"Flight"

CCLIX

The Marine Air Terminal’s Art Deco rotunda is designed to resemble the Pantheon of ancient Greece.  It is capped by a huge circular skylight. The exterior of the building is decorated with friezes (much like Dinner Key) of flying fish, symbolically representing the Atlantic Clippers. 

Perhaps the terminal’s most arresting feature is the twelve foot tall 235 foot circular mural. Entitled “Flight”, the mural was painted by the artist James Brooks under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. Brooks’ massive mural is the largest and last of the WPA murals which served the dual purposes of beautifying America and letting artists eat. 

James Brooks at work, 1940

“Flight” depicts the history of flight from the time of myth until 1940. Painted in a modernist style, it strongly presents flying as an activity of the common people. Its “socialist” ideals were so offensive during the Red Scare of the 1950s that some colorless anonymous bureaucrat at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ordered it painted over; it remained obliterated until the 1980s when it was restored with the help of the Rockefeller family, along with the rest of the Marine Air Terminal. 

An entire generation of New Yorkers grew up having been censored perforce, but the restoration allows citizens to appreciate the vision Brooks wished to share even while allowing them to think for themselves. What a radical concept in a free America.

 

From top to bottom: "Daedalus and Icarus," "Leonardo and his Flying Machines," "The Wright Brothers," and "The Pan American Clipper"