John F. Kennedy International Airport

• 1. Introduction

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  John F. Kennedy International Airport sits on the southwestern shore of Long Island, 16 miles southeast of Midtown Manhattan, bordered by Jamaica Bay. Today it handles nearly 100 airlines, with nonstop or direct flights to destinations on all six permanently inhabited continents. It is the busiest international commercial airport in North America. But the story of how a stretch of marshland and a golf course became one of the world's great aviation hubs begins not with a grand vision, but with a crisis: LaGuardia Field was overcrowded, and New York needed a bigger answer.

  The questions the rest of this documentary will answer are ones that reveal how an airport becomes a city unto itself. How did a site originally earmarked for fewer than a thousand acres grow to 5,200? Why did each major airline end up building its own terminal rather than sharing one? Who stole millions of dollars from the cargo terminals, and why have those crimes never been fully resolved? And what does it mean that a building designed by Eero Saarinen for Trans World Airlines spent years as a vacant shell before reopening as a hotel?

• 2. Marshland to Runway

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  In late 1941, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia announced that New York City had tentatively selected a large area of marshland on Jamaica Bay as the site of a new airport. The chosen land included the Idlewild Golf Course, a summer hotel, and a small landing strip called the Jamaica Sea-Airport. Title to the land passed to the city at the end of December 1941, and construction began in 1943, even though the airport's final layout had not yet been decided.

  About $60 million in government funding was initially spent on the project. In 1943, the airport was briefly renamed after Major General Alexander E. Anderson, a Queens resident who had commanded a National Guard unit in the southern United States and died in late 1942. Mayor La Guardia vetoed the renaming, but the New York City Council reinstated it. In practice, no one called it anything but Idlewild. By 1944, the Board of Estimate had authorized the condemnation of an additional 1,350 acres. The Port of New York Authority leased the property from the city in 1947 and still maintains that lease.

  The airport's first flight departed on the 1st of July 1948, with an opening ceremony attended by President Harry S. Truman and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Both men were running against each other in that year's presidential election, making the ceremony an unintentional political tableau. The Port Authority cancelled foreign airlines' permits to land at LaGuardia, forcing them to shift to Idlewild over the following years. By 1954, Idlewild had more international air traffic than any other airport in the world.

• 3. The City of Terminals

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  Architect Wallace Harrison's plan for a single 55-gate terminal was rejected by the major airlines in the mid-1950s. The airlines argued it would be far too small for future traffic. Harrison then proposed an alternative: each major airline would receive its own space and build its own terminal. Seven terminals were initially planned when the revised plan won airline approval in 1955. Five were for individual airlines, one was shared by three airlines, and one handled international arrivals.

  The International Arrivals Building, designed by SOM, was the first of the new terminals to open, in December 1957. It stretched nearly 2,300 feet and introduced "finger" piers at right angles to the main building, an innovation that allowed more aircraft to park. In October 1959, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines opened a second SOM-designed terminal. Eastern Air Lines opened a Chester L. Churchill-designed terminal in November 1959.

  American Airlines opened its terminal in February 1960. The building featured a 317-foot stained-glass facade designed by Robert Sowers, and it held the distinction of being the largest stained-glass installation in the world until 1979. Pan American World Airways opened the Worldport in 1960, designed by Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton. The Worldport's most notable feature was a large elliptical roof suspended by 32 sets of radial posts and cables; it extended 114 feet beyond the base of the terminal to shelter passengers. The Worldport was also among the first airline terminals anywhere to feature jetways that could be moved to provide a covered walkway between the terminal and a docked aircraft.

  Trans World Airlines unveiled the TWA Flight Center in 1962, designed by Eero Saarinen with a shape widely described as a winged bird. That same year, Northwest Orient, Braniff International Airways, and Northeast Airlines opened a joint terminal. National Airlines followed in 1969 with the Sundrome, designed by I.M. Pei and notable for its all-glass mullions dividing the window sections, which were unprecedented at the time.

• 4. The Heist Years

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  In April 1967, associates of the Lucchese crime family walked into the Air France cargo terminal and stole $420,000 in American currency that had been exchanged in Southeast Asia and was awaiting deposit in the United States. At the time, it was the largest cash robbery in the United States. The theft was carried out by Henry Hill, Robert McMahon, Tommy DeSimone, and Montague Montemurro, acting on a tip from McMahon. Air France's aircraft regularly delivered three or four $60,000 packages at a time; the robbers obtained a key to a cement-block strong room and entered the unsecured cargo terminal without any challenge. They took seven bags in a large suitcase. The theft was not discovered until the following Monday.

  More than a decade later, on the 11th of December 1978, the airport was the scene of what became known as the Lufthansa heist. The robbery netted an estimated $5.875 million, including $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry. It was the largest cash robbery committed on American soil at the time. James Burke, another associate of the Lucchese crime family, was believed to be the mastermind, but was never charged. Burke is also alleged to have committed or ordered the murders of many participants in the robbery, both to protect himself and to claim their shares of the money. The only person convicted in connection with the heist was Louis Werner, an airport worker involved in the planning.

