North Beach

One drizzly night last week, TWA Pilot Jack Zimmerman, with 20 passengers behind him, circled over The Bronx. With the scattered lights of Central Park on his right, to his left stretched the darkened reaches of Long Island sound. Ahead of him lay a floodlit field with a runway 6,000 feet long and 200 feet wide, Runway No. 1 of New York City's North Beach airport. Jack Zimmerman plunked the DC-3 down short, turned right and taxied up to the administration building where swart Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and a knot of city bigwigs waited in a crowd of 2,000 to see the first scheduled airline flight come in to New York City's new $40,000,000 terminal. Said Jack Zimmerman to the Mayor of New York, "This is a swell airport,"

So, with a minimum of ceremony, the airline capital of the U. S. moved to the finest and the most expensive flying field in the world. Into North Beach airport, New York City had poured $15,000,000, the Federal Government $25,000,000 (through WPA, which spent more money there than on any other project), the airlines thousands more in shop and office equipment. For all this the transcontinental airlines, riding on a passenger boom that has skyrocketed revenues 42.19% over last year's respectable totals, were properly grateful.

North Beach airport ("New York Municipal Airport" officially) was as handsome a subsidy as any city ever granted to a transport business. For rentals from the new airport New York City will get only $315,000 a year, has no expectation of getting any money return for the king's ransom it paid to bring the airlines across the Hudson from Jersey.

To induce the airlines to move their terminus from Newark's busy airport, New York City offered a 558-acre airdrome, of which 357 acres were moved from nearby Riker's Island; six huge hangars, each large enough to house a football gridiron with room for bleachers, six restaurants, one with cocktail lounge and nightclub; offices for rent by the day to busy executives (the most expensive, $75 a day); a sound-proofed engine test building; the finest seaplane terminal in the world where trans-Atlantic planes can dock in the roughest weather. Clear of approach obstructions to jangle the nerves of pilots, the field also has many a piece of expensive equipment to make life easier. Examples: a stop-go traffic light system for taxiing planes; a control tower fitted with 16 radio receivers to hear calls on any airline frequency.

First of the airlines to plump for North Beach was the U. S.'s biggest, American, which grabbed three hangars, is now operating 84 of the 138 in-and outbound flights daily from the field. Other tenants are United, TWA, Canadian Colonial, Eastern, still operating from Newark, is belatedly readying to join the others. And from faraway Port Washington (20 miles from Grand Central) Pan American Airways will move to North Beach next year.

To Newark, defeated after a bitter fight before the CAA to hold the airlines, the opening of North Beach is a sad blow. But it is a blow to civic prestige rather than to civic economy. From Newark to Manhattan and Queens will move several thousand airport employes and their families (to be joined by workers from Chicago and other points along the lines). In the business of Newark merchants, their departure will make no discernible dent.

Meanwhile, the economic effect of this $40,000,000 expenditure on New York City is negligible. The addition of some 8,000 to its 7,500,000 inhabitants will not even make a ripple. But for airline travelers, North Beach has a substantial benefit: passengers will reach Grand Central in 20 minutes, instead of 55 minutes from the Newark Field through the Holland Tunnel.

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