Brooklyn by Thomas Campanella

Author:Thomas Campanella [Campanella, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Cora Bennett and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia with pilot Jack O’Meara at Floyd Bennett Field, August 2, 1934, as the Lustig Sky Train prepares for its first (and only) flight. Times Wide World Photo / New York Times.

The fight for Brooklyn’s airfield was kicked up several registers by the city’s new mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia. An experienced aviator himself, La Guardia served in the Army Air Corps with the American Expeditionary Forces in Italy during the First World War, and—as a congressman from East Harlem—had piloted one of the six hundred warplanes that flew over the city in the 1931 aerial armada. Elected mayor on a fusion ticket in 1933, La Guardia refused to accept that Gotham’s flagship airfield would be located not in New York City but in the bogs of New Jersey. The mayor was on hand for the launch of the Lustig Sky Train in August 1934, cheering it airborne alongside Floyd Bennett’s widow, Cora. Cocksure from his electoral victory, he pushed for the airfield most memorably on a flight back from Panama with his wife on November 24. As the TWA airliner rolled to a stop, La Guardia refused to disembark, pointing out that the destination on his ticket read New York City, not Newark. A parade of airline officials pleaded with him to conform, but he remained in his seat. Eventually the big engines were cranked up and the aircraft—empty but for Fiorello and Marie—took off for Brooklyn, where La Guardia disembarked victoriously.21 Over the next several years, La Guardia put the full-court press on the issue, calling favors in from Washington and directing every Brooklyn lawmaker to write to the Post Office Department detailing Floyd Bennett Field’s advantages over Newark. But unfortunately for the Little Flower, the newly appointed postmaster general of the United States, James A. Farley, was no shrinking violet himself. Farley was a kingmaker with friends in very high places, with a temperament every bit as tenacious and forceful as La Guardia’s. He had helped Alfred E. Smith win the governorship in 1918 and played a major role in getting Franklin D. Roosevelt elected president; the postmastership was his reward. It was going to take more than airport antics to convince Farley to pull the airmail rug out from under Newark—where the airlines had made substantial investments in terminals and hangars.

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