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 innovation airlines would dictate where and when they would land. That a remarkable 85 percent of national transatlantic traffic crowded through New York in 1946, mostly on stately ocean liners, did not necessarily guarantee anything. Experts working for the city estimated that by 1955, as a result of airport growth in other cities, New York would retain just 67 percent of transatlantic passengers. The Commerce and Industry Association of New York identified Idlewild as postwar project number-one “insofar as New York’s prestige and commercial supremacy are concerned.”33
The war proved essential to the new airport’s development. Speedy condemnation of land for Idlewild, for instance, was justified on the basis of the national war emergency. The judge who enabled the condemnation remarked that “great new airfields with long ribbons of runways” would be needed for the war.34 The biggest subsidy of the time came directly from the federal millions that flowed in from the sale of Floyd Bennett Field to the navy. This purchase helped pay for additional land sought for the new airport. A 1941 estimate of the total cost of Idlewild properties was $8.25 million that could conceivably be paid out of the navy’s purchase of Floyd Bennett Field for $9.75 million.35 Federal government officials also provided an initial grant of about $860,000 toward landfill and runway development in the Idlewild area. The federal government even subsidized hangar development and an administration building.36
The commercial aviation business got its biggest boost from federally funded aviation research. The U.S. Postal Service’s airmail service continued to quietly subsidize airlines, but without the war, large-scale postwar commercial aviation would have grown more gradually. The massive bombers pioneered during the war proved easily remodeled for civilian conversion. With the addition of seats and other creature comforts such as bathrooms, they offered dependable commercial air travel. Planes that could safely fly thousands of miles under attack could pretty easily and safely ferry people from one city to another in peacetime. Government construction of extensive airfields in Europe also proved crucial. Seaplanes had been very popular before the war (in spite of high operating costs due to the fact that seawater was terrible for planes) for international travel because many crowded cities abroad lacked sufficient land or capital for runways, “but the exigencies of war made nations forget about expense. Big runways were laid down to support 4 engine bombers and big new land-based transports built for the military.”37 Radar systems developed for expertly detecting airborne enemies also simplified