La Guardia Airport

The NYT reporter David Dunlap is a specialist in the city's infrastructure and reports on the plans and changes to it. In today's edition he puts together something of a "what-if" story about perhaps the name that will be given, (or remain) to La Guardia Airport in Queens once the $4 billion makeover is completed in 2021. The airport sits so close to Flushing Bay that there have been times when a plane was asked to do the breast stroke.

Mr. Dunlap's story is a treat, albeit a short one. I learned at least one new thing I never knew before about Idelwild, the other NYC airport known to all today as JFK.

If the show 'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?' were still on, and Regis were pumping me to answer the question as to Idelwild's name before Idelwild, there isn't a friend or relative left in the world I could have called who would know it was called New York International Airport-Anderson Field, apparently named after a general and former chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party. Otherwise known as a boss.

(The name Idlewild derives from a developer's name for a resort and later golf club on Jamaica Bay. It provided the unofficial name for the airport being planned in the 1940s, while the City Council and Mayor La Guardia argued on what to call it. There was no debate when the airport was rededicated in honor of slain president John F. Kennedy in December 1963.)

Idle Wild. Makes sense now. A developer's portmanteau for the idle rich carved out of what is also a bird sanctuary.

Mr. Dunlap gets in the trigger word North Beach. La Guardia Airport is where North Beach was. Bet you don't know that one either. I do.

As a kid, my father's mother took the family to North Beach from their 32nd Street, Second Avenue walkup. The 2nd Avenue El ran to North Beach, to Astoria, going over the Queensboro Bridge. I have a black metal subway destination sign that hung in the subway cars that says: Astoria via 2nd Avenue. I guess somebody brought it home. It wasn't me.

 

Anyone from that Corona neighborhood who might have been taking a Rip Van Winkle, awoke, and reached for their beach towel as they headed out the back door and down some stairs, would have been greeted by a paved roadway, cars and some prop planes. Swimming was out. Remnants of this kind of access can still be seen from the Grand Central Parkway.

 

When he was mayor, La Guardia was told he'd have to take a flight from New Jersey in order to get airborne. The Little Flower didn't like the idea even then of having anything to do with New Jersey. Get me an airport.

 

Landfill. Plenty of it. Robert Moses. Yep, him too. As a kid growing up in Flushing and being raised with a daily delivery of the L.I. Star Journal I'd often read about how the control tower was sinking. The place has been a pit long before Uncle Joe Biden stopped by and looked around and called it "third world." Lots of people have that reaction to Queens, especially these days.

 

So, more construction. A Willets Point light rail connection. By the time it is done maybe Uber will be picking everyone up at the airport.

Change the $10 bill. Change the $20 bill. But Uber will be operating at the still-named La Guardia airport.

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