LaGuardia: Rikers Island Garbage Fill, Compass Warnings and an $8B Rebuild

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New York's LaGuardia Airport traces back to a 1934 protest: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, holding a ticket to New York, refused to leave his plane in Newark and made the airline fly him to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The site he later chose in Queens had been Bowery Bay Beach, a resort the Steinway piano family opened in 1886 with bathing pavilions and the Gala Amusement Park, which faded under anti-German sentiment in World War I, Prohibition and industrial pollution. In 1929 New York Air Terminals built the small Glenn H. Curtiss Airport seaplane base there, and the city leased it for $1 a year because Queens offered quick access to Midtown. Works Progress Administration crews then pushed the shoreline into the bay with garbage and ash from Rikers Island, then the city dump, packed around steel piles driven to bedrock. The airport opened in December 1939.

Ten-cent observation deck turnstiles brought in nearly $300,000 in two years, and American Airlines opened the first private airline club, the Admirals Club, there in 1939. Heavier jets like the Boeing 707 forced runway decks out over Flushing Bay, and the FAA added hourly slot caps, a midnight to 6 a.m. curfew and, from 1984, a Port Authority perimeter rule barring most nonstops beyond 1,500 miles. The central terminal, built in the 1960s for about 8 million passengers a year, was handling more than 14 million by the 2010s. In 2014 Vice President Joe Biden compared it to a third world country, and an $8 billion rebuild announced in 2015 moved the terminals 600 feet toward the Grand Central Parkway, adding two miles of taxiways and bridges that planes taxi beneath.

• Steel buried under runway 13 distorts magnetic compasses, and signs warn pilots to cross-check their instruments.
• Airlines sometimes fly half-empty planes to keep their slots, which can trade for tens of millions of dollars.
• In 2023 the rebuilt airport won the Airport Service Quality Award for best midsize airport in North America.
• On March 22, 2026 Air Canada Express flight 8646 collided with an airport fire truck on a runway, killing both pilots and injuring dozens of passengers, and the NTSB investigation halted operations.
• Spirit Airlines filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in May 2026; its last LaGuardia flight left May 1, emptying Terminal A, the historic Marine Air Terminal.