In spite of the lavish praise for LaGuardia Airport, its limited scale for future air travel was obvious even to the mayor.10 By 1941 the airport may have been handling one million passengers a year, but the limitations on its physical growth promised long-term challenges. Adding land in the deeper waters of Long Island Sound, for instance, would have been very expensive and technically complicated (even though the airport’s runways were eventually extended over the water after World War II). Seaplanes, also accommodated in the open water astride LaGuardia, were on their way out for commercial aviation. Making matters worse, as the fill it was built on settled, the airport began to sink in the years after it opened, and the runways had to be reconstructed. Finally, houses, businesses, and the Grand Central Parkway hemmed in the airport on the land side. LaGuardia was simply too small to hold New York at the center of a global air network.11
The Regional Plan Association, the city’s powerful planning think tank, had been of the opinion in 1929 that “in the New York region it is practically impossible to obtain any large airport site so central that it would be in immediate touch with the main business activities and the largest groups of populations.”12 A practical, if unorthodox, solution was found to this problem.
Redefining Jamaica Bay
In retrospect, Jamaica Bay was a likely place to build a grand airport. Long neglected as a natural environment, civic leaders had for decades shifted around for a suitable use of such a large and seemingly vestigial territory. Sewage had flowed from loosely regulated suburban development for much of the twentieth century; the city dumped trash directly into the bay’s waters and lined its edges with unsightly landfills; and improvised fishing camps emptied human excrement directly into the once pure waters. Many considered the filling of marshlands for an airport in the 1940s to be the best possible outcome for this polluted marshland. Robert Moses’s transformation of the Flushing Meadows from ash dump and swamp into park, lakes, and a grand setting for the World’s Fair of 1939 provided a clear precedent for environmental transformation on this scale. As Hugh Quinn, a city councilman from Astoria, remarked on an exploratory visit to the field in 1941, an airport at the site would “eliminate a large area of mosquito-breeding marshlands.”13
It could have turned out quite differently if the bay’s environment had been protected earlier. Yachting had once been popular in the 1890s at the Jamaica Bay Yacht Club, a summer spot for Brooklyn’s fashionable set. Families would spend weeks at the clubhouse or come for a weekend by train to enjoy regattas and the salty marsh air. Those rosy days had long passed by the 1930s, however. The poor water quality and industrial development of the bay’s edges spoiled the natural beauty that could still be found in new elite clubs on Long Island’s less developed south and north shores.14 The Idlewild Park Hotel for decades had also been a fashionable destination for “swank society” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it had long ago fallen out of fashion and was demolished in 1939. The only relic of the fashionable era, and a modest one at that, was the Idlewild Golf Course (from which the colloquial name of the airport derived) and a small, recreational airfield known as Jamaica Sea Airport.15
Jamaica Bay’s glory days as a productive estuary had also passed. In the early twentieth century, the bay still supported a $5 million-a-year industry that rivaled the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island’s Great South Bay in the quality of oysters and clams drawn from its waters. The shallow waters made harvesting shellfish easy, and the delicate bivalves enjoyed protection from many storms and predators. Approximately 1,500 hearty souls still harvested 750,000 to 1,000,000 bushels of oysters per year from Jamaica Bay in about 1917.16 Shellfish harvesting ended abruptly, however, in 1921 when the city’s health officials firmly linked a typhoid epidemic to bay shellfish. Alas, diseases of great variety had already traveled from the fetid bay to the urban masses; untreated sewage had been flowing for years from surrounding industries and improvised suburban housing. Illegal harvesting continued in the 1920s even with bans on the shellfish.17
The salty air and open space in the shadow of a crowded city continued to attract urban adventurers seeking diversion. A few fishermen, precariously lodged in stilt houses, still fished the waters in the 1930s but not on a commercial basis. Small suburban housing developments in the early twentieth century clustered on the edge of the future airport site, including both cottages and “substantial” homes.18 Failure of other infrastructure projects in the marsh contributed to the desolation. A grandiose plan to turn Jamaica Bay into a great port in the early twentieth century seemed to prove the inaccessibility of the site.19 New Jersey, plugged directly into continental rail and road routes, stood better positioned than Jamaica Bay for port modernization. New Jersey interests also proved far more aggressive; they successfully convinced the Port Authority to improve Newark Bay for deep-water shipping, a decision that doomed not only the Jamaica Bay port plan but also almost all of New York City’s direct participation in waterborne commerce.20 Robert Moses loved to make fun of the failed plans to make a port in Jamaica Bay because its promoters had believed that such a facility could be “greater than the combined ports of Liverpool, Rotterdam, and Hamburg.”21
FIGURE 2. The Broad Channel neighborhood of Jamaica Bay showing hotels, stores, and other development in 1915. Jamaica Bay was once an important source of seafood and a leisure destination for New Yorkers in search of fresh air and warm saltwater for recreation. Queens officials hoped that a port or airport would create a use for the bay as the quality of the water and environment declined in the 1920s and 1930s. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The 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.