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Memories, Renovations For Airport's Birthday/Kenneth Gross

Memories, Renovations For Airport's Birthday "LaGuardia Airport will be 40 years old on December 2." -Port Authority Press Release By Kenneth Gross LaGuardia Airport- Some things remain. The old railroad tracks, like fingers half-buried in the cement, still point to the hangars where the trans-Atlantic clippers were kept. And the old Marine Terminal Building, with its marble laurel of flying fish, waits like an unopened Egyptian burial chamber. There will be no ceremony to mark the anniversary. "There's nothing to see," said a Port Authority spokesman. "It's not the same place that it was in 1939 when it opened. Nothing's the same." He was wrong. The field is haunted by memories and ghosts of flying boats and Depression art. It is an airport from the old days, when people slept on bunk beds during overseas flights. The very name evokes memories of fog and the sound of propellers. The old mural of "Flight," painted over in the '50s by someone's fear that it contained a subversive message, is being restored. And the old Yankee Clipper flies again, though only as a model airborne over the main lobby. The people who know the airport best are not always eager to tamper with the memories. "I don't want to go back for the anniversary," said Eddie Juengst, who more than anyone else knows what's gone and what remains. "I don't want to go back there for anything. I hate what's happening to it." What's happening is expansion. There were only a few thousand passengers those first years. Today there are 18 million every year. "I used to swim there in Flushing Bay when it was still an amusement park," said Juengst, who is 80 years old. "That was back then. A long time ago, when it was still North Beach-the Little Coney Island." One day in 1912, Juengst, who lived in Maspeth, was riding his bicycle near Belmont Park and saw his first airplane take off from the infield. "I couldn't breathe," he said. *That thing took my breath away. I was bit by the flying bug and I've never gotten over it." That began Eddie Juengst's air career. He became an airplane mechanic in World War I. Then he came home and worked at LaGuardia when it was a private field and when it became a municipal field. He was the chief of operations for 10 yearsfrom 1957 until he retired in 1967. Juengst lives with his grandchil- dren in Queens Village. He does not get around too well. "The old engine can't make it un the hill any more," he says. Every once in a while a plane passes over and it still takes his breath away. But he won't go back to the airport. But some of the old-timers will be there. Like Rabbi Jacob Polish, who will come by and remember the way it was 40 years ago on the day they opened the airport. "It was a beautiful day," said Polish, who was a 25-year-old, brandnew rabbi on the day of the dedication. "I was on the speakers' platform with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses. And I even remember what I said. I said: 'We have learned to fly through the heavens like the birds. We have learned to probe the depths of the oceans like the fish. Now, dear Lord, teach us to walk the earth like men.' "I said that then, 40 years ago. I'll tell you something: It is now more appropriate than ever." There are threads of sentiment entwined with LaGuardia more than with any other airport in the area. "It is the human• factor," said George Pierce, the airport manager whose office overlooks its 650 acres. "We know the employees by name. But that's because there are only 8,000, as opposed to 40,000 at Kennedy." The airport was the brainstorm of the feisty Mayor LaGuardia. In 1936 he boarded an airplane at Chicago. At the final destination, Newark, he refused to leave the aircraft. "The ticket says New York," he said. The airline finally called in a special crew and flew LaGuardia to Floyd Bennett Field, a military facility in Brooklyn, and the campaign for a municipal airport had begun. The old North Shore Amusement Park at Sanford Point in Queens was selected as the site. A "miniature Coney Island" at the turn-of-the-century, it had been acquired in 1929 by the Curtiss- Wright company, which opened a private flying field. In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved plans for using Works Progress Administration funds for converting the field into a municipal airport. Two years later it opened. As in many WPA projects of that time, a great work of art was built into the Marine Terminal building. It was a 12-foot high, 235-foot circular mural entitled "Flight." The artist was James Brooks. But during the 1950s, someone in government thought he detected a subversive hammer and sickle in one of the panels, and the mural was painted over. Last year Alan M. Farancz began : a restoration of the mural.
Article from 02 Dec 1979Newsday (Suffolk Edition)(Melville, NY)
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