The New York Municipal Airport, situated at North Beach on Flushing Bay, Long Island, was completed in October 1939, and officially dedicated on Oct. 26, before a crowd of over 300,000 spectators. This $50,000,000 project, designed to serve air traffic from all the chief trade lanes of the world, was inaugurated on Dec. 1, 1939.
In size, it covers an area of 558 acres, of which 357 acres were reclaimed from the Bay, and compares favorably with other large important flying fields, including Le Bourget of Paris (812 acres), Chicago Field (626 acres), Newark Airport (1,200 acres of which 300 are now in use), Tempelhof Field at Berlin (392 acres), and Croydon at London (190 acres). The New York Municipal Airport is strategically erected twenty minutes from the heart of Manhattan in the New York-Northeastern New Jersey Metropolitan area which contains a population of about 11,000,000 people, and the port has been designated by the Civil Aeronautics Authority as a co-terminal with Newark for this district.
Technically and structurally, however, the New York Airport is the best equipped and safest of the world air terminals. It is designed as a terminal for both land and transoceanic planes. The port's center is the three-story, marble-floored landplane administration building, larger than many large railroad stations. On either side of the administration building are three great hangars. The field itself has four asphalt runways, constructed in the direction of the prevailing winds, the longest 6,000 feet, the others 5,000, 4,500, and 3,532 feet, respectively. The whole is lighted from the control tower by the most powerful beam in the country — the 13,500,000 candle-power beacon of the administration building.
Fronting the administration building is a concrete apron, 6,200 feet long, the largest of any airport, providing space for the loading and unloading of fifteen 21-passenger transport planes at the same time; there is an upper promenade with a capacity for 5,000 visitors. The apron is floodlighted at night by the glare of eight 7,500,000 candle-power hangar lights. Beyond the administration building and to the west is a separate marine terminal for oceanic flights, with its one huge hangar.
On the third floor of the landplane administration building are the offices of the United States Weather Bureau and two departments of the Civil Aeronauts Authority — Air Traffic Communications and Air Traffic Control — from which will be handled all air traffic in the northeastern part of the United States. The marine building has a weather bureau of its own, as well as immigration inspectors' quarters and detention room and offices for the public health service. The nerve center of the entire airport is the control tower on the administration building. At the control desk the airport is reproduced in miniature, and tiny white lights flash on and off with the contact lights, traffic lights, and floodlights on the field. All radio receivers are located across the channel at Rikers' Island in order to eliminate electrical interference from the airfield lights and mechanisms. A submarine cable connects the radio towers on the island with the airport's central control tower.
The whole airport resembles a small city. There are facilities for 700 flights daily. The buildings have 931,500 square feet of floor space. The runways and taxi strips cover ninety acres, and the aprons occupy fifty-three acres. There are 700 miles of street lighting. The twenty-five gasoline storage tanks have a capacity for 465,000 gallons of fuel. Over twenty thousand tons of steel have been used in the construction of the buildings. In the administration buildings, there are four restaurants, a huge bar and dance floor, waiting rooms and a terrace, besides the ticket offices for the airlines. Planes of the American Airlines, Eastern Airlines, Canadian Colonial Airways, Transcontinental and Western, Inc., United Airlines, and Pan American Airways use this airport as a terminus, and giant clippers arriving or departing from Europe or Bermuda will land or take off on Long Island Sound which is reached by a taxi-strip of water from the marine terminal. The marine base has facilities for hauling the giant clipper ships from the water for repairs or other emergencies.
The airport was first proposed by Mayor La Guardia and other public officials in 1933 as a terminal for the New York area to replace the Newark, New Jersey, Airport. In 1935, a 105-acre flying field at North Beach, which had formerly been an amusement center, was chosen as the site for the project, and on Sept. 3, 1937, President Roosevelt placed the construction of the airport under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. A purchase of 96 adjacent acres and the laborious filling in of 357 more enlarged the field to 558 acres. The airport is the largest WPA project to date. A force of 23,000 men was employed and $50,000,000 appropriated. A number of additions to the airport have already been contemplated, among them another seaplane hangar, two landplane hangars, and a separate Civil Aeronautics Authority Building. See also AVIATION.
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