Another historic Pan Am marine terminal was the one at Dinner Key in Miami. It operated from 1932 until 1945. I remember my grandfather taking me to watch a Clipper flying boat arrive. Divers went out to lower the wheels so the aircraft could taxi up the ramp to disembark its passengers. The terminal is now home to the Miami city hall but preserves important parts of the old terminal. When Delta acquired Pan Am, the Miami hub was the only profitable part of the Pan Am system. Originally then and at the Delta acquisition, Pan Am’s Miami operation was the focal point for service from the US and Central/South America.
Good
morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find
out why aviation buffs and
preservationists are concerned about
the future of a terminal at LaGuardia
Airport that opened just before World
War II. We’ll also find why the
Brooklyn borough president is running
for a new job — and why he may face a
challenge from a candidate backed by
the Democratic Socialists of America.
Image
Credit...Library
of Congress/Interim Archives, via
Getty Images
Linda
Freire loved the building where she
worked for 12 years when she was in her
20s and 30s.
“Walking
in every morning, it was like when I
would go to visit the Louvre in Paris or
the Vatican in Rome,” she said.
Her
office was at LaGuardia Airport — not in
the main terminals, which former
President Joe Biden would later liken to
“a third-world country,” but in
LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal. That is
an elegantly proportioned building with
a spacious rotunda that handled the
trans-Atlantic arrivals and departures
in LaGuardia’s early days.
The
building is a landmark Art Deco relic
from an era when commercial air travel
“had that sense of excitement, adventure
and risk,” said Freire, who was the
shuttle operations manager for Pan
American World Airways when Pan Am filed
for bankruptcy in 1991 and is now the
chairwoman of the Pan Am Museum
Foundation.
Aviation
buffs like Freire and preservationists
sounded alarms after noticing a sentence
in a Port Authority news release that
said the agency’s latest 10-year, $45
billion capital plan would include
“replacing the 85-year-old Terminal A.”
The news release also mentioned a
“top-to-bottom rebuilding of Terminal A
while preserving the landmark rotunda.”
The
Port Authority said the project would
complete the remaking of the airport and
would “make a vastly improved experience
at LaGuardia even better.” But the
preservationists worried that its
mention of an 85-year-old terminal
referred to the Marine Air Terminal,
which was dedicated in March 1940 — 85
years ago. “It’s part of aviation
history,” said Edward Trippe, a son of a
founder of Pan Am. “It’s a very
important building.”
Some
preservationists have spoken at hearings
that the Port Authority has held in
recent days to gather public comments on
the capital plan. “They listened to my
comment and they went on to the next
person,” said Julia Blum, a former
archivist at the Cradle of Aviation
Museum in Garden City, N.Y., and the
editor of Metropolitan Airport News. “I
think it’s wonderful, all the things
they’ve done with the airports. But this
is part of it.”
Josh
Stoff, the curator of the Cradle of
Aviation Museum, said that the Port
Authority planners were “very vague on
what they want to do.” After noting that
the Marine Air Terminal was “the only
pre-World War II terminal still in
operation,” he added: “All they said was
they’d save the rotunda. I don’t even
know if that means they’ll save the
outside of the building.”
Geoffrey
Arend, the editor and publisher of Air
Cargo News Flying Typers, which covers
the aviation industry, said he was “very
worried” about what the Port Authority
might have in mind. Perhaps the design
would “take the two wings off the
building, maybe take the front off the
building and just keep the lobby.”
The
Landmarks Preservation Commission
designated the Marine Air Terminal in
1980, noting that it was “the only
surviving American airport terminal
dating from ‘the golden age of the
flying boat.’”
That
was a reference to Pan Am’s clipper
ships, seaplanes that taxied up to a
dock after landing and sailed away from
it before takeoff, lifting into the air
in open water some distance from the
airport. The Clippers made
trans-Atlantic travel a reality for
ordinary passengers. They were slow by
modern standards — with a top speed of
200 miles per hour, they took almost a
full day to fly to Europe, with a
refueling stop along the way. But that
was revolutionary. Europe was 10 days to
two weeks away by ocean liner.
Image
Credit...Craig
Ruttle/Associated Press
“As
built, the Marine Air Terminal had a
spare, open feeling — a circle at the
water’s edge,” the architecture writer
Christopher Gray noted. In the rotunda
inside was a circular mural called
“Flight,” by James Brooks, that was
painted over in the 1950s and restored
in the 1970s.
“We
do not want to see another historic Pan
Am terminal torn down,” said Freire,
referring to the former Pan Am Worldport
at John F. Kennedy International
Airport, which was demolished in 2013.
(The Worldport, which had a huge
elliptical roof, operated as Terminal 3
at J.F.K. and had been used by Delta Air
Lines after Pan Am shut down.) “Pan Am
was the heart and soul of aviation
development, especially international
aviation, in this country,” Freire said.
“We can’t lose this history.”
A
Port Authority spokesman said by email
that the Marine Air Terminal building
“is not going anywhere and will remain
fully intact.” He said that the
reference in the news release to
“85-year-old Terminal A” was
“inaccurate.” The rebuilding is planned
for Terminal A, the concourse with six
gates adjacent to the marine building.
It dates only to the 1980s and is not a
landmark, he said.
On Mon, 8
Dec 2025 at 16:40 Kathryn Creedy via Mifnet
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