Transport: LaGuardia’s Coup

Four years ago Manhattan’s spunky 5 ft. 4 in. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia began bucking Postmaster General Jim Farley, Mayor Meyer Ellenstein of Newark

(N.J.) and four of the major U. S. airlines with his contention that the logical metropolitan air terminal for mail, express and passengers was not Newark but New York City. Laughed out of his lethal scheme to set an airport on Governor’s Island, right under the skyscraper windows of downtown Manhattan, the Little Flower, a harum-scarum War flyer on the Italian front, was then battling in behalf of Floyd Bennett Field, which had been begun in boom times by nifty Tammany Mayor Jimmy Walker on the Brooklyn shore of Jamaica Bay. Floyd Bennett had advantages over smelly Newark but it had the disadvantage of being separated from Manhattan by a tedious, 15-mile series of traffic snags and bottlenecks.

Year ago Mayor LaGuardia launched a new attack on Newark’s monopoly—enlargement of the old North Beach Airport on Flushing Bay in Queens (20 minutes by car from Manhattan’s Grand Central Station) into the most pretentious land and seaplane base in the world (TIME, Sept. 20). At brisk Newark renovation also began.

Last week, Newark Airport suddenly found itself all spruced up with apparently no place to go. For, with the $23,000,000, 550-acre North Beach project half completed, energetic Fiorello LaGuardia had won commitments from aviation’s big five—Pan American Airways, American. United, Eastern Air Lines and Transcontinental & Western Air—that they would begin using the new field when it is opened officially next April 30. Pan American, which does not use Newark, planned to move in from its own base ten miles away at Port Washington. The others cagily announced they would use both North Beach and Newark.

Despite unobstructed approaches and broad, long runways (ranging from 3,600 to 6,000 ft.), North Beach has one feature the Civil Aeronautics Authority’s safety board may not like—a blind landing runway separated by only 200 feet from the flanking water of Flushing Bay. Last week even Newark’s stout advocates feared that C. A. A. might approve North Beach and old Newark Airport might become a ghostly memento in the marshy Jersey meadows.

Griped Newark’s greying Mayor Ellenstein over the Little Flower’s coup: “Without the first consideration for the lives of passengers and pilots, Mayor LaGuardia seems determined to resort to every stratagem to have New York designated as the official Eastern airway terminal.”

Quipped LaGuardia, remembering that only last December Mayor Ellenstein was indicted for conspiracy to defraud his own city in the purchase of land for Newark Airport: “Poor Meyer is so troubled with . . . the pickle he is now in.”

What part of Mayor LaGuardia’s bustling salesmanship Mayor Ellenstein considered a stratagem he did not say, but anyone could guess. Less than two miles from North Beach stand the spindling 700-foot Trylon and the great round Perisphere of the New York World’s Fair 1939. A thick slice of premium revenue will undoubtedly go to the transportation system that can pick up the sightseer at his home airport and deposit him in the shadow of the World’s Fair’s Big Apple.