck Expressway. Master builder Robert Moses envisioned that expressway as a double-duty road that would speed both airport traffic (including trucks) and suburban commuters to midtown; at the same time, he made the congestion that much worse by banning truck and bus traffic from his landscaped parkways. As a result of these early decisions, sustained by later politicians, the Van Wyck has never been large enough to handle airport traffic effectively and has a deserved reputation for near-permanent congestion. Above all, the growing density of population surrounding the airport placed limits on the ability of the Port Authority and airlines to operate as they saw fit. Neighborhoods bothered by aircraft operations produced both unlikely metropolitan alliances and unusually affluent activists.
In addition to demographics, neighborhood activism is a key theme influencing JFK’s development. The widespread notion that airports are disconnected from neighborhoods is the result of the lack of historical perspective on community activism related to noise and the environment. That airplanes zoom over houses at hundreds of miles an hour does not mean that aviation does not profoundly affect neighborhood life. Aircraft noise became one of many new sources of pollution in the postwar era—and its impact was not restricted to one side of a city line.
The growing density of housing surrounding JFK in both Queens and Nassau County, and the affluence of many of these residents, had a major impact on the airport’s operations. 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