JFK Airport: The Near KIA Code, Terminal City and the Lufthansa Heist

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John F. Kennedy International Airport sits on more than 5,000 acres of former Queens marshland that included the Idlewild Beach Golf Course. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, seeing his first airport overwhelmed soon after it opened in 1939, secured the Jamaica Bay site, and Idlewild opened in 1948 with President Harry Truman and Governor Thomas Dewey, rivals in that year's presidential race, both at the ceremony. In 1951 the Port Authority banned early jetliners over noise and held out until a Sud Aviation Caravelle passed strict noise tests in 1957, while two Soviet Tupolev jets were refused. After three fatal crashes near Newark in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1952 briefly closed Newark Airport, Idlewild absorbed the traffic and by 1954 was the busiest international hub in the world.

When the airlines rejected a single 55-gate terminal, architect Wallace Harrison proposed Terminal City, in which each carrier built its own terminal. The results included Pan Am's Worldport with its flying saucer roof, American's 317-foot stained glass window by Robert Sowers, Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center and I.M. Pei's glass-walled Sundrome. The airport was renamed for Kennedy in December 1963 and nearly received the code KIA before JFK was adopted in 1968. Boeing 747s soon made those terminals obsolete, and a $13 billion redevelopment is now consolidating the airport into new mega-terminals.

• Pan Am's Worldport pioneered enclosed passenger jetways, so its travelers never walked through the rain to board.
• The Worldport was demolished in 2013, and the TWA Flight Center survived a preservation fight to reopen as a hotel in 2019.
• In December 1978 mobsters stole $5 million in untraceable cash plus about another million in jewelry from the Lufthansa cargo terminal, the robbery behind Wiseguy and Goodfellas.
• After September 11, Hangar 17 stored about 2,500 pieces of steel, crushed emergency vehicles and personal items recovered from the World Trade Center.
• The Ark, a $65 million terminal for animals with climate-controlled stalls and medical facilities, opened in 2017.