  Neither the money nor the jewelry from the Lufthansa heist has ever been recovered. The investigation became one of the longest-running in U.S. history; the most recent arrest associated with the case was made in 2014, and it resulted in acquittal.

• 5. Renaming and Rivalry

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  On the 24th of December 1963, a month and two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. proposed renaming the airport in the president's honor. The airport was officially renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport that day. The airport was initially assigned the code KIA, but in 1968 the code was changed to JFK to avoid any association with the phrase "killed in action" during the Vietnam War era.

  Jets began scheduled service to the airport in 1958-59, and JFK became New York's dominant aviation hub. From 1962 to 1967, it had more airline takeoffs and landings than LaGuardia and Newark combined, peaking at 403,981 airline operations in 1967. By the mid-1970s, however, the two airports had roughly equal flight counts.

  Concorde, operated by Air France and British Airways, made scheduled trans-Atlantic supersonic flights to JFK from the 22nd of November 1977. British Airways retired the aircraft on the 24th of October 2003. Air France had retired it in May 2003. At the other end of the size spectrum, JFK was the first airport in the United States to receive a passenger Airbus A380 flight, on the 19th of March 2007. The route was operated by Lufthansa and Airbus and arrived at Terminal 1. On the 8th of December 2015, JFK became the first U.S. airport to receive a commercial Airbus A350 flight, when Qatar Airways began using the aircraft on one of its New York-Doha routes. The airport currently hosts Singapore Airlines Flights 23 and 24, which the airline launched in 2020 as the world's longest flight, operating between Singapore and New York using the Airbus A350-900ULR.

• 6. The TWA Hotel and Lost Terminals

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  When Trans World Airlines ceased operations in 2001, the Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Center went dark. The terminal, which had been named a New York City landmark in 1994 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, sat vacant rather than being demolished. In 2005, JetBlue and the Port Authority financed the construction of a new 26-gate terminal partly encircling the Saarinen building. Called Terminal 5, it opened on the 22nd of October 2008, connected to the original structure through the original departure-arrival tubes.

  The Saarinen building was eventually converted into the TWA Hotel, a 505-room property with 40,000 square feet of conference and event space. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the project on the 27th of July 2015. Groundbreaking took place on the 15th of December 2016, and the hotel opened on the 15th of May 2019. The estimated cost was $265 million. The hotel includes a 10,000-square-foot observation deck with an infinity pool.

  The International Arrivals Building was demolished in 2000 and replaced with Terminal 4, which opened on the 24th of May 2001, at a cost of $1.4 billion. The Worldport, Pan Am's famous elliptical-roofed terminal, was demolished in 2013. The final departure from Terminal 3 was Delta Air Lines Flight 268, a Boeing 747-400 to Tel Aviv Ben Gurion Airport, which left from Gate 6 at 23:25 local time on the 23rd of May 2013, exactly 53 years after the terminal's opening. Terminal 2, which had opened in November 1962 for Northeast Airlines, Braniff, and Northwest Orient, permanently closed for departures on the 10th of January 2023, and was demolished to make room for the new Terminal 1.

• 7. The $13 Billion Reinvention

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  In January 2017, the office of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a plan to renovate most of the airport's existing infrastructure for between $7 billion and $10 billion. The Airport Master Plan Advisory Panel had reported that JFK, ranked 59th out of the world's top 100 airports by Skytrax, faced severe capacity constraints. The airport was expected to serve roughly 75 million annual passengers in 2020 and 100 million by 2050.

  In October 2018, Cuomo released a broader $13 billion plan that included two all-new international terminals. A $7 billion, 2.8-million-square-foot, 23-gate structure would replace Terminals 1, 2, and the space left by Terminal 3. The partnership financing and building the new Terminal 1 includes Munich Airport Group, Lufthansa, Air France, Korean Air, and Japan Airlines. Construction began on the 8th of September 2022. The first 14 gates are scheduled to open in 2026; a further five gates are expected in 2028, and the final four in 2030.

  A new Terminal 6 began construction in February 2023 on the site of the original Terminal 6 and Terminal 7. Designed by Corgan, the ten-gate terminal is projected to cost $4.2 billion and will open in phases from 2026, with the full terminal expected by 2028. It is being built under a public-private partnership between the Port Authority and JFK Millennium Partners, a consortium comprising JetBlue, RXR Realty, and Vantage Airport Group. When construction across the airport is finished, JFK will have 149 total gates. A new control tower designed by Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, which reached 320 feet and was once the world's tallest control tower when it began full FAA operations in October 1994, stands on the ramp side of Terminal 4 as a fixed landmark in an airport that otherwise rarely stops changing.