The Marine Air Terminal

CCLVIII

The Marine Air Terminal (Terminal A) today

What was intended to be the crown jewel of all of Pan American Airways’ passenger facilities was built, unsurprisingly, in New York City just a few miles from the Cloud Club at the top of Juan Trippe’s Chrysler Building world headquarters. Purpose-built and with no prefabricated structures, the building that became known as “The Marine Air Terminal” was meant to be part palace and part showplace for Pan Am’s Clipper fleet.  The airport surrounding them, New York Municipal, was intended to be the setting for the jewel, a unique airfield with cutting edge technologies and accommodations both as an aerodrome and a port facility.

The Main Terminal at New York Municipal Airport (LaGuardia) circa 1940

Led by Mayor LaGuardia, a team of engineers headed by Robert Moses designed the airport, which was to be paid for through a combination of Federal, State, City, and Corporate funding. The final plans were submitted to President Roosevelt on September 3, 1937, and by September ninth, work began on the site.

New York Municipal Airport (LaGuardia) under construction, 1938

The old North Field / Glenn Curtiss Field / North Beach Field / Grand Central Airport / Holmes Airport structures were razed, and significant amounts of landfill were used to extend the shorelines. At $40,000,000.00, New York Municipal Airport was the largest, most expensive, and most advanced airport in the U.S. when it was completed on October 15, 1939, just a few weeks more than two years after construction began. 

Still referred to as “North Beach Field” in 1939, what would become LaGuardia Airport began operations on a low key. Note the very empty parking lots

The great airport was designed by William Delano, a cousin of FDR’s (and a nephew of the Brown of Brown Brothers, Harriman). It covered nine-tenths of a square mile, and had four miles of runways and taxiways.  Delano was also responsible for designing the impressive Beaux-Arts building for the Clippers. 

A rare color shot of a Clipper at the Marine Air Terminal, 1940

Impressive, but not vast: The small two story structure was outfitted with a  circular lobby, a departure lounge, a restaurant and a bar and grill that was decorated with flying bird and propeller motifs and chrome signs, most of which remain or have been restored. The Clipper dock projected from the rear of the building out into Flushing Bay, and was originally envisioned as the mooring point for not just Pan Am’s flying boats, but Imperial Airways’ , Air France’s, Deutsche Lufthansa’s, and other nations.

The first flight of the Yankee Clipper from the Marine Air Terminal, 1940

History derailed the glamorous fate of the Marine Air Terminal. By the time it was completed  on March 31, 1940, the world was at war, and most of the prewar carriers had dedicated themselves to military service. Pan Am, as the carrier of a neutral nation, continued to fly to Lisbon, and Marseilles, to neutral Ireland, and to Southampton, but service was subject to the vagaries of the war. 

The interior of the Marine Air Terminal in the 1940s. Note the huge globe, not unlike the one at Dinner Key

It was not long before the Atlantic Clippers gained the same romantic notoriety as the China Clippers in the Pacific. As the chief international terminal on the Atlantic seaboard, the Marine Air Terminal was often in the news --- foreign diplomats came and went, crisis situations were discussed in the Arrivals area, and famous and infamous passengers were sighted walking the Clipper dock. Refugee nuclear physicists came ashore at the Marine Air Terminal as did Jews and others fleeing Nazi Europe.

The Marine Air Terminal today

On December 7, 1940, the New York Times rather innocently reported a story under a banner headline which read:

COL DONOVAN FLIES OVER ATLANTIC ON SECRET MISSION TIED TO FRANCE

Departs Incognito on Clipper with Two Others, One a Frenchman - Reported to be Bound for Africa, Greece, and Spain

Some secret. The “Colonel Donovan” referenced was “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA.  

William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, American spymaster nonpareil

The paper also noted at one point that a scientist, Henry Tizard, had arrived from the U.K. It would have meant nothing to most Americans, but sharp-eyed Axis agents were able to tell their leaders that the inventor of British ASDIC --- what we call “radar” today --- had arrived in America on a Top Secret mission carrying the blueprints for his invention.  Before the war, the idea of “national security” still had the quaint trappings of the Gilded Age. 

Sir Henry Tizard, the inventor of Radio Detection And Ranging

Regardless of its all-too-brief reign as the ultimate Clipper facility, the Marine Air Terminal remains in use today as the oldest remaining active airport terminal in the United States.  The first aircraft to use the Marine Air Terminal was the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper in 1940. After the war, the Marine Air Terminal became the preserve of landplanes like the Lockheed Constellation. As jets came into use, and grew larger and larger, the Marine Air Terminal faced demolition, but instead LaGuardia began using it for shuttle flights to Boston and Washington, and later Chicago. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, ensuring its survival, and was thereafter restored to its original configuration.  

The spectacular business failure of the Trump Shuttle (1989-1992) put the future of the Marine Air Terminal in question for awhile. As Rick Wilson said, “Everything that Trump touches dies.”

Even as LaGuardia Airport is being utterly reconfigured, the Marine Air Terminal remains in use.

LaGuardia Airport is undergoing (as of 2018) a massive reconstruction that has disrupted air passenger handling in New York City in an epochal manner

As of 2018, the venerable Marine Air Terminal is in use (as “Terminal A”) by JetBlue and Alaska Air.