Abstract
This chapter shows early examples of the landside–airside boundary and comments on its origins and representations. The author discusses the emerging complexities that turned airfields into airports and airports into systems. In those years and from the point of view of users, the romantic borderline—or the earliest representation of the landside–airside boundary—was in danger. As aircraft grew more sophisticated, airports became a technology of their own; they turned into political artifacts and powerful mechanisms of publicity and propaganda. To cover its need for a new airport, in 1939 New York City officials commissioned a new kind of airport that could surpass its rival, Newark Airport, in New Jersey. Not surprisingly, the design incorporated a never-seen-before landside–airside boundary scheme. In this chapter, the NY Municipal Airport, later known as LaGuardia, is analyzed in depth, with a special emphasis on the larger discourse and its conflicts of interests. In addition, this section also discusses the details of the creation of the “Skywalk,” or the birth of the first techno-political landside–airside boundary.
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Notes
- 1.
A steeped railway is an American innovation that literally tilts a railway track over an inclined plane.
- 2.
Hence, they experienced flight vicariously through forms of mass culture : best-selling books, newspapers, popular magazines, comic strips, radio, and, above all, motion pictures. Aviators, like sports figures and actors , became celebrities, and subsequently, the early history of aviation must be understood within the framework of the rise of a certain type of mass culture (Wohl, 2005, pp. 4–6).
- 3.
In terms of technological meaning and my own interpretation of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” the man-machine reveals to the audience the supra human, just as the miracle does to the devoted.
- 4.
Paraphrasing Bednarek (2001, p. 40).
- 5.
According to Bednarek (2001), “help first came in the form of federal work relief programs. Federal aid thus provided airport with manpower but little in the way of materials or the latest equipment. Critics charged that mandating a link between airport aid and work relief limited the value of the program ” (p. 98).
- 6.
According to Corn (1983), Mrs. Roosevelt showed an unbounded enthusiasm for aviation that fell in the “airmindedness ” of the epoch (p. 57).
- 7.
Robert van der Linden is the curator of Air Transportation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
- 8.
As I will explain in the next section, Mr. Trippe plays an interesting role in this study.
- 9.
Formerly a mini Coney Island, North Beach became a favorite private land field serving the wealthy Long Island sport flyers, called Glenn Curtiss Airfield .
- 10.
The name “clipper” was borrowed from fast sailing boats from the nineteenth century.
- 11.
Maybe with the exception of Geoffrey Arend’s brief comments on page 10 of his book LaGuardia 1939–1979 in the collection Air World Greatest Airports (1979).
- 12.
Paraphrasing. Air Branch policy is fully discussed on page 46 of Bednarek’s America’s Airports (2001).
- 13.
Colonel Brehon B. Somervell’s anticommunist feelings sent the “History of Aviation ” mural in Floyd Bennett Field to the garbage, simply because several characters appeared to be “strangely un-American in expression and thick mustaches that made them look like Joseph Stalin” (Gordon, 2004, p. 99).
- 14.
Somervell later became a key military figure during the Second World War. He took part in the Manhattan Project, was a member of the Army Corps of Engineers and has been credited as the author who conceived the idea of building the Pentagon.
- 15.
From the biographical notes on William Delano at the Archives of Yale University Library.
- 16.
Letters between W. Delano and Fred Delano from 1937 to 1941 William Delano Collection. The Archives at Yale University Library.
- 17.
Letters between W. Delano and Lt. Charles Edison from 1938 to 1940 William Delano Collection. The Archives at Yale University Library.
- 18.
Three more airport facilities were designed for Pan Am—Midway, Wake, and Guam Island—but these were just minor utilitarian buildings, prefabricated and exported from the USA (Pennoyer & Walker, 2003).
- 19.
As shown in most of the project documentation, where he is credited as associate architect . Columbia doc.
- 20.
As stated in a recent interview. David Aldrich, a former alumnus, in Pennoyer and Walker (2003, fn. 35).
- 21.
Modern in terms of Le Corbusier’s idealism, in which planning is “subordinated” to the machine (Boyer, 2003, p. 95).
- 22.
Perhaps, this is a topic for further study, but it is certainly fascinating to imagine the complexities and implications of aerial traffic in a Boolean space , versus the straightforwardness of rail or automobile traffic control on Cartesian planes—even in the case of subway systems . By the way, we are still using Cartesian coordinates for air traffic control , and that is why the 9/11 tragedy was technically possible.
- 23.
Substituting for the transatlantic ship or the transcontinental rail routes.
- 24.
Translation: “Mr. W.A. Delano, cousin of the President of the United States, is probably the foremost architect of America. He has achieved the municipal airport of the City of New York, and he has asked me to do a design like the electric wagons of our Swiss rail stations which transport the baggage from one place to another at the register to the trains …”.
- 25.
As observed from a photographic detail of the baggage cart system in a TWA flight. C. Manley DeBevoise, Photographer, Humanities and Social Sciences Library/Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, New York Public Library, 1939, Standard Reference: 1292-D4.
- 26.
Evident in the active correspondence between W. Delano and Fred Delano from 1937 to 1941, available in the William Delano Collection, The Archives at Yale University Library.
- 27.
Interview with a former employee of the firm (quoted in Pennoyer & Walker, 2003, fn. 35).
- 28.
Terms imported from operations at maritime ports. Date from the 1582 French terms disembarquer and embarquer meaning to remove to shore from a ship, and load onto a ship (Merriam-Webster, 2006).
- 29.
Le Corbusier’s scheme for a new city distribution is presented as early as 1922 in his Ville Contemporaine, but does not fully mature until the publication of the Ville Radieuse (1935).
- 30.
From analyzing the original blueprints prepared by Delano & Aldrich . Construction drawing set of New York Municipal Airport and Seaport (1939), Avery Drawings and Archives, Avery Library, Columbia University.
- 31.
La Ligne refers to the myth of the intrepid French postal service or Aeropostale in the 1920s.
- 32.
See “Perfect Attendants,” an excellent historical chronicle of the role of women in air hospitality, by Molly Simms, in the October/November 2007 issue of Bust.
- 33.
Mumford (1934) discusses how monotechnics (planes in this case) will only care about its own “trajectory,” leaving aside humans and society as a whole. This assumption might be correct in many contemporary airports but was hardly the case in LaGuardia.
- 34.
“La Ligne” refers to “The Line,” or the earliest French airmail system—established through an incredibly dangerous trajectory between Toulouse and Santiago, and which was later known as the Aéropostale (Wohl, 2005, p. 201). The author of “The Little Prince” thought that it was risk, and not necessarily the need to deliver mail, that moved those pilots .
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Marquez, V. (2019). “The Romantic Borderline”: From Fences to the Skywalk—Landside–Airside Space in an Early American Airport; New York LaGuardia Terminal 1933–1939. In: Landside | Airside. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3362-0_2
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