Big Airport Plans Today and Yesterday: Governor Cuomo, Mayor La Guardia and the Shift from City to Metropolitan Scale

Mayor La Guardia Announces the Opening of

Municipal Airport (La Guardia), 1939

(Source: La Guardia and Wagner Archives)

A fortnight ago, Governor Cuomo, flanked by Vice President Biden announced a $4 Billion reconstruction of La Guardia Airport, a project that will be undertaken by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Why the Governor, the Vice President and the Port Authority? Why not the Mayor?

The announcement seemed to beg for some historical context from those of us here at the La Guardia and Wagner Archives.  In the 1940s, Mayor La Guardia too envisioned big airport plans.  But back then, La Guardia’s dream was a grand new airport on Jamaica Bay, and it was the city, not Albany or Washington, who took the lead in planning its own future.  For La Guardia, the new airport at Idlewild (JFK) was an investment to secure New York City’s future dominance in world trade and travel in the emerging aviation era.  Today, in contrast, many New Yorkers think of the airports as a regional enterprise largely divorced from the city rather than one purposed for the city’s benefit.

Our story of the transition of New York’s airports from municipal to regional is set in the 1940s and begins with the early inadequacy of the airport that bears La Guardia’s name.(1)  Then as now, the airports have reflected the tension between New York as a place of aging infrastructure and jostling crowds, and its demand for grand facilities befitting a great metropolis.  

Vice President Biden’s depiction of La Guardia Airport as overcrowded and outdated is a recurring complaint, dating back almost to the Airport’s origins. 

VIDEO: 1938 World Series NY Yankees vs. Chicago Cubs

Seventy-five years ago, the Chicago Cubs and the New York Yankees faced off in a lopsided World Series contest.  The powerhouse Yankees swept the Cubs in four straight games.  Watch the highlights of Game Four, narrated by Archives baseball maven Stephen Weinstein, and see Mayor La Guardia give a Bronx Cheer.  Sadly, in 2013 New York fans will have to remember the old Brooklyn Dodger refrain, "Wait 'til next year!"

VIDEOS: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Casey Stengel, Fiorello La Guardia, Brooklyn Dodgers, and NY Yankees and Giants

Bedlam at Shea Stadium when the Mets win the 1969 World Series

Baseball is in the air at Citifield, Yankee Stadium, and the La Guardia and Wagner Archives.  Check out our new videos narrated by Stephen Weinstein, the Archives' baseball expert extraordinaire : 

"Opening Day 1936: New York Giants vs. Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds" where Mayor La Guardia throws out the first pitch, the Giants trounce the Dodgers, and Babe Ruth watches the action.

"Joe DiMaggio's Wild Dash Home Clinches Yankees 1939 World Series Victory Over the Cincinnati Reds"  The Yankees swept the Cincinnati Reds that year and this baseball newsreel would have been seen in movie theaters alongside the news of the Soviet Union's and Nazi  Germany's conquest of Poland.

You can also view the Archives' slide show,  Baseball in New York, on the La Guardia and Wagner Archives computer screens located on the 1^st floor of the walkway between the M and E buildings by the La Guardia Welcome Center, and the 2nd and 4th floors of the lounge areas of the C-building.  You can also view them online at : http://tinyurl.com/dxalkg7

Mayor La Guardia's Cousin Knocks on the Archives' Door

Patrizia Luzzatto with her cousin Fiorello La Guardia

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

You never know who will walk in your door on any particular morning. Yesterday, it was Patrizia Luzzatto, the cousin of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. She arrived unannounced to the Archives researching the Luzzatto family tree. Fiorello’s mother was Irene Luzzatto-Coen of Trieste. Born in the Austro-Hungarian port city of Trieste, Irene was of Italian-Jewish heritage. Patizia and Fiorello share a common great-grandfather, who I learned from Patrizia was a rabbi and a teacher in a yeshiva. The Luzzatto family had deep roots in Trieste dating back to the 18^th century, but they were most likely Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century, although medieval Roman and Florentine records also mention Luzzattos.

I had the privilege of sharing notes with Patrizia, who has spent the last two years researching the Luzzattos, about Fiorello La Guardia and his family. (She will be sending her research to the Archives.) We had both read the autobiography of Fiorello's sister, Gemma La Guardia Gluck, and discussed her harrowing experiences during World War II. Gemma had married a Hungarian Jewish man and settled in Budapest before World War I. She lost both her husband and her son-in-law to Nazi genocide. The Nazis initially sent Gemma, her daughter and grandson to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Knowing Gemma was Mayor La Guardia’s sister, the Nazis then sent them to Berlin as potential ransom. When the war ended, Gemma and Fiorello regained contact and he helped her to settle in New York City in the Queensbridge Houses his administration had built. (To learn more about Gemma’s story and read the correspondence between her and Fiorello go to: http://tinyurl.com/bctcrb5 )

In our conversation, I learned that Patrizia’s family, like Gemma’s, were also survivors who went first to Argentina and later settled permanently in Caracas, Venezuela. Both are stories to think deeply about, especially as we approach Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) on April 8^th, which will be the 70^th anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Professor Emerita Janet Lieberman Remembers the 1939 New York World's Fair

Professor Emerita Janet Lieberman 

Remembers the 1939 New York World's Fair

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs 

On Sunday April 30, 1939, the New York World’s Fair officially opened with a formal ceremony that included a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Fair’s opening was selected to coincide with the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States in New York City.

In commemoration of the Fair’s opening, the La Guardia and Wagner Archives has posted on its YouTube channel a video containing footage of the Fair and the memories of La Guardia Community College Professor Emerita Janet Lieberman visiting the Fair. The video was compiled and edited by Sandy Chase.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair offered a vision of a utopian city of tomorrow—one in which life was going to be easy thanks to new technology that would revolutionize transportation, home economics and daily life. Yet, the Fair made no mention of war, no sense of a troubled present, in spite of the looming world nightmare.

Marijuana Legalization Arguments Similar to La Guardia's Arguments Against Prohibition

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

Ninety three years ago this month the 18^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, banning the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors."  Congressman Fiorello H. La Guardia was a major opponent of prohibition. In the 1926 photo below you can see him mixing "near beer" with malt tonic to create 2% beer to demonstrate how easily Prohibition could be flouted.    In his article "Prohibition: A National Farce" (March 1927 "A Smokers Companion"), La Guardia argued that Prohibition was impossible to enforce, led to criminality, and cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.  In  "Marijuana Push in Colorado Likens It to Alcohol," The New York Times reports similar arguments being made by proponents of marijuana legalization, "Banning or improperly regulating a substance that large numbers of people will use anyway failed in the 1920s with alcohol - with the spread of speakeasies and corruption during Prohibition - and is failing now with marijuana, they say."

Fiorello La Guardia pouring beer at his congressional office, June 1926.  

The La Guardia and Wagner Archives explores these issues in our "Unforgiving Economy" calendar/website  in a month called "The Underground Economy," and developed a lesson in our Women's Leadership Curriculum on temperance and prohibition, called 19th Century Reformers Ida Wells-Barnett and Frances E. Willard.

Below are some other interesting links related to that theme:

An Identity Thief at Age 18:  

America Goes Dry With Prohibition:  

Gangster Al Capone Exploits Prohibition:   

Assignment Discovery Shorts: Prohibition Makes Chicago Corrupt:  

A Stinging Critique of College Athletics by the Eminent Historian John Hope Franklin

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

More than 20 years before the accusations of sexual assault and rape in the athletics programs of Syracuse and Penn State Universities, the eminent historian John Hope Franklin delivered a stinging critique of college athletics and their deleterious effects on higher education in a LaGuardia Lecture hosted by La Guardia Community College at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1989.  It is now available on the Featured page of the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives Website http://www.laguardiawagnerarchive.lagcc.cuny.edu/featured.aspx  and on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/user/lagarchivist?feature=g-all#p/u/42/3_GeAo3WzXQ 

You can also learn more about intercollegiate athletics on the Archives' Investing in Futures: Public Higher Education in American website.  http://www.cuny.edu/site/cc/higher-education/intercollegiate-athletics.html and in The Chronicle of Higher Education commentaries called, "What the Hell Has Happened to College Sports? And What We Should Do About It?"http://chronicle.com/article/What-the-Hell-Has-Happened-to/130071/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Professor Franklin's words felt prescient to me and I wanted to share them with you. I hope you will take the time to consider the role and meaning of athletics in higher education and send us your comments.

Photo of Fiorello La Guardia with Isoroku Yamamoto, Architect of the Pearl Harbor Attack

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

 Major La Guardia poses with two other early aviation enthusiasts, Captain Poggi of the 

Italian Army and Captain Isoroku Yamamoto of the Japanese Navy at the Austro-Italian Front, 1918.

During World War I, Fiorello La Guardia left his seat in Congress to serve in the Eighth Aviation Center in Foggia, Italy.  While in Italy he met officers from other countries interested in aviation, including Isoroku Yamamoto, a Japanese naval attaché and later the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 70 years ago today.  (See photo above and attached.)

Ironically, as Ian W. Toll recounts in today’s New York Times Op-Ed, “A Reluctant Enemy,” Yamamoto had been an opponent of attacking the United States.  (See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/opinion/a-reluctant-enemy.html?_r=1&ref=opinion) Before Pearl Harbor, he had traveled widely in the U.S. and Europe and based on his observations of the U.S. and its industrial might concluded that “Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”   

The photo captures the chance encounter of two young men on divergent paths.  La Guardia was on his way to becoming the United States’ greatest mayor, while Yamamoto would become infamous for the attack on Pearl Harbor.  While we do not know what conversations La Guardia and Yamamoto had, one wonders if Yamamoto’s impressions of the brash, outspoken congressman from New York City added to his reluctance to attack the United States